Gross Domestic Runaway

 

4 September 2008

 

 

Will continued GDP growth lead to resource scarcity – or to something worse?

Over the past several decades in Western societies, and particularly in the United States, measures of annual gross economic activity and its growth have come to be seen as markers of overall national strength. Understandably, this confusion has been criticized. Here, for example, is Robert F. Kennedy in March 1968:

The Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile …

E.F. Schumacher, author of the 1973 bestseller Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, noted pointedly that gross output measures don’t just exclude social factors; they also fail to take into account important economic factors, particularly the depletion of key natural resources which should be treated as assets. More recent critics, such as Bill McKibben, have argued that these assets, such as oil, must inevitably become scarce with continued GDP growth, and to avoid an economic cataclysm societies therefore should abandon the pursuit of such growth and focus on less materialist routes to well-being.

These seem like compelling arguments. Yet the imperative to grow GDP now seems much more entrenched in policymaking than it was in the 1960s. Why? Again, there are compelling arguments: GDP growth is usually necessary for job growth and the expansion of wealth per capita, and in the long run both are politically essential in democracies. There are also external pressures on national economies. Superior economic output – particularly America’s – was clearly a deciding factor in World War II and in the drawn-out Cold War that followed.

Even in the relatively peaceful global economic competition of the present, the low-growth losers are seen to suffer real consequences, including currency flight, a “brain drain” of skilled workers, unemployment, higher import (e.g., oil) prices, and political upheaval. For example, today as I write, columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times tells us that “The country that spawns the most [new energy technology] companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America.”

GDP isn’t a perfect measure of global competitiveness, particularly to the extent that it reflects debt-driven consumption. But it is at least a rough measure, and it has the essential merit of being easy to grasp. Nowadays only a few, undeveloped societies fail to treat economic growth as a central policy goal.

For the most part, the best way to achieve this policy goal has been to keep people and markets free. Economic growth is founded on the fairly basic human desire to trade and to innovate and thereby to make one’s life better. This “pursuit of happiness,” as Jefferson called it, is specifically protected by the legal structures of Western societies. It may be that this restless pursuit is most acute in these societies, and thus helps explain their political, military and cultural dominance over most of the past millenium. But even non-Western societies are apt to link social prestige – and therefore happiness – to the accumulation of wealth in some material form.

Can such economic growth go on forever? Or is there a natural and perhaps painful limit?

Obviously, the system that includes humans and their environment is so large and complex that any forecast of its future is fraught with uncertainties. But the notion that growth must founder, once and for all, on the shoals of global warming or oil scarcity, or the lack of land, or some other near-term limit, is dubious on its face.

Global warming and oil scarcity are two problems that are being solved by the switch to other energy sources now just getting underway. Other commodities may become scarce or otherwise unaffordable, but that sort of thing happens all the time. The composition of economic activity is always changing, and history makes clear that the scarcity or obsolescence of one resource will create an incentive for the invention of alternatives. Even habitable land may yet become less scarce, as personal transportation and other technologies make it easier to live anywhere, and perhaps also as populations begin to fall – which they often do with sustained economic growth.

There is one resource, however – human beings – whose decline into obsolescence we may not take so lightly. Yet current socioeconomic trends suggest that this is happening. These trends also appear to be intensifying, and there are hints from evolutionary theory and the social sciences that they may be part of a “runaway” process that is getting harder and harder to resist.

H. Economicus

A society driven by internal political necessity and external competition to maximize its economic activity would put that imperative above all others. It would make the accumulation and display of wealth the easiest route to prestige, and thus would convince its members – who would come to be called consumers, not citizens – to fill their lives with economic activity.

Eventually, as the technology permitted, it would develop a ubiquitous electronic media to make all this transacting much easier, not only by making deliberate acts of buying and selling easier, but by making a large category of production (i.e., “media content”) consumable even passively.

In a society founded on personal and economic freedoms, little would stand in the way of the total marketization of existence. Traditional social ties and related values would hinder the process, but what anthropologists call the “horizontal transmission” of new cultural traits, via the high-speed electronic media, would enable the swift neutralization of these values. Through advertising and other media content, consumers would be encouraged to put consumption first in their lives. Where they could just as well consume in groups, they would be pushed to do so. But loneliness, neediness and narcissism would be encouraged, because the psychological void they represent is one that can be endlessly filled with products and services. As this process accelerated, measures of friendship and civic association and even marriage would show rapid declines.

Along the way, something called “diversity” would be celebrated and encouraged, partly for humane reasons but moreso for two economic reasons: First, it would encourage the large-scale immigration upon which continued economic growth largely depends; and second, it would help to bring about a society in which no cultural value is widely shared – other than consumerism, the melting pot’s gray remainder.

As these trends intensified they would push humans against their evolved psychological and neurophysiological limits. Some would seek solace in extreme, apocalyptic faiths (secular as well as religious). Others would become mentally ill. Many would rationally question the atomization of their communities and families, the marketization of their lives, the senselessness of running ever faster, producing more and more, to afford consuming more and more. But as in any society, most would shrug and go with the flow.

Surely this is at least an approximate picture of American society over the past few decades. And clearly many other societies are not far behind. Arguably China, which for its own historical reasons doesn’t need significant immigration to sustain its GDP growth, is already outpacing American and European societies in this regard.

As inhumane as these present trends may seem, they appear to be taking us somewhere worse.

The Post-Human Future

We humans have little ability to produce economic value by our own naked, untaught ingenuity. We need technology and related know-how, and always have. Lately the powers of technology and its associated skillsets have been increasing by leaps and bounds. We have seen the recently-developed Internet, for example, turn some college students into billionaires in the space of a few years. As such technology becomes “smarter” and more powerful, and creeps further up the labor value chain, the people who are able to harness it – even as passive investors – will presumably enjoy unprecedented wealth. The rest, for the most part, will face economic obsolescence.

Will this growing mass of economic losers finally revolt? To do so successfully, they would have to grasp their problem, then use their political power to make the appropriate, i.e., fundamental changes to the culture, against all the pressures and institutions that keep that cultural system in place. Certainly in America the sense that there is a fundamental problem is widespread. People routinely tell pollsters that they think the country is on “the wrong track.” Politicians opportunistically appeal to this sensibility. But in the resulting fog of populism (“there’s too much corporate greed,” “there’s too much immigration,” “there’s too much godlessness”) the real problem is somehow never identified.

The economic inequality that we read about these days is not, as is often thought, a mere adverse side effect of free economic activity. It is instrumental to that activity, as a stimulant, and as such it stimulates GDP growth. In other words, the widening gap between the very rich and the middle class is not so much a widening barrier to advancement as an intensifying goad to advancement.

We humans calculate our places in the social order, and accordingly feel more or less satisfied with our lots, by comparing our wealth with that of others around us. If we lived in traditional villages, surrounded by neighbors who differed from us only minimally in economic terms, we might be more content. But our media-wired “global village,” as Marshall McLuhan memorably called it, brings the lifestyles of the rich and famous into our very living rooms, creating the illusion that we – we with our wide-screen TVs – are actually somewhat impoverished, and therefore should be discontent. (A contrasting illusion, the schadenfreude we feel when someone rich and famous falls into scandal, helps assuage this sense of inadequacy, but probably not nearly enough to undo the damage.)

Thus a widening inequality forces the bar of our ambition higher and higher, and driven by this ever more extreme ambition, we seek any advantage. We work longer hours; we take stimulants and other drugs; we enhance our faces and bodies with plastic surgery in case that gives us an edge. We seek technological enhancements, not just to be more productive but also for status reasons, to “fit in” with those who really are more productive. Although these enhancements so far have been in portable or wearable form (notebook computers, cellphones, Bluetooth headsets, Blackberries, portable GPS devices) it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we will consider more invasive enhancements when the technology allows it.

The technology is beginning to allow it. Relatively simple brain-machine interfaces have been available for years to assist blind, deaf and paralyzed people, and although marrying metal to flesh is no easy matter, these systems are becoming more sophisticated all the time. When a cognitive advantage or even a status advantage (a more direct route to prestige) can be had by wiring one’s brain to an external computer or the Web, and when procedures to do so are as “risk-free” as plastic surgery, such a straightforward dehumanization will presumably become just as acceptable. In principle, a great deal of interfacing could be done even without surgery, for example via special glasses or goggles that put the semitransparent image of a computer screen in one’s visual field. In the auditory realm, Bluetooth headsets and iPods already seem to represent the last stage of interfacing before actual surgery.

The Pied Pipers

This trend towards personal enhancement with technology is being promoted not only by those actually selling the technology, but by those who, for reasons best known to themselves, actually want to bring about a “post-human” future. Probably the loudest of these pied pipers is Ray Kurzweil, a rich inventor whose recent posthumanist tract, The Singularity is Near, celebrated “the inexorable evolutionary process” of technological enhancement that will ultimately “enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.” Writing last year in Popular Science, Kurzweil prophesied that we humans will undergo a process of robotization enabling us to escape the “confines” of “our bodies and our minds” in roughly another two decades.

This kind of thinking is also found today among prominent academics. Rodney Brooks, the “Panasonic Professor of Robotics” at M.I.T. and co-founder of iRobot, the company that makes Roombas, has not-quite-jokingly said that where the roboticization of human existence is concerned, “resistance is futile.” There is a long-standing trend among such people to justify this course of events by declaring the equivalence, functionally and therefore morally, between a human mind and a suitably advanced machine mind. Thus Brooks’s fellow M.I.T. professor Marvin Minsky has quipped that “the brain is a meat computer,” and “some machines are already potentially more conscious than are people.”

It remains to be seen whether the posthumanist attitude, and the prosthetic competition it seems to want to inspire, will take people very far economically, in an age when pure, inhuman machines will be able to perform virtually any task more cheaply than even the most roboticized human. Indeed, one variant of post-humanism, represented by Hans Moravec, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, suggests we shouldn’t even bother. Instead we should just “silently fade away,” passing on the torch of existence to robots and robotized humans as if they were our children. “We have very little choice, if our culture is to remain viable,” Moravec has written in his book Mind Children. “Societies and economies are surely as subject to competitive evolutionary processes as are biological organisms.”

I think it is important to remember that these theorists are not referring fancifully to the distant future. They are talking about developments they expect to happen – and are helping to bring about – within a generation or two.

Why It’s a Runaway

Again, it is not only the posthumanists and their neo-eugenics ideas that have been brought to life by our faith in growth and innovation. Virtually all our chronic social problems spring from this cultural core, from the decay of relationships and communities to our mindlessly needy, narcissistic consumerism. Surely it is fair to say that these problems have been getting generally worse over the past few decades.

But is this really a runaway process? Won’t it eventually moderate, for example as we become more “green” and more circumspect about the social consequences of our economic activity? Certainly I hope so. But some broad factors suggest otherwise.

The first should be obvious: The pressures on political leaders to maximize GDP as a policy goal are becoming more intense, not less. That is particularly true in Western economies, where job growth and wage growth recently have come under new pressure from the rapid globalization of markets.

The second factor is less obvious, but more worrisome: The relatively slow, generational “vertical transmission” of culture from parents to offspring has declined in importance, thanks to the advent of mass-media technologies that permit a rapid, “horizontal transmission” of culture. Mass media technologies are not new, of course, but as they have developed over the past few decades they have reached very far into our lives.

Their encroachment into our leisure time and the consequent decline in our traditional social activities has been noted in numerous time-use studies. (The idea that the Internet has restored communities in online form is debatable to say the least, as Harvard’s Robert Putnam among others has pointed out.) Effectively these technologies have rapidly replaced traditional family and community-level social contacts with a more direct connection to the culture. They have, in other words, taken up a greater portion of our mental “bandwidth,” giving the culture a much more direct and uniform and immediate influence over us.

Note how eagerly we welcome this increasing influence! These technologies appeal to us on multiple levels, and when we start to use them a real psychological dependency is apt to set in. There is, to begin with, the inherent attraction of having a huge variety of media content to consume, with its promise of constant sensory and narrative novelty. There is also the undeniable fact that these technologies are useful. Who among us would willingly give up the convenience of a cellphone or an iPod?

These gadgets are typically sold to us not just as useful but as productivity-enhancing – i.e., as tools to increase our economic production. And they may be that, for some of us. But productivity is merely a route to wealth, which itself is meant to lead to social prestige – which is why marketers now routinely short-circuit our desire by associating these things, in their ads and their “buzz” campaigns, directly with that prestige. They become icons of membership in the exclusive club of the rich and the hip – however illogical that association is for a mass-market product.

In reality, whatever else these media platforms may be, they are designed to get us to consume more media content. As such they are — as extreme as it might sound — mechanisms of thought control. Obviously, that control is not all-powerful. But it is always there, like a steady wind. Media content produced by relatively unregulated, profit-chasing media companies will almost by definition have systematic pro-cultural biases – simple exhortations to need things and buy things – and no matter how diverse and cacophonous the content may seem, those biases will be there and will get through, if not to everyone then certainly to a large majority. Flip through the ten most watched TV cable channels, or the ten most popular websites on the Internet, and ask yourself whether the cultural messages you see and hear would suit any society but a consumerist one.

Anthropologists have been trying to understand the dynamics of cultural evolution for a long time, and for the past few decades they have been applying lessons learned by evolutionary scientists in the biological realm. This is a difficult area; in contrast to some popular notions, cultural elements are not gene-like or virus-like “replicators” and their transmission can occur in a complex variety of ways. But at least one thing is clear: When a set of cultural traits is somehow able to influence its own rate of transmission, a “positive feedback loop” can be set up, possibly overcoming ordinary constraints and leading to a “runaway” spread and intensification of those traits.

The anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, who introduced the “cultural runaway” term two decades ago, have tended to apply it to situations where a trait becomes associated with social status. Because it is natural for humans to chase after such status, the resulting status competition can drive the associated trait to an absurd or even harmful extreme. In one of their primary examples, they argued that the association of tattooing with social prestige in Polynesia could have led to the extreme and unhealthy tattooing practices eventually noted by early Western explorers.

In their writings Boyd and Richerson have hinted that status-associated cultural runaways abound in modern societies. In fact, this should be obvious, since marketers now routinely exploit this phenomenon by linking products directly to prestige. But it seems to me that when these prestige-linked products are actually transmitters of the culture, an even stronger runaway dynamic exists.

Situations in which cultures control or heavily influence their own means of transmission we usually recognize as dangerous. Totalitarian societies and totalist cults, for example, do not merely encourage desired cultural traits by rewarding them with social prestige. They also try to control the channels of cultural transmission, and then use that control to overwhelm people, via pro-cultural messages on billboards and banners, on radio and TV, at mass gatherings; and of course simultaneously they try to block alternative channels of information. They seek a direct and exclusive route into the heads of their followers, and to the extent that they are successful, they spread their influence as far as their hosts’ susceptibilities permit. Typically this influence is driven to become extraordinarily strong when it is in the service of extreme and violent behaviors that would be unacceptable to less “brainwashed” followers.

In this regard, modern Western societies haven’t yet reached a totalitarian extreme. But if our mental bandwidth is being overtaken by mass media, and that media transmit pro-culturally biased information, it follows that we are headed in the totalitarian direction. The recent use of the Internet to monitor our behavior (via “tracking cookies,” spyware, etc.), to allow a more precisely targeted influence over that behavior, should at least remind us of the two-way telescreens in Orwell’s 1984.

Into the Machine?

Even more worrisome is the fact that this ever more pervasive media technology is, in effect, beginning to encroach physically on our humanity. Already it is changing us cognitively and culturally, and if we follow the pied pipers of post-humanism it will presumably change us into ever more efficient, but ever less human economic processors. Sound far-fetched? Way back in 1962, Marshall McLuhan wrote that “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”

Will this “machine” continue to wire itself more tightly to human minds, ultimately replacing obsolescent flesh with metal? Or will human societies somehow wake from their stupor and renew themselves? Of course I don’t know, but I wonder how deep a crisis would be needed to prompt the latter, considering the forces arrayed against it and the changes it would require. How many of us now would even consider significant constraints on our social and economic freedoms, to force a change in cultural direction? How many of us could consider even the underlying premise, that our freedoms might be leading to our enslavement?

 

Jim Schnabel

4 September 2008

Links to other essays by Jim Schnabel:

 

Bringing People Together?  (14 September 2008)

 

The Robot Menace (4 December 2007)