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For one, using law or regulation to create distance between companies and profit-seeking is likely to stymie welfare-enhancing innovations. A central theme throughout Edmans’s book is that profit is not profligate; rather, it is the engine oil for the human wheel of progress. Edmans refers to the social benefits of corporate innovation no less than eighty-four times throughout the book, with numerous examples illustrating a virtuous chain: profit incentivizes experimentation, which leads to break-through technologies, medicines, or consumer services, ultimately enhancing human welfare.48 Indeed, that capitalism and the corporation are at the heart of human progress seems difficult to deny—simply ask yourself to name a great civilization that was created by a stakeholder-oriented society (or, put differently, that did not look favorably on free markets, industry, and trade). In some ways, I would go further than Edmans here. At times, he may be overly sanguine in presuming that companies are inspired to innovate for innovation’s sake irrespective of profit potential.49 It seems more like the exception than the rule: companies might be willing to subsidize research in the hopes of the rare breakthrough— but profit is always part of the equation. So, Edmans is correct that corporate innovation is socially beneficial, but may well underestimate (at least in certain parts) the extent to which profit is the motivational spark, in one way or another. But overall, Edmans’s general point is quite well taken: the realization that we need successful companies that are focused on innovation should put the brakes on stakeholder capitalists’ moves to hamstring corporate profit. After all, forcing companies to forgo profits is likely to translate directly and in the first instance to the R&D line item in the corporate budget.

So even if there is a sustainable growth path, we are not currently on it. About this, degrowthers are right; a gentle, natural transition to green growth is possible, but is an unaffordable luxury. But degrowthers’ prescription is the wrong one. The reason, in a word, is politics. The kind of massive intention reordering of global production and consumption that degrowthers fantasize about is not just pragmatically impossible to implement, it’s the kind of thing that essentially everyone in the world except for a few very shouty people in Northern Europe and the occasional Twitter activist is going to reject. To see why, let us turn to the excellent articles/podcasts by Milanovic, Piper, and Klein. The political argument against degrowth Milanovic actually has two excellent posts on the topic of degrowth. In the first one, he lays out why forcing developing countries to stay in poverty would be bad: Let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we interpret “degrowth” as the decision to fix global GDP at its current level…Then, unless we change the distribution of income, we are condemning to permanent abject poverty some 15 percent of world population that currently earn less than $1.90 per day and some quarter of humankind who earn less than $2.50 per day…Keeping so many people in abject poverty so that the rich can continue to enjoy their current standard of living is obviously something that the proponents of degrowth would not condone. Enforcing global degrowth would require freezing world income at about $17,000/year. That means that most people in the world would never even come close to current rich-world living standards — instead, they would at best only be able to reach the level currently enjoyed in China or Botswana. Perhaps that’s not such a horrible fate, but as Milanovic notes, this would require impoverishing most of the population of developed countries. He elaborates on this point in his new post, pulling no punches: [In order to avoid keeping most of the world in poverty, degrowthers must] introduce a different [income] distribution (B) where everybody who is above the current mean world income ($PPP 16 per day) is driven down to this mean, and the poor countries and people are, at least for a while, allowed to continue growing until they too achieve the level of $PPP 16 per day. But the problem with that approach is that one would have to engage in a massive reduction of incomes for…practically all of the Western population. Only 14% of the population in Western countries live at the level of income less than the global mean…Degrowers thus need to convince 86% of the population living in rich countries that their incomes are too high and need to be reduced….It is quite obvious that such a proposition is a political suicide. Milanovic quite rightly waves away degrowthers’ protestations that GDP is not a good measure of human welfare. GDP isn’t perfect, he notes, but it’s close enough where the basic point stands. Demanding that people in rich countries accept absolutely catastrophic declines in their living standards is a political non-starter. Klein, on his podcast, tries to point this out as gently as possible: I think that if the political demand of the [degrowth] movement becomes you don’t get to eat beef, you will set climate politics back so far, so fast, it would be disastrous. Same thing with S.U.V.s. I don’t like S.U.V.s. I don’t drive one. But if you are telling people in rich countries that the climate movement is for them not having the cars they want to have, you are just going to lose. You are going to lose fast…This is where the politics of [degrowth] for me fall apart… I just don’t see the argument for degrowth as being anything but an extraordinarily slower way of approaching the politics, probably counterproductive compared to what we’re doing, which is I think you can make tremendous strides on climate change by deploying renewable energy technologies and giving people the opportunity to have a more materially fulfilling life atop those technologies. Milanovic is less gentle, calling this “outright magical thinking”. He is correct. When you look at how much people in America are willing to sacrifice in terms of their material well-being in order to fight climate change, it’s far less than what Klein is talking about. And Klein is really softballing it here — it’s not just giving up beef and SUVs, it’s a dramatic reduction in the size of housing and the amount of food and the ease of transportation and the quality of medical care that people in rich countries enjoy. It is, frankly, not happening. But even this vastly understates the political and practical difficulties of degrowth. Piper adds several key points. First of all, she notes, because developed countries have been decoupling resource use and growth for a while now, curbing resource use will actually cause a lot more restrictions on developing countries than Milanovic’s simple calculations would suggest: From a climate change perspective, though, there’s a problem [with simply reducing rich-world living standards]. First, it means that degrowth would do nothing about the bulk of emissions, which are occurring in developing countries. This is an incredibly important point. For example, China now produces more CO2 emissions than the U.S., the EU, and Japan combined: (And no, this is not because of outsourcing, as you can see by looking at the trade-adjusted emissions numbers.) Another way of looking at this is that China’s CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP are more than twice America’s, and about five times that of the EU. Any global degrowth plan that actually reduces resource use is going to entail more pain for China than its GDP numbers would suggest, simply because China is at a more resource-intensive stage of growth. Do you think China will accept a substantial diminution of its living standards, in order to satisfy the environmental-economic diktats of activists in Northern Europe? If so, you need to rethink a great many things. Anyway, Piper makes a second crucially important point. So far we’ve been waving our hands and talking about lowering rich-world GDP while raising GDP for poor countries. In fact, economies don’t work like that: Second, the global economy is more interconnected than Hickel implies. When Covid-19 hit, poor countries were devastated not just by the virus but by the aftershocks of virus-induced slowdowns in consumption in rich countries. There’s some genuine appeal to the idea of an end to “consumerism,” but the pandemic offered a taste of how a sudden drop in rich-world consumption would actually affect the developing world. Covid-19 dramatically curtailed Western imports and tourism for a time. The consequences in poor countries were devastating. Hunger rose, and child mortality followed. Degrowth would thus require deep changes in the entire way that the global economy works. Change happens, but not like that; implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame. Klein points this out, again rather gently: Degrowth is, as its advocates understand it, a act of global economic planning really without equal anywhere in human history. It is an act of extraordinary central planning. In other words, it is abject fantasy. Taken together, these criticisms are utterly devastating to the entire degrowth project. In its current form, it will not advance beyond a media fad. No matter how shrilly degrowthers quote apocalyptic projections, the things they call for simply will not happen. Luckily, there is a better way to save the planet. And there is a better role for the degrowth movement, if they’re willing to rethink their approach and become more fact-based, reasonable, and humble. A better direction for Earth, a better direction for the degrowth movement Degrowth is a non-starter, and green growth won’t happen fast enough on its own. Thus, the world has only one viable option: Forced green growth. Government policy will have to accelerate the transition to green energy and dematerialized GDP faster than these transitions would otherwise take place. For climate, this will involve things like: A forced rapid transition to green electricity Forced rapid electrification of most energy use The forced rapid adoption of low-emissions heat for industrial processes Forced restriction of deforestation …and so on.

The United States is not trembling on the precipice of a communist revolution.

Uncle Sam commands the most powerful military in human history, and its rank-and-file exhibit few socialistic sympathies; U.S. precincts with military bases America’s civilian security forces — which is to say its roughly 665,000 police officers — are . Our nation’s most heavily armed private citizens, meanwhile, would by and large prefer a Hobbesian war of all against all to a Marxist government. Should America’s constitutional order ever give way to an extralegal power struggle, an overwhelming force of arms will be arrayed against the radical left.

The concern that some input material will come to an end, and that this crisis will deal a fatal blow to civilization, is a recurrent theme in history. In Britain, the fear was expressed in the age of sail that when the country was depleted of oak, the fundamental wood used in shipbuilding and masts at the time, the country would become defenseless at sea. Clearly, this did not happen; eventually iron replaced the need for wood, and in the meantime, sufficient supplies came through trade with Scandinavia, the Baltics, and North America. For goods that cannot be replaced, prices generate strong incentives to become better at extracting and recycling them.38 Think of copper, which has good properties as an electrical conductor. As electrification was in full swing in the early twentieth century in the United States, geologist and copper-mining expert Ira Joralemon warned that “the age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years.… Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.” One century later, we can see that this prediction did not age well.

It is not even a necessity that the bulk of our technological solutions must be based on geological materials. Think, for example, of recent research on fertilizers, based on the discovery that certain bacteria can capture atmospheric nitrogen, without the high pressures and temperatures of the polluting Haber-Bosch process described above. Likewise, the research frontier is shifting toward new materials, opening up the possibility of producing consumer goods with algae-based bioplastic. It would seem that if the twentieth century was characterized by the triumph of inorganic chemistry, the twenty-first might well be the century of organic materials, repurposed to meet human needs. This age is being ushered in by the advent of biotechnology which, also thanks to recent advances like Crispr / Cas9, will provide powerful tools to address current challenges, from reducing the use of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture to fostering natural carbon sequestration.

Today’s best-case ecological scenario was a horror story just three decades ago. In 1993, Bill Clinton declared that global warming presented such a profound threat to civilization that the U.S. would have to bring its “emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000.” Instead, we waited until 2020 to do so; in the interim, humanity burned more carbon than it had since the advent of agriculture. Now, it will take a historically unprecedented, worldwide economic transformation to freeze warming at “only” 2 degrees — a level of temperature rise that will turn “once in a century” storms into annual events, drown entire island nations, and render major cities in the Middle East uninhabitable in summertime (at least for those whose lifestyles involve “walking outdoors without dying of heatstroke”). This is what passes for a utopian vision in 2021. If we confine ourselves to mere optimism — and assume that every Paris Agreement signatory meets its current pledged target for decarbonization — then warming will hit 2.4 degrees by century’s end. The reality of our ecological predicament invites denial of our political one. Put simply, it is hard to reconcile the scale of the climate crisis with the limits of contemporary American politics. Delusions rush in to fill the gap. Among these is the fantasy of national autonomy; the notion that the United States can save the planet or destroy it, depending on the precise timeline of its domestic decarbonization. A rapid energy transition in the U.S. is a vital cause, not least for its potential to expedite similar transformations abroad. But the battle for a sustainable planet will be won or lost in the developing world. Although American consumption played a central role in the history of the climate crisis, it is peripheral to the planet’s future: Over the coming century, U.S. emissions are expected to account for only 5 percent of the global total. There is also the delusion of “de-growth’s” viability. The fact that there is no plausible path for global economic expansion that won’t entail climate-induced death and displacement has led some environmentalists to insist on global stagnation. Yet there is neither a mass constituency for this project, nor any reason to believe that there will be any time soon. Freeze the status-quo economy in amber, and you’ll condemn nearly half of humanity to permanent poverty. Divide existing GDP into perfectly even slices, and every person on the planet will live on about $5,500 a year. American voters may express a generalized concern about the climate in surveys, but they don’t seem willing to accept even a modest rise in gas prices — let alone a total collapse in living standards — to address the issue. Meanwhile, any Chinese or Indian leader who attempted to stymy income growth in the name of sustainability would be ousted in short order. It’s conceivable that one could radically reorder advanced economies in a manner that enabled living standards to rise even as GDP fell; Americans might well find themselves happier and more secure in an ultra-low-carbon communal economy in which individual car ownership is heavily restricted, and housing, healthcare, and myriad low-carbon leisure activities are social rights. But nothing short of an absolute dictatorship could affect such a transformation at the necessary speed. And the specter of eco-Bolshevism does not haunt the Global North. Humanity is going to find a way to get rich sustainably, or die trying. Thus, the chasm between the ecologically necessary and the politically possible can only be bridged by technological advance. And on that front, the U.S. actually has the resources to make a decisive contribution to global decarbonization — and some political will to leverage those resources. Unfortunately, due to some combination of fiscal superstitions and misplaced priorities, the Biden administration’s proposed investments in green innovation remain paltry. An American Jobs Plan with much higher funding for green R&D is both imminently winnable and environmentally imperative. U.S. climate hawks should make securing such legislation a top priority. The choice before us is techno-optimism or barbarism. If governments are forced to choose between increasing income growth in the present, and mitigating temperature rise in the future, they are going to pick the former. We’ll get cheap, lab-grown Kobe beef before we get a U.S. Senate willing to tax meat, and steel plants powered by “green hydrogen” before we get anarcho-primitivism with Chinese characteristics. The question is whether we’ll get such breakthroughs before it’s too late. Techno-optimism has its hazards, but the progress we’ve made toward decarbonization has come largely through technological innovation. When India canceled plans to construct 14 gigawatts of new coal-fired power stations in 2019, it did not do so in deference to international pressure or domestic environmental movements, but rather to the cost-competitiveness of solar energy. The same story holds across Asia’s developing countries: Thanks to a ninefold reduction in the cost of solar energy over the past decade, the number of new coal plants slated for construction in the region has fallen by 80 percent. Meanwhile, the road to an electric-car revolution was cleared by a collapse in the cost of lithium batteries, the challenge of powering cities with solar energy on cloudy days was eased by a 70 percent drop in the price of utility-scale batteries, and wind power grew 40 percent cheaper. Our species remains lackluster at solidarity and self-government, but we’ve got a real knack for building cool shit. The technological progress of the past decade was not sufficient to compensate for tepid climate policy. But real techno-utopianism has never been tried: As of 2019, global spending on clean energy R&D totaled $22 billion a year, or 3 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget. Increasing spending on such research — while expediting cost-reductions in existing technologies by deploying them en masse — should be twin priorities of American climate policy. The preconditions for green industrialization can be made in America. The United States has more fiscal capacity and better-financed research universities than any nation on the planet. And, for all the pathologies of our politics, public investment in green tech inspires far weaker opposition than many less-indispensable climate policies. In fact, late last year, with Republicans controlling the Senate and Donald Trump in the White House, the U.S. increased funding for zero-emission technology R&D by $35 billion. America does not have sovereignty over enough humans to save the planet by slashing our domestic emissions. But we just might have the resources and political economy necessary to help the developing world save us all. Although progress on renewables has exceeded optimistic expectations, the technical obstacles to global decarbonization remain immense. In the most optimistic scenario, scaling up existing, cost-competitive technologies can get us about 16 percent of the emissions reductions necessary for achieving net-zero by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Driving down the price of tech we already have will get us another 39 percent. The rest must come from technologies that have yet to be fully developed. We need electrified cement, hydrogen-powered steel plants, and evaporative cooling. We need utility-scale energy storage, electric airplanes, and ultra-high voltage transmission lines. And we’d be remiss to not toss a bit of our collective wealth at game-changing hail marys like nuclear fusion.

General complaints against “industrial civilization” in its various forms have always been among the most reactionary of sentiments, reflecting a desire to turn back the wheel of history. Indeed, for a long time that was the very point. Longing for the days of pre-industrialization was always the realm of aristocracies, popes, and feudal lords, who saw their power slipping away with the rise of the bourgeoisie. In his classic 1965 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon’s main character Oedipa Maas comes across an outfit first founded by a Confederate officer called the Peter Pinguid Society. Its current member, Mike Fallopian, when confronted with the organization and its founder’s dislike of industrial capitalism, declares “Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn’t it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror.” A few years later in the real world, fears of industrialization, and the economic growth it brings, began to find its way into more mainstream circles. In 1972, MIT researchers published The Limits of Growth, a report commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international think tank of bourgeois elites dedicated to discussing “humanitarian challenges.” Published with much fanfare, the book predicted that by the year 2100 the planet’s resource base will have shrunk so badly that the global economy would quickly find its way back to the 19th century: If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. Analysis like this will inevitably find its way to anti-human sentiment. Only a few years before Limits of Growth was released, Paul Ehrlich had published his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich really made the rounds after the book was published, appearing on The Tonight Show over 20 times. In 1970, he told CBS News. “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” Ehrlich’s remedies for overpopulation included steep taxes on diapers, mass sterilization, and the addition of sterility agents to food exported to foreign populations. Such thinking recently received a shot in the arm from Michael Moore’s latest documentary Planet of the Humans. Featured in the film was Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth, declaring “too many human beings, using too much, too fast.” Anthropologist Nina Jablonski claims, “Population growth continues to be, not the elephant, the herd of elephants in the room.” In reality, the rate of global population growth was declining for years prior to Ehrlich’s book being published and has been in consistent decline since. Most projections agree that the global population is going to peak at some point in the second half of the 21st century and then plateau or gradually drop. Indeed, with birth rates in many places hovering at or below replacement level, in recent years dozens of governments have attempted to adopt pro-natal policies. Meanwhile Total-factor productivity (TFP) in agriculture, productivity calculated in a way that includes all the costs of labor, land, and inputs, has more than doubled since the early 1960s. The present day version of all this goes by the name “degrowth.” Degrowth is a notion that has spread in recent times. Degrowth is certainly anti-capitalist, and largely eschews population control, however this alone by no means makes a movement progressive. Feudalism, romanticism, even at times fascism waved the anti-capitalist banner. In a new book, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, degrowth is defined as “a proposal for the radical reorganization of society that leads to a drastic reduction in the use of energy and resources that is deemed necessary, desirable, and possible.” A core idea is a critique of “industrialism,” referring to “the overall structure of a modern industrial society based on mechanized work …this critique questions the central factor by which both capitalist and socialist societies measure or have measured their success.” It is a version of the same Malthusian ideas that were given a shellacking by Marx and Engels. Touted by advocates such as Noami Klein and Jason Hickel, along with NGOs such as Greenpeace and 350.org, degrowthers target the most developed places for their downgrading schemes. How exactly would this play out? Both Hickel and Klein have an ironic fascination with the 1970s. Here’s Hickel writing in November 2017: Imagine cutting the GDP per capita of the US down to less than half its present size, in real terms. This might sound horrible on the face of it, but it would be equivalent to US GDP per capita in the 1970s. Folks who lived through the 1970s remember them as heady days. And the poverty rate was lower back then and happiness levels were higher than now. Real wages were higher, too. The difference is people consumed less unnecessary stuff. Depending on one’s perspective, or better still one’s class, the 1970s may be a strange time to romanticize in the US. The urban crisis was worsening, the result of capital flight, austerity, and racism. Neoliberalism was rapidly being asserted as an economic cure-all. Smog and water pollution were bigger problems than they are now. The trucking and meat industries were being deregulated with wages crashing. As for the real wages Hickel refers to, for the working class they have hardly budged in the decades since. Would it be consolation to the workers in the slums of St. Louis, Lowell, and East Baltimore that their wages are in line with the degrowth agenda? It would save them the trouble of union-organizing. The difference in American society stemming from the 1970s is not increased consumption by everyone, it was the resurgence of capital over the working class. Pointing out the unrealistic nature of this proposal, the economist Branko Milanovic estimates that the global median income is $PPP 16 per day. Only 14 percent of people in Western countries live at a level income less than this mean. Leaving aside the feasibility of convincing everyone in the Western world and plenty of others elsewhere to cut their incomes quite substantially, this would seem to be austerity on a scale far beyond the dreams of even Reagan and Thatcher. Suggestions for pulling this off found in degrowth literature range from legislating extended warranties on products ensuring that they last longer, a “right to repair”, breaking corporate monopolies on products to enable repairs to be affordable, and tool-lending libraries, to taxing red meat (meat eating is a consistent target in degrowth literature) , limiting single-use plastic, scaling down the airline industry (including eliminating frequent flier miles) banning food from landfills, and worker cooperatives. Some of these are fine ideas, others get quite dicey (repair cafes where one can learn to repair one’s own devices, clothes, and furniture sound a bit tedious). It would be a society of endless rules and regulation. Yet even these reforms would hardly be enough for the 70 percent reduction in resource use that Hickel claims is necessary. For degrowth proponents transitioning off fossil fuels isn’t enough, not to mention difficult given degrowth hostility to mining, energy usage would need to decline for its own sake. Despite the good intentions, living standards surely will have to decline as well. Naomi Klein writes in her book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal of an “ecological crisis that has its roots in overconsumption” and the necessity of “reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume.” 20 percent is obviously a minority in terms of overall global population, but it still encompasses about 1.6 billion people—equal to the combined populations of the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina. The absurdity of this proposal is revealed by an Oxfam analysis with the Stockham Environmental Institute that found that for about 20 percent of the human population—mainly corresponding to the working and lower-middle classes in rich countries—per capita emissions actually fell from 1990 to 2015. Meanwhile, it was the richest 5 percent who were responsible for over a third of the growth in global emissions. Of course degrowth proponents claim to target the wealthiest people in society and thereby empower the masses, and surely the wealthiest stand to take the biggest hit, however they somehow overlook the effect their policies will have on everyone else. In an article titled In Defense of Degrowth, prominent degrowth advocate Goirgos Kallis honestly describes this part of it as “a change of direction, at the macro-level of economic and political institutions and at a microlevel of personal values and aspirations. Income and material comfort is to be reduced for many along the way, but the goal is that this is not experience as welfare loss.” How can such a message be sellable to the working class? Besides minimizing the class factor, degrowth suffers from two interconnected flaws. First, degrowth underestimates, even ignores, the extent that technology and innovation can decouple economic growth from material usage. As Engels wrote in his critique of Malthus: There still remains an element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist—science—whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population… Science advances in proportion to the knowledge bequeathed to it by the previous generation, and thus under the most ordinary conditions also in a geometrical progression. And what is impossible to science? Examples of this abound. US crop tonnage has consistently increased for the past 70 years while precision agriculture has enabled the use inputs such as fertilizer and water to decline the past two decades and crop acreage (the amount of land used to grow crops) to remain at a steady level. There’s been the digitization of goods and services. Smart phones have generally replaced cameras, clock radios, calculators, and camcorders, fitting what used to be numerous material devices into one device that fits in the palm of a hand. Aluminum cans are 75 percent lighter than they were decades ago. Building materials are more flexible. As Andrew McAfee describes in his book More from Less, real GDP growth was symbiotic with the consumption of metals for most of the 20th century. However since around 1990 the US has been consuming less metals such as steel, copper, and aluminum all while real GDP growth has continued. Research by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute, found a decoupling of emissions and GDP growth happening in 32 countries. The Economist recently found such decoupling in 33 countries. A familiar canard that has emerged out of the degrowth movement claims something like “infinite growth on a finite planet isn’t possible.” “Infinite” is perhaps too much to ask of any planet, however we don’t appear to be running out of resources in the near future. According to simulations published in Limits to Growth, even under the most optimistic scenarios, known global reserves of gold would be used up within 29 years of 1972; silver within 42; copper and petroleum 50; and aluminum 55. It is an understatement to say these predictions were inaccurate. Despite a half century of additional consumption, known global reserves of gold are almost 400 percent larger today than in 1972, and silver reserves are more than 200 percent larger. And we haven’t come close to running out of energy or copper. As for aluminum, the most plentiful metal on Earth, it need not be a concern: known reserves are almost 25 times what they were in the early 1970s. Secondly, and more importantly, degrowth mistakes growth itself with markets, ironically echoing libertarians. One of the major contradictions within capitalism is that the system can’t help but reproduce social harms if such harms are profitable and can’t produce necessary social goods if such goods aren’t profitable. There are times when social good coincides with profitability, yet not nearly enough. Degrowth obviously has sprouted in a time of increased anxiety about global warming and other potential environmental catastrophes. Fossil fuels are a perfect example of capitalism’s warped incentives. Fossil fuels, with their energy density, fueled the industrial revolution and helped energetically free us from nature’s dictates. However their continued high use threatens to shift the earth’s temperature from the range that has enabled human flourishing since the last ice age. Market based solutions to carbon emissions such as carbon trading, carbon pricing and offsets, and so-called ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing move far too slowly while depending on the very market incentives that produced the problem in the first place. Carbon pricing, essentially raising the price of energy, also generates resentment from the working class, as the French Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement showed. Norway is the world leader in electric vehicles, reaching around 80 percent of new car sales this year. Norway is blessed with abundant hydroelectric power, which provides 96 percent of the country’s electricity (electricity prices in Norway are among the cheapest in the world), yet it was the government’s buildout of a wide network of charging stations throughout the country, not just in places where stations are most profitable, along with other steps such as free parking, that accomplished the transition. The largest historical drop in carbon intensity of energy of any economy was France’s nuclear energy program of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a centralized, government led effort. It was the 1972 Clean Water Act that dramatically cut pollution in U.S. waterways. The Clean Air Act did the same for U.S. air pollution. The 1987 Montreal Protocol phasing out of Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (then used in refrigerators and aerosol cans), to this day the only UN treaty ratified by every member state, reversed ozone layer depletion, once the top environmental concern. The reversal began in the early 2000s and is on pace to be completed for most of the planet by 2040. These were neither market nor degrowth solutions. Yet economic growth continued. Around 3.3. billion people on the planet still live without a consistent source of electricity- in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or less than the amount used by a decent refrigerator. That includes about a billion people with no access to electricity at all. Average consumption per person in sub-Saharan Africa is only 185 kilowatt-hours (KWh) a year, compared with 12,000kWh in the U.S. and 6500kWh in Europe. According to a 2018 report by the International Energy Agency, of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, only 8 percent had air-conditioners. Earlier this year, the WHO reported that around 2.4 billion people still cooked using open fires or with inefficient stoves powered by wood or charcoal. Such a method is more carbon intensive than burning coal and the resulting household air pollution causes an estimated 3.2 million deaths a year. Global electricity demand figures to double in the next 15-20 years if not sooner. The bulk of carbon missions now are emitted by developing countries. By any estimate global mining will have to greatly increase to produce the lithium, cobalt, vanadium, and other materials needed to achieve an energy transition and decarbonize the economy. These minerals have to be sourced globally, which puts a dent into the degrowth vision of locality. This will take growth. In other words, what we need is not degrowth, but planned socialist growth. Mines can be worker controlled. Public banking can make investments for social goods. Socialist designed cities can return more land to forests. Degrowth proponents claim that they will allow growth in the Global South but reverse it in the Global North. It is not at all clear how this miracle can be accomplished. Hard to imagine developing countries will be willing to suddenly cease economic growth at the point degrowth advocates target. Somehow balancing growth in the Global South with degrowth in the Global North would seem an impossible task. As for the Global North, The Future is Degrowth claims “degrowth is about strengthening more meaningful and less destructive forms of happiness.” Certainly, there is plenty of happiness that can be considered “less destructive,” yet many more forms require consumption. Airplanes and trains gave us the power of long distance travel to see the world. These have to be made, as do, bicycles, musical instruments, and flat screen TVs. Despite what it claims for itself, conservatism is actually never a static force. It grows ever more reactionary. Let it be left to conservatives. As Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution regarding the future of human innovation: He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of rivers and he will lay down rules for oceans. The idealist simpletons may say this is a bore, but that is why they are simpletons…. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. And man will do it so well the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. Contrary to the tedious stream of propaganda, the point of socialism is abundance and prosperity for all. It is a time for thinking big, not growing small.

An alignment of Interests around copyright. In securing AI protections, the writers benefited from the studios’ shared interest in protecting copyright. The U.S. Copyright Office has determined that only works authored by a human can be copyrighted: “In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term ‘author,’ which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.” Under this interpretation, the interests of writers and studios align: A human writer needs to be involved in creating written stories in order for the works to be copyrighted by law, which in turn protects studios’ financial interests. This confluence of interests is somewhat unique to a narrow set of industries in entertainment, creative arts, and writing, where copyright is a salient concern for employers. Workers seeking protections in most other industries that generative AI will disrupt—from customer service to law, finance, computer programming, clerical work, and education—may face a more challenging battle in securing similar protections without this mutual interest between content owner and producer.

This may be the year that content creators finally fight back against surveillance capitalism. Over the past few weeks, there have been multiple lawsuits filed by news providers large and small, as well as comedians, authors and other creative professionals who allege that their work is being unfairly used to create the artificial intelligence that threatens eventually to put them out of business.

One of the highest profile suits was filed by the New York Times, in which the newspaper behemoth accused both OpenAI and Microsoft, which has a multi-billion dollar investment in it, of unlawfully using millions of pieces of journalistic content to train large language models — the very creations that may ultimately replace the search traffic that is monetised by both tech platforms and publishers.

More than six years ago I published an analysis arguing that training generative ai on copyrighted works could break American law. Since then many others have suggested the same. The issue has already boiled over in Britain, where this month talks between the ai industry and creative organisations over a new code of practice broke down. Now, lawsuits by artists, writers and the New York Times are testing our theory against defendants such as Openai, Meta and Stability ai.

The ai industry’s defence rests on “fair use”, a doctrine that permits the use of copyrighted material without its owner’s permission in certain circumstances. If this argument prevails, the industry will receive carte blanche to exploit copyrighted works without compensating authors—all while the law continues to stifle humans’ access to those works. ai will “learn” from pirated textbooks free of charge, while students pay extravagant prices. How perverse.

On balance, however, I do not think that even the extraordinary economic conditions we are witnessing today are going to have much impact on the likelihood of war. Why? First of all, if depressions were a powerful cause of war, there would be a lot more of the latter. To take one example, the United States has suffered 40 or more recessions since the country was founded, yet it has fought perhaps 20 interstate wars, most of them unrelated to the state of the economy. To paraphrase the economist Paul Samuelson’s famous quip about the stock market, if recessions were a powerful cause of war, they would have predicted “nine out of the last five (or fewer).”

Second, states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory. As John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it will be long, bloody, costly, and uncertain. To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.

We can either deny this evidence, or we can face up to it. Facing up to it means rethinking the extent to which we should pursue GDP growth. Now, this is where the good news comes in. McAfee says he wants to achieve “longer, healthier lives”, improving human well-being and flourishing. That’s the goal. And here too, we agree (that’s two goals we share). But for some reason McAfee assumes that in order to do this, even high-income nations, regardless of how rich they have already become, need to keep growing their GDP, exponentially, with no identifiable end point. This is an unexamined assumption; he provides no evidence for this claim.

I get it – I used to hold this assumption too. Most people do. But the good news is that it’s not true. At least 30 years of research in ecological economics has made it clear that high-income nations don’t need to keep growing in order to improve people’s lives. They can do it right now, without any additional growth at all, simply by sharing income, resources and opportunities more fairly and investing in universal public goods. These are the interventions that matter. That’s how Spain beats the USA in life expectancy by a solid five years, and outperforms the USA on virtually every social indicator, with half of the USA’s GDP per capita. The notion that the US needs to keep growing its GDP in order to improve social outcomes is simply not supported by evidence.

Modern industrial culture has placed such a premium on “innovation” — fueled in large part by an endless quest for competitive advantage — that innovation is often seen as an absolute good in itself. In such a world, its general goal is to help businesses prevail against competitors in the marketplace, improve return on investment, and entice consumers to buy an endless stream of “new and improved” products. By contrast, the commons as a system of provisioning is often considered backward, premodern, or tribal — ways of producing things that are seen as static, stodgy, and not innovative. This is a gross caricature if not untruth because many commoners are extremely capable of adapting to changing needs, including the need to reduce one’s ecological footprint. In a commons, there is no imperative to constantly expand production and profit, and so creativity can be focused on what really matters — ameliorating quality, durability, resilience, and holistic stability. Innovation need not be linked to boosting market sales and ignoring planetary health. Countless commons exhibit the pattern of Creatively Adapt & Renew as part of their everyday activity. As Eric von Hippel shows in his book Democratizing Innovation, all sorts of practitioner-communities — bicyclists, hang-gliders, skiers, extreme sports buffs — have developed breakthrough ideas that were later commercialized by conventional businesses.26 Indigenous peoples, too — long considered fixed and traditional in their ways — have shown immense creativity over the centuries in co-creating robust ecosystems through seed-breeding and animal domestication. The fertile soil in the Amazon region known as terra preta do indio — “dark earth of the Indians” — writes political economist James Boyce, “is not a random anomaly, but rather a deliberate creation of Indigenous farmers who long ago practiced ‘slash-and-char’ agroforestry in the region. A noteworthy feature of terra preta is its remarkable capacity for self-regeneration, which scientists attribute to soil microorganisms.”27 Such practices can also be seen in the creation of gravity-fed acequia irrigation in the upper Rio Grande valley, which transformed the semi-arid region into a rich landscape of wetlands, cultivated fields, and riparian corridors that allowed many animal species to flourish. The ETC Group, an organization that studies technological innovation, has called such creativity “Indigenous innovation” and “cooperative innovation”28 because Indigenous peoples have made countless ethnobotanical and ecological discoveries that transnational corporations have later sought to appropriate for free and privatize (“biopiracy”). Commoners survive through creative adaptation and renewal. It is in their blood. They habitually have to make do with what is available and improvise. Among peasants and poor people in India, there is a word for such innovation — jugaad — the Indian practice of slapdash innovation from whatever is at hand.29 Creative adaptation, in truth, is a part of the human condition. Struggle and need induce creativity as a matter of survival.

In this market socialist society, most shares are pooled into highly regulated mutual funds, which then pursue different investment strategies when trading them on a highly regulated stock exchange. This exchange helps monitor the performance of the firm managers and assess which innovations are performing strongly. To avoid the concentration of market power and capital, the government sets the bar for how much stock any stakeholder can hold in any firm and industry. It also sets the minimum and maximum amount of dividends that each person can receive annually. As the economy grows, dividends can be adjusted to increase by a percentage, or commensurate with inflation. Surplus resulting from distributing only part of the profits allows the more profitable firms to subsidize innovative, but less profitable, activities. In addition, this regime does not tolerate anti-competitive contracts like restrictive employment agreements, strict license agreements, and long patents (although inventions may be attributable to their inventors and may be rewarded through other means like prizes, bonus compensation, or simply very short patents periods).

The model could incorporate elements of democratically-planned, participatory socialism, which emphasizes democracy and individual autonomy in the workplace. Economist David Kotz believes that particular features of this model could foster innovation performance:

In most simple terms, the commons are the natural and cultural resources that are accessible to all members of society. What is typical about them is that they are held in common, instead of being owned privately (Bollier 2014). Public debate about the commons has become more mainstream due to environmental degradation and has been popularised—amongst others—by the frst female winner (2009) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, Elinor Ostrom. Her work includes Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990), in which she refutes the Tragedy of the Commons thesis (Hardin 1968). She has inspired thinking about the design and organisation of cooperative alternatives beyond markets and states.

Ostrom, together with her colleague Hess, has also worked on extending the debate about commons to knowledge. Hess and Ostrom (2007) approached knowledge as a complex ecosystem that operates as a common, similar to what Benkler (2006) theorised as commons-based peer production. In a similar vein, others have been working on the concept of digital commons, which refers to the communal ownership and distribution of informational resources and technology (Birkinbine 2018). Taking the ideas of knowledge and digital commons together opens up opportunities to inquire about alternative structures for AI ownership and governance.

Platform Cooperatives Digital networks have immense capacity to enable sharing and cooperation. Unfortunately, tech companies have captured much of these social energies for their own purposes, namely, to carry out the usual work of capitalism on powerful platforms. They call the result the “sharing economy” and “gig economy,” but in fact it is simply a new species of markets designed for microrentals, piecemeal labor, data mining, and consumerism. Platforms like TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk have re-introduced piecework on a massive scale by offering pennies for a variety of microtasks that computers can’t perform, such as image tagging, transcription, and data cleaning. Other platforms entice us into converting our cars, apartments, and private time into rentable assets to compensate for our plunging incomes. As sophisticated computer algorithms constantly ratchet down wages for “independent contractors,” it is eroding the very possibility of stable jobs with benefits. To counter these trends, the platform cooperatives movement arose in 2015 as a field of experimentation. Its goal is to try to develop more socially constructive websites and mobile apps. If people can own and manage their own platforms as cooperatives, argues Trebor Scholz, one of the catalysts of the movement, they will be able to reap greater long-term benefits and control in the face of well-capitalized tech giants like Uber and Airbnb. “What if we owned our own version of Facebook, Spotify, or Netflix?” writes Scholz. “What if the photographers at Shutterstock.com could own the platform where their photos are being sold?”30 A number of efforts are underway to do just that. The idea is to help producers and users co-own member-driven websites for distributing stock photography, streaming music, and other artworks. Another type of platform cooperative is apps codeveloped by city governments and local users. Seoul, South Korea, for example, has been developing a Munibnb platform to enable apartment rentals on better terms than Airbnb, with revenues earmarked for public services. The app is also intended to prevent the conversion of stable rental properties into “ghost neighborhoods” used mostly by tourists, a problem afflicting many major world cities like Amsterdam, London, and Barcelona. While still an emerging strategy, platform coops hold great promise for preventing monopoly, exploitation, and data surveillance in digital spaces. They can also help democratize ownership and control over platforms, and assure greater self-determination for working conditions.

Neoliberalism, the dominant narrative guiding Western democracies and their economies for almost 70 years, is crumbling all around us. It was set up to protect our freedoms. But neoliberalism’s excesses and failures – from recent financial crises to soaring levels of income inequality – have fueled populist movements that threaten not only open markets and free trade but the very freedoms it was meant to safeguard. The U.K.‘s vote for Brexit, the U.S. election of Donald Trump and the rise of both right- and left-wing populism across Europe all point to a desire for change from the established order and a more equitable distribution of the world’s wealth. But in each case the popularly chosen remedy is worse than the disease it’s intended to cure. Neoliberalism emerged from the ashes of World World II when a group of economists, politicians, philosophers and others gathered at a ski resort in Switzerland convinced that more open markets would help protect the freedoms threatened by fascism. With those ideas now discredited, and fascism once again on the rise, it’s past time to devise a new narrative to guide our economies in a way that prevents neoliberalism’s excesses, promotes universal well-being as an economic imperative and ensures nationalism doesn’t once again win the battle of ideas. While a narrative may not seem like much, my research suggests how important such narratives and their underlying “memes” are in fostering the kind of system change we need right now. Ask any business or economics student what the purpose of a company is. Most likely you will get the same answer: to maximize shareholder wealth. This narrow view is deeply embedded in the thinking of business school professors and economists and, as a result, of the manager-wannabes they teach. Yet it is highly problematic, since there are many other groups besides investors whose contributions to the business are as necessary and valuable. Think employees, customers, communities and suppliers, to name a few. Even General Electric’s former CEO Jack Welch, the one-time “father” of shareholder wealth maximization, claimed in 2009 that it was “the dumbest idea in the world.” Yet shareholder wealth maximization still dominates economic thinking, and it is a direct result of those neoliberal ideas that emerged from that Swiss mountainside. The perspective that companies exist to maximize shareholder wealth is most often attributed to now-deceased economist Milton Friedman. Friedman’s arguments, embedded in virtually all economics textbooks, derive from the work of a relatively little-known group of economists, philosophers and historians. This group, including Friedman, met at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland in 1947 to grapple with the expansion of government interventions they claimed threatened freedom, dignity and particularly free enterprise. They developed the narrative we know as neoliberalism or neoclassical economics. This narrative now dominates global understanding of what economies and businesses do and why they exist, not to mention the nightly news (via constant markets coverage). The Mont Pelerin Society, whose members included economist Friedrich von Hayek, philosopher Karl Popper and economist George Stigler, agreed on a few core ideas and then crafted them into a resonant story about the purpose of business and how economies – and, ultimately, the world – ought to work. They acted individually in their own countries to foster freedom and private rights, uphold the functioning of markets and create a globalized order that safeguarded peace and liberty. Some went on to hold positions of power and others had great influence over those who wielded it, such as President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who embraced Friedman’s ideas and ushered in the “maximize shareholder wealth” era for companies. The result of the Mont Pelerin Society’s work is a set of familiar memes, or core units of culture. Unlike internet memes, which spread via the worldwide web, the memes I’m talking about refer to ideas, phrases, symbols and images that replicate from person to person when they resonate, and are ubiquitous. Our common understandings, belief systems and the stories that we tell ourselves about how the world works are based on such memes. Memes are, I recently argued, an overlooked and vitally important aspect of system change. Recognizable memes form the basis of today’s dominant economic narrative: free markets, free trade and globalization, private property, competition, individual but not shared responsibility, and maximization of company and shareholder wealth. The success of these memes speaks to why business students so readily identify the purpose of the business as maximizing shareholder wealth and with the language of free markets and trade. They are simple, identifiable and based on laudable values like freedom and individual responsibility, after all: things that Americans in particular, with their individualistic orientation, can readily identify with. Their power to convey the underlying economic “story” illustrates why change that seems to astute observers to be necessary – change toward more sustainability, dealing with climate change and fostering greater equity – is so difficult. Neoliberalism’s pursuit of endless growth, efficiency and free trade have led to setbacks in curbing climate change, enhancing sustainability and reducing inequality, all of which are potentially existential crises for humanity. In other words, those changes don’t fit neatly into market logic because they include both social and ecological values in addition to economic ones. Thus, neoliberalism can’t absorb them. Successful memes resonate broadly and are difficult to change unless other, equally successful ones replace them. Such complex and “wicked problems” are difficult to resolve because there are just too many groups and individuals with different ideas about what the problem is and what caused it, and how to best deal with it. Recent work with colleagues on how to bring about large system change to cope with such problems suggests that there is really no way to plan or control such change. What is needed, as happened with the creation of neoliberalism’s core narrative, is that a new set of memes framing a new economic and societal narrative needs to be established. An emerging group called Leading for Wellbeing and composed of global organizations, universities and newspapers is attempting to do just this, built on the notion that the world’s major institutions and businesses should “operate in service of well-being and dignity for all.”

Change from below Many analysts are taking notice of this paradigm change. Paul McCulley, a business professor at Georgetown, told the New York Times earlier this week, “Having the tools of economic stabilization work a whole lot more through the fiscal channel and a whole lot less through the monetary channel is a profound, pro-democracy policy mix.” In plainer language: It’s better to have elected representatives rather than unelected bankers making the call on how public money is spent. Some media commentators are seeing the shift, but they’re missing the real reasons for why it’s happening. Times opinion writer Neil Irwin, for instance, characterizes it as a battle between “pointy-headed technocrats” and lawmakers, or as the headline of his article earlier this week put it, “Move over, nerds. It’s the politicians’ economy now.” Without the insights that come from a class analysis of the situation, Irwin and other commentators in the bourgeois press continue to look only at the differences among those at the top of society to explain social change. The truth, however, is that the pressure now being applied to neoliberal ideology is the result of class struggle from below. Since the last recession, working-class action has been steadily building and gaining strength. The first sparks came in the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged in the wake of the financial crisis. There were the two Bernie Sanders campaigns for president as well as that of Elizabeth Warren, which inserted explicitly social democratic demands like Medicare for All into public conversation. The trade union movement has begun to reverse its decades-long decline, with new organizing efforts like the campaign by Alabama Amazon workers showing that more and more workers are looking to collective action as the way to improve their lives. The Black Lives Matter national uprising, with its demand to defund policing and militarization and redirect funds toward human needs, has melded together the fights to end racism and economic inequality. Opinion polls have shown interest in the ideas of socialism gaining steam for several years already, showing up also in the fact that left-wing organizations like Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party USA have seen explosive growth. The 2018 and 2020 elections were further proof, as the caucus of progressive legislators swelled. Bold women of color leaders like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Pramila Jayapal now lead the charge in Washington on everything from the Green New Deal to the Fight for $15 and more. The mass death and destruction experienced in the past year because of coronavirus have only accelerated the trend of people questioning the status quo and looking for alternatives. The pandemic has accelerated class struggle trends that were already becoming apparent. Increasingly, millions are questioning capitalism, as shown by this message spray-painted onto a wall in Toronto. | C.J. Atkins / People’s World All this simmering of organized working-class activity and political growth—driven by the material conditions workers and oppressed people find themselves living in—is having an impact at the national level of policy and debate. In Marxist terms, changes in the economic foundation of society are affecting mass consciousness and therefore prodding change in the superstructure—the legal, political, and philosophical ideas of our times. Old ideologies like neoliberal capitalism are under pressure from new ones arising out of class struggle. Those new ideas are not yet fully formed, though, and the forces pushing them are not yet strong enough to assert their power at all times. The new is still in conflict with the old, and the outcomes are uneven. Allies (like politicians) will at times waver. Victories will be real, but incomplete (like the dropping of the $15 minimum wage from the ARA). Defeats are not unavoidable. As Frederick Engels wrote, “History makes itself in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts…there are innumerable intersecting forces.” So the American Rescue Plan, despite whatever we didn’t get out of it, is a big win for the working class. The people have been demanding a change in how our economy operates and whom it benefits. Organization and unity are making it happen—the 2020 election was proof of that as well.

This is Richard Wolf from Democracy at Work responding to another Ask Prof. Wolf, question from our Patreon community. This one comes from the nadir family. And it's a question that has been raised before and deserves an answer. The question concerns patents and copyrights, that legal arrangement in modern capitalist societies, which allows someone who invents a new product are a new technology, or writes a new piece of music or a new kind of published book, etc, to get a privacy control over it. In other words, to say to the rest of the world, I invented this, I did this, it's mine. And if you want to make use of it, you have to pay me and I can charge whatever I want. And if you don't pay, you can't use what I've developed. Okay, interesting. What does it mean? Well, one of the things it does is create a direct link between innovation on the one hand, and making money on the other. The idea behind it, those who defend it, is that you wouldn't get as much innovation and invention. If you didn't give people a big monetary incentive to do it. Those who have been critical have quickly pointed out that by allowing the inventor of something or the originator of something, to withhold it from wide public use, you are depriving large numbers of people of the benefits of whatever it is, the inventor has produced, even if it's limited by time, 10 years or 20 years, and then the copyright lapses or the patent disappears. And that's typically how it's arranged. Even if it's a matter of time for those years, you'll effectively have denied the people of the world, the free use of what you have invested in your time and your innovation, what it produced. And this, especially if you charge a lot could mean the rest of the society is deprived. And these critics then point out that whatever it is you invented, depended on the education, you got the influences on you, from the time you were born to the time that you made the innovation, and that 1000s of people contributed directly and indirectly, more than less to whatever capabilities you brought, and that they all in some sense, deserve access to the benefits of what they all indirectly produced. Why should you the last in a step of processes that resulted in the innovation? Or the new article or the new song? Why should it all accrue to you the one with the last step? It's as if we were all handing each other a sandbag, to prevent the flood? And the last one who put it down, gets to have his or her house saved from the flood. Everybody else? treads water. Okay. How does a socialist society, a worker coop based economy? How would it handle it differently? Well, that's of course speculation, in the sense that we don't have that kind of economy. We have portions of the economy that are set up that way. Mondriaan in Spain, Emilia Romagna, and Italy, and so on. But we don't have a whole national economy that has yet been worker, Co Op, based that could then develop its own laws. So we can answer the question, how would us a socialist society of that sort do it. But let me speculate as a way of concluding, clearly, what we want is to get the benefit for everybody of all the innovations and pretty much as quickly as they are developed. That's the way we maximize the social benefit of individuals coming through with breakthroughs in what they produce or how they produce. And indeed, since those individuals have been educated, raised and developed by the larger community, then in a way it's pay back and a socialist society would be committed to that. But let's give some credit to the notion that there is some monetary incentive that may help us all get the benefits of innovation by giving some sort of monetary reward to the inventor, the last one in the step that led to the invention. But there's no need for it to be done in that way we do it now. Why all the discretion to the individual who becomes individually wealthy from an invention? That's not socially useful? And how does he do it? Or she do it by withholding it from the rest of this society, forcing more and more money, the more urgent a society needs that innovation, that seems unjust, unequal, and downright cruel, when you're talking, for example, about medical inventions, or all kinds of other inventions that can save or improve our lives, a socialist society would presumably not want to go down that road. Well, then what could we do? We could offer a modest reward. Yes, a government agency could keep track of all the inventions, the way patent and copyright offices in the Library of Congress and elsewhere in Washington do now you can register your innovation, it's recorded that you did it in this way on that time and with the specifications. And we can require that people who make use of it get permission, all of that we can continue. And that would be good, because we'll give us a record of who's actually doing what, and that's useful for many purposes. But how much money you give a person, that's a completely different matter. That doesn't have to be linked to this at all. But it gives you proof. Number one, many people will do things because of their social value, because they appreciate the praise, they get the love, they get the appreciation they get. And they don't need a whole lot of money. In American academia, for example, professors routinely write papers and publish them in journals, they don't get any money for that, or certainly not an appreciable amount. But they do it anyway. Because it's part of being a professional, contributing to the literature of your profession, helping to develop understandings, becoming a better teacher, and so on. There are plenty of benefits from doing things creatively, that academics find adequate, they don't get money for the specific inventions, they are engaged in most of the time. And if we still want to give people some money, give them something honorific. In fact, let's use the word honorarium, it's still used, a kind of recognition modest, that there is some kind of reward, we want to get it that's really important. Let's give it a modest one. But let's give it to a person who has made an important breakthrough. Without constricting the use that society can make of that breakthrough. There's no need to deprive society of the benefit, even if you want to give the individual inventor, a reward a financial reward. The way the system works, now, of course, also has a terrible cost that I need to mention. You are skewing invention. By profit, you are leading inventive minds to go to where they think the profit is. And that is not the same as going with a need is an esoteric mega medicine for a disease that afflicts 20 people each year may be profitable, if you can charge a lot. But solving the problem of the common cold may be much more of a social kind of invention. It would be important to have democratic decision making over where the funds and support for innovative research go in terms of the broad notion of social benefit, rather than the narrow notion of private profit being such a powerful influence as it is today on what kind of research is done, where it is done, and what use is made of it. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.

Capitalist control over the news media has always been problematic: commercial values have tended to be incongruous with journalism as a public service; and owners have enjoyed using the political power of the press to their advantage. That prerogative was generally weighted toward advancing the interests of the owning classes. In fact, “professional journalism” emerged as a form of industry self-regulation in the first half of the twentieth century, to some extent to allay concerns about monopolistic or commercial control over public information. It did so by informally delegating control of the newsroom to professionally trained editors and reporters. The professional system was probably at its peak in the 1960s or 1970s, and even then it was far from perfect.38

The current crisis of journalism began in the 1970s, owing in part to increasing corporate consolidation of ownership, which exploded in the 1980s. In monopolistic markets, media owners had incentive to lowball the resources to newsrooms, assuming they would keep their customers and advertisers. These firms were out to maximize profit, and journalism was merely a means to that end.

Climate scientists have documented that global greenhouse gas emissions began to increase during the era of the Industrial Revolution with the growing use of fossil fuels in connection with industrial production. The full emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the expansion of the market economy, and the subsequent process of industrialization were central elements of what Polanyi (1944) called the “Great Transformation” that emerged in Europe and later spread to other parts of the world primarily through the force of colonization. The discipline of sociology originated in the attempt to understand this transformation, which culminated in the rise of the “modern” world, the triumph of capitalism, the rise of the infrastructural power of the capitalist state, and the use of markets as the dominant mode for structuring economic relations, along with significant intellectual, cultural, and political revolutions such as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Another transformational dimension of the emergence of the modern social world, unintended and unrecognized at the time, was that it set humanity on the path to the current climate crisis. Yet, despite the clear linkage between the development of capitalism, the process of industrialization, and the rise of markets, Perrow and Pulver (2015: 63) argue that “action by capitalist, industrial organizations in markets has been only a peripheral focus in analyzing the problem of global warming.”

There is a growing effort in macro­structural environmental sociology and green criminology to move this focus on the political economy of the climate crisis to the center of disciplinary concerns. One important contribution to this effort is Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Malm (2016: 11) analyzes the historical origins of what he calls the fossil economy, “an economy of self­sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in the emissions of carbon dioxide.” He argues that the fossil economy emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries during the Industrial Revolution when “the fossil fuel of coal was coupled to the machine through the rise of stationary steam power in the mills of Britain” (Malm, 2016: 16). And he contends that British manufacturers turned from traditional sources of power such as wind and water mills (the flow) to an engine fired by coal (the stock), not because coal was a cheaper or more abundant form of energy but because steam power gave capitalists greater control over both labor and the energy source. Production could be concentrated at urban sites that were more profitable, during hours that were more convenient. The steam engine was a technology that had greater value for capital. Steam won because it augmented the power of the men who owned the means of production in the class struggle of the early Industrial Era. According to Malm (2016: 277), “capitalism gave birth to the fossil economy. The rise of steam power—the critical moment in the delivery—occurred in a country with a distinctly capitalist mode of production: two centuries later, the context remains the same, the umbilical cord as strong as ever.” His comment that, centuries later, the context remains the same is important. As we examine rising greenhouse gas emissions today, it is critical to understand the history and continuing influence of fossil capitalism.