Surviving Progress Page #2

evolved before we had any ability

to think forward to the future

and when it made some sense for

decisions to be short-term.

A lot of our brain mechanisms, what I call

ancestral mechanisms or reflexive mechanisms

are tuned to making snap decisions,

right away, like fight or flight

you see a lion, either you're

gonna fight or you gonna run

no time to think about

long-term consequences

and that's good when we're stressed about something

immediate that we can deal with, for example

but those very systems that work by reflex

are not so good at cooperating with these

more modern systems, deliberative systems

that allow us to make

long-term decisions, and say

is this good for me, is it good

for my society, for my planet.

NOT ENOUGH PLANETS

Between the fall of the Roman empire

and Columbus sailing it took 13 centuries

to add 200 million people

to the worlds population

now it takes only 3 years.

A simple thing like pasteurization, the warming

of milk so that the bacteria are killed

and the control of smallpox.

Things like that have led to a

great boom in human numbers.

Overpopulation, which no one

really wants talk about

because it cuts that things like religious believes and the

freedom of individual and autonomy of family and so on

is something that we

will have to deal with.

We probably have to work towards a much smaller

worldwide population then 6 or 7 billion.

We probably need to go down to a half

of that or possibly even third of that

if everybody is going to live

comfortably and decently.

The other side of this problem

and perhaps the more dangerous side is

the footprint of the individuals

at the top of the social pyramids

who are consuming the most.

Somebody in the U.S. or Europe is

consuming about 50 times more resources

then a person in a place like Bangladesh.

If China is going to reach

the level of consumption

of the U.S. or Europe it's very unlikely that the world could

support the addition of billion consumers at that level

I'd say in China, maybe 200, 300

million people are affluent

they could afford a lot, all

that we can in the west

in India ca. 200 million, so you add up

this affluent segments of population

in these developing countries

but still what you come up with is no more

then one and half, maybe two billion people.

So there is still five billion people

waiting to tap into these bonanzas

of plentiful food, cars, decent housing,

right education for their children.

So the potential demand

for resources is immense.

For thousands of years, you know,

China has the longest continuous

civilization in the world.

And it is only in the recent period of time

when the European countries

started to industrialize

that China started to lag

behind and therefore, you know,

between the First Opium War in

around 1840 all the way to 1978

China went through a roller coaster of great

humiliation, wars, aggression of foreign nations

Japanese aggression against China, Civil War, collapse of

Qing Dynasty, great cultural revolution, chaos in China

that's when Deng Xiaoping reemerged in 1978

he basically pointed out

the only correct path.

We need to go out to the path of growth

and China needs to

modernize and insutrialize.

NATURAL CAPITAL:

Some people have written about, ehm,

natural capital, the capital

that nature provides

which is the clean air and clean water

the uncut forest, the rich farmland and

the minerals, the oil, the metals,

all these things are the capital

the nature has provided

and until about 1980 human

civilization was able to live on

what we might term interest of that capital

or surplus that nature was able to produce

the fruit that farmland can grow without

actually degrading the farmland

or the number of fish you can put out of sea

without causing the fish stocks to crash

but since 1980 we've been

using more than the interest

so we are in effect somebody who thinks he's rich cause he

is spending the money that has been left in his inheritance

not spending the interest

but eating into the capital.

The last time I visited the

New York Stock Exchange

was in 1980 and the mood

sure was different than.

Government with its high taxes,

excessive spending and over regulation

had thrown a wrench in the

works of our free markets.

With tax reform and budget control our economy

will be free to expand to its full potential

driving the bears back

into permanent hibernation.

That's our economic programme for next four

years, we're going to turn the ball loose.

The world is this big.

It's not this big and it can't be this big.

It's just this big, it's a finite sub.

Instead of thinking that nature is

this huge bank that we can just....

this endless credit card that

we can just keep drawing on.

We have to think about the

finite nature of the planet

and how you keep it alive, so

that we too may remain alive.

And less we conserve the planet there

isn't going to be any "the economy".

The ice-age-hunter is still us, it's in us.

Those ancient hunters who thought

that there would always be

another herd of mammoth other the next hill

shared the optimism of a stock trader, that there's

always gonna be another big killing on the stock market

in a next week or two.

If you are watching the earth over

the last 5 or 6 thousands of years

and you're speeding up your film

what you see is civilization

breaking out like forest fires

in one pristine environment after another

and after a civilization has arisen as it

burnt out natural resources in that area

than it dies down and another

fire breaks out somewhere else.

And now of course we have one huge

civilization around the world

which we have to confront the possibility

that the entire experiment of civilization

is in itself a progress trap.

"When will the economy

turn around?" "yeah."

"I'm not an economist, but I do believe we are

growing and I can remember this press conference"

"saying about recession as

if you were economists."

"I'm an optimist, I believe there is a

lot of positive things for the economy."

Faith in progress has become

a kind of religious faith

a sort of fundamentalism rather,

like market fundamentalism

that have just recently crashed and burned.

The idea that you can let market leap

is a delusion just like

the idea that you could

let technology leap and it will solve

the problems created by itself

in a slightly earlier phase.

That has become a belief very

similar to religious delusions

that caused some societies to

crash and burn in the past.

A SHORT HISTORY OF DEB Written records go back

about four thousand years

and from 2000 BC to the time of Jesus it was

normal for all of the countries in the world

to periodically cancel the debts

when they became too large to pay

so you have Sumer, Babylonian,

Egypt, other regions

all proclaiming these debt cancellation and

the effect was to make a clean slate so

that society would begin all over again.

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