What are we to make of Steven Pinker's reliance on economic growth?
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According to several metrics, the human condition has improved, but this is at the cost of increasingly unsustainable resource usage. As far as I know, Pinker’s solution to improving our state of affairs is continued growth, and I haven’t heard of how this could work on even short time scales of a few centuries. One would hope that, in our burning of the 300 million years or so worth of stored fossil fuels, that we’d have seen improvements. It’d be harder to imagine a bigger failure if we hadn’t, but how is this situation expected to give us peace of mind, and how can we respect such an accomplish when its unsustainability is built in? It’s like saying if we throw a one-time, overnight party where everyone is hypothetically invited, then everything will be fine for the next several hundred million years.
I’ve heard intelligent discussions of sustainable economies, but has Steven Pinker discussed this at all? If not, isn’t he promoting catastrophic risk to civilization?
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Economics is not a science. That is a big part of the problem. The fundament of economics is ideology not science. That said, I believe you have identified something truly significant. In the field of economics, in particular, something “new under the sun” is desperately needed. Current pseudoscientific theories have given rise to a global political economy that, at its present scale and rate of expected growth, is producing patently unsustainable increases of industrial agriculture, manufacturing and spectacular amounts of unnecessary stuff, all of which are ravaging the Earth by extirpating its biodiversity, dissipating its finite resources and polluting its environs.
Let us follow the example of Zizek. Think of economics as “a series of discourses that give people false ideas about the nature of reality, providing them with a ‘false consciousness.’
In this way, ideology is like the way most people see the world…. unaware that they are being brainwashed by an infinitude of subliminal messages.”
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Note from a friend…..
Indeed. It seems to me that what we call ‘economics’ is a blend of deliberate deception, wishful thinking, misunderstandings, real-world measurement, motivations attributable to the existence of vested interests, armchair theorizing and exhortation, with the various aforementioned elements differing according to the school of economics and the character and motives of its proponents.
And of course the actual real-world outcome is dependent on the interplay between those elements and a variety of externalities (both acknowledged and unacknowledged, understood and not understood).
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https://medium.com/@george.gpt/honey-ive-killed-the-planet-ooops-bfa1f5102ee2
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Honey, I’ve Killed The Planet (Ooops)
We are responsible for all the imbalance in the ecosystem because we are not part of the food cycle. We are just eating the whole cycle. It is more of a food conveyor belt actually. We are at the end of the belt, eating everything until it runs out.
Moreover, we are the only species obsessed with having more than the person next to us. This competition between neighbours, cities and countries pushes us to commit even further environmental destruction.
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