Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (34 page)

I would like to embed the catastrophe phenomenon in a larger context. It is true that positive-feedback loops such as the Precambrian oxygen catastrophe exist in nature. They come at special moments, though—moments of transformation. It is, for example, a positive feedback cascade of self-reinforcing, self-augmenting hormones that triggers the childbirth process. Childbirth labor is unsustainable—it would kill the mother if it continued too long—but once its goal is accomplished, the mother returns to homeostasis.
Positive feedback phases take an organism or ecosystem from an old steady-state phase to a new one.

We can look at money in exactly this way. Money, along with technology, is one of the key “hormones” of the human metaorganism that is propelling us on an unsustainable course toward a new estate. Technology builds on past technology and creates problems that necessitate yet more technology. Capital builds on past capital and is created through interest-bearing debt that requires exponentially more capital to be created in the future. Unsustainable, yes, but only unnatural if we try to sustain it past its time. Positive feedback processes always hit limits. Earth’s contractions intensify only up to a point—then a baby is born. What we see with alarm as an exponential growth curve is actually part of a phase transition curve.

Figures 2
through
5
illustrate this point. The solid line represents the growth of money, population, energy consumption, resource use, CO
₂
emissions, and lots of other things up until the present time. It is an exponential curve. The dotted lines represent four possible futures.
Figure 2
represents the techno-topian myth of Ascent, which says that exponential growth can and will continue forever as we conquer the galaxy and the universe. It says that when we grow past the limits of the earth, we will colonize the stars and terraform new planets; that the infinitude of the universe will contain our infinite exponential growth.

Current economic policy still embodies the curve in
Figure 2
. Although many people today recognize that continued exponential growth threatens the basis of life on earth, this realization hasn’t yet
infiltrated into mainstream economic discourse, which still focuses on growth.

Figure 2. Continued exponential growth

Figure 3. Peak and collapse

The fear of the pessimists is that the continuation of the heretofore exponential curve can be no other than
Figure 3
—a catastrophic crash back to the baseline. This is essentially the prediction of “collapsist” thinkers in the anticivilization and Peak Oil movements, who compare our present condition to the demographics of animals like locusts, who have a massive population explosion that pushes their numbers far above the land’s carrying capacity, followed by a population crash. We too, they say, are living far above the earth’s carrying capacity, and so a population implosion is inevitable.

Doom-and-gloom, collapsist scenarios such as Armageddon, popularizations of 2012 prophecies, or other cataclysmic end-of-the-world
events have a certain emotional appeal, an appeal I must confess to have felt at times myself. Part of me wants out. I am not alone in this. Many of us are tired of the modern world, with its violence, alienation, poverty, and deadness, and we despair of ever changing it. A world-changing event that does it for us is appealing, whether it is some miracle technology come to save us, or Jesus come to save us, or UFOs, or even some geological, social, or economic cataclysm. Many collapsist thinkers are also drawn to what might follow collapse: a lower-tech, communal society connected to nature, spirit, and the old ways. Furthermore, the prospect of economic or environmental collapse gratifies that vindictive part of us that wants to say, “I told you so!”—the part that wants to see the wicked punished.

Unfortunately, collapse scenarios involve immense suffering: hundreds of millions or billions of casualties. Moreover, they involve the erasure of the entire edifice of civilization, the good along with the bad. That would be OK if indeed technology and culture were a mistake, but I think that like those of all beings, our gifts have a purpose, a purpose we have yet to discover. We are emerging now from childhood, and the crises we have created offer the first opportunity to apply our gifts to their true purpose. In a subtle way, to reject our gifts wholesale is just as much a mind-set of Separation as to exalt them above the rest of nature. Both are a kind of anthropocentric exceptionalism. Can we not reunite with nature as a mature species?

With that in mind, I offer two more curves that equally fit the data points we have up until now.
Figure 4
shows a curve that is quite common in nature: a time of rapid growth that eventually slows and approaches a steady state. This curve could map the growth of an adolescent human, the total biomass of vegetation regrowing on barren land, or the population of bacteria newly
introduced into a petri dish with a constant food supply.
Figure 5
represents another common pattern: a peak above long-term sustainable levels followed by a gradual decline toward a steady-state.

Figure 4. Leveling off to steady-state

Figure 5. Peak, then steady-state

Phases of rapid growth driven by competition, followed by a phase transition into a steady state, are quite common in nature. Think of an immature ecosystem with weeds and saplings racing for sunlight. This is but a phase of a larger process that culminates in a symbiotic, complex, nonlinear, and stable forest. Immersed in an economy and ideology corresponding to the immature ecosystem, we have seen its headlong competition as nature’s way. Perhaps humanity too is maturing, self-organizing into mutualistic wholes in which competition and growth are no longer primary.

As a matter of fact, recent demographic statistics seem to show not a population crash, but a rapid deceleration of growth. We
could see either a leveling off of population as it approaches an asymptote at about 8 or 9 billion people (
Figure 4
), or a peak at about that level followed by a decline toward a steady state of a couple billion (
Figure 5
). Interpreting these curves in economic terms, either the monetization of life will slow down and stop (i.e., economic growth will gradually slow until we reach a steady-state, zero-growth economy), or it will contract a bit first before stabilizing at a lower level (lower per-capita GDP) than today.
Figure 4
shows the first scenario,
Figure 5
the second. In both cases, population and economy, I foresee the latter.

Demographic statistics support this conjecture. As a country approaches full industrialization, its birthrate slows—in most cases to below the replacement rate. This implies a gentle, natural decline in population, not a catastrophic mass die-off. I think that on a healing planet, both GDP and population will peak within the next three decades, level off, and then contract by a few percent per decade until they reach a sustainable level.
¹
The trend has started already: according to 2006 U.N. projections, the world’s fertility rate has dropped in the last decade from 2.65 to 2.55 live births per woman. Over the past half-century, fertility rates in the most highly industrialized countries have dropped dramatically, in most cases to well under the replacement level of 2.1. Interestingly, the inverse correlation between a nation’s human development index (HDI, a measure of well-being that avoids many of the flaws of GDP) and its fertility rate has, in the last few years, reversed at the upper extreme of HDI. In other words, the fertility rate is showing
signs of recovery to near replacement levels when economic development nears completion.
²

I don’t intend these statistics to be anything more than suggestive of a possibility. I’m not going to attempt to predict the future, but I think that the ravages of Separation such as the conversion of health capital into money, will result in drastically reduced fertility and increase mortality over the next half-century. The world population circa 2100 may be moderately smaller than it is today. In economy, we will reclaim much of the monetized, privatized realm for the commons and the gift. Much that is commodity today will no longer be commodity as new, cooperative economic forms spring up to meet local needs.

The severity of the “bump” in
Figure 5
depends on how far we overshoot the sustainable baseline. I believe that we missed our chance for an effortless (
Figure 4
) transition in the 1960s, which really represented the natural zenith of the Age of Separation. And we caught a glimpse of it, too! We caught a glimpse of a more beautiful world, so close. The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours.

The longer the Age of Separation persists, the more traumatic the transition will be, and the farther and more abrupt the drop to a sustainable baseline. In the limit case, it approaches the calamity of
Figure 3
. That is why it is so important to protect whatever we can of the remainder of the commons, to limit growth and preserve real wealth to sustain life after the bump—“to hasten the crash and mitigate its severity.” Even today, forty squandered years
after the Great Awakening of the 1960s, it is still not too late for a soft landing.

Today, economic recession is the bogeyman of policy makers, who quite understandably associate it with unemployment, poverty, and social unrest. I have explained already how a negative-interest system allows credit to circulate even in a shrinking economy, thereby avoiding polarization of wealth and a deflationary spiral. Even so, many people would be aghast at a call for negative economic growth: wouldn’t that, by definition, mean that society were made poorer? Wouldn’t that, by definition, mean a decline in the volume of goods and services available for the public benefit?