ism, and the attraction and the forceof a populist nationalism-the cult ofthe people and of the military power ofthe nation, the meaning of whichSchlesinger cannot comprehend orperhaps even discern. In 1955,WilliamF. Buckley Jr. launched his NationalReview, his "conservative"-muchmore accurately, his nationalist-weekly on a shoestring. Forty yearslater it had more subscribers than TheNation and The New Republic together(and the worldview of the latter hadbegun to move in a neoconservativedirection). As late as 1989, Schles-inger saw the collapse of the Sovietempire as the long overdue triumphof democracy against Communism.He failed to see that the dissolutionof the Soviet empire as well as thepopularity of, say, Ronald Reaganwere due not to the appeal of liberaldemocracy but to the appeal of na-tionalism. Until the last pages of hisjournals and, presumably, till the veryend of his life, Schlesinger kept writ-ing and thinking about Democratsand Republicans, liberals versusanti-liberals.

His early book The Age of Jackson,published in 1945, was a bestseller,and it made Arthur Schlesinger Jr. fa-mous. That his then hero AndrewJackson had nothing in common withhis later heroes, such as Stevenson orKennedy (though Jackson had a littlemore in common with another South-erner, Lyndon Johnson, whomSchlesinger came to loathe), is worthnoting, but that is not my argumentnow. The main problem is thatSchlesinger's view of history wasflawed. And why?Because of his viewof human nature-and does not anyunderstanding of history rest on someunderstanding of human nature? InThe Age of Jackson, the young ArthurSchlesinger [r., quoting Pascal, wrotethis sentence: "Man is neither angelnor brute"-a safe, liberal, gray, cen-trist view of human nature. To thecontrary: Man is both angel and brute.This is something that Schlesinger,whose next book after The Ageof Jack-son bore the title The Vital Center,never understood-or perhaps nevereven thought about. He was a decentman. He had a pleasant career. Buthis journals are those of a very short-sighted historian. _

88 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

FEAR OF FALLOWINGThe specter of a no-growth world

By Steven Stoll

Discussed in this essay:

The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Cul-ture, by Brink Lindsey. Collins. 394 pages. $26.95.

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin M. Friedman. Vin-tage. 570 pages. $16.95 (paper).

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by BillMcKibben. Holt. 272 pages. $14 (paper).

Costco shoppers navigate withcarts broad enough to seat twochildren side by side. The

carts had better be big. They need tohaul gallon jars of mayonnaise, 117-ounce cans of baked beans, 340-ounce jugs of liquid detergent, and70-ounce boxes of breakfast cereal.The coolers advertised for summerpicnics hold 266 cans. Giant ware-house stores, shelved to the ceiling

with goods from all the waters andforests of the world, make no excusesfor consumption. But although Cost-co sells its goods in large packages,there is no item here that cannot befound at a corner grocery. So whydon't I lighten up and buy a pallet ofmango salsa? Because thundering allaround me is the scope and scale ofAmerican economic growth. Here itis possible to see the enormousthroughput of the economy-its ca-pacity to mobilize resources and ener-gy and turn out waste. One storemanager, on the floor for fourteenyears, tells me he has seen eight pal-lets of paper towels move out the

Steven Stoll is Senior Fellow at the RutgersCenter for Historical Analysis. His bookThe Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor,Death in the Tropics, and the UtopianOrigins of Economic Growth will be pub-lished later this year by Hill and Wang.

"Granger, IN, 2003" © Brian Ulrich. Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York City

door in a single day. At forty pack-ages to a pallet, twelve rolls to a pack-age, this means nearly 4,000 rolls. Ican hear the sound of chain saws lay-ing off as falling trees cut the airsomewhere high in the Cascades. Thequestion that comes to my mindwhenever I catch a glimpse of aggre-gate consumption is always the same:How can it last?

The question is a discomfortingone. Consumption is the essence ofeconomic growth, the sustained ex-pansion in goods and services as mea-sured by the gross domestic product.Economists credit growth for declin-ing rates of child mortality, wideningopportunities for education, and thecontinuing flow of new technologythat in turn powers our ever greaterproductivity. Many trace the begin-nings of growth to the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, when warand revolution dismantled feudalstates, opening up new social spheresin which individuals were free to pur-sue their private interests. Since then,growth has become intrinsic to howwe understand progress. By the nine-teenth century, machines that cap-tured heat from burning coal radicallymagnified the scale of human labor,shattering a ceiling to accumulationthat had defined agrarian societiessince the domestication of wheat. Inthat hot glow, it became clear thatincreasing knowledge about the worldwould translate into increasing con-trol over it. All those who felt theirteeth rattle in their head as hundredsof looms shook the beams and floorsof a water-powered factory, watchingbolts of cloth roll out like eggs from agiant hen, walked away thinking thatthe human economy no longer pos-sesseddefinite limits.

The earliest advocates of econom-ic growth celebrated it.as a physics ofsociety, in which amplified produc-tion resulted in more robust con-sumption, causing an outward shiftin wealth, investment, employment,and production-a positive feedbackloop promising that most fundamen-tal of human desires: a more durableexistence. Political economists spokean almost mystical language, claim-ing, in the words of Francis AmasaWalker in 1892, that "there nevercomes a time when more laborers

will not produce larger harvests.There never comes a time when ad-ditional capital introduced into agri-culture cannot secure for itself somereturn. Such is the condition underwhich the earth is cultivated by hu-man labor, for the supply of humanwants." That wishful thought servedas the blueprint of modernity, andno shortage or other crisis succeededin rending it. For the past 250 years,the industrialized world has expand-ed and thrived on an escalating vol-ume of material transferred from en-vironments into commerce, manu-

facturing, construction, and agricul-ture. The raw stuff of the planetmade growth possible, and growth,in turn, reshaped the way peoplethought about themselves, theircommunities,. and the human condi-tion itself.

Two important works of social his-tory argue that the economic growth ofthe past century has created a distinc-tive political culture, particularly inthe United States. The more recentis The Age of Abundance, in whichBrink Lindsey, a vice president of theCato Institute, the libertarian think

Photograph of trees being milled for paper towels, Baton Rouge, Louisiana © 2008 J. Henry Fair REVIEWS 89

tank, peers at the past fifty years ofAmerican history through the prism ofeconomic growth, reading its influ-ence into housing, popular literature,religious ritual, and reality TV. Most ofall, Lindsey sees abundance as havingcreated a new cultural consensus basedon a post-scarcity vision of the world.For generations, observers of societyin the United States have wonderedwhat unites us. Lindsey's answer isboldly materialistic: we are united, hewrites, by our affluence. "Across class-es and religions and ethnic back-grounds, 'enough' proved an ever-receding horizon, and the commoncommitment to chase that horizon be-came the glue that held an increas-ingly pluralistic society together." Lind-sey argues that plenty has produced anew politics too, a shared libertarian-ism that remains unacknowledged bythe major parties. To be American to-day, in Lindsey's view, is to favor thewidest possible margins for "econom-ic and cultural competition."

What about the environmentalists?Lindsey lumps them, along with mostother anti-establishment critics, intowhat he labels the "Aquarian awaken-ing," a movement that has attackedmass affluence, failing to appreciate itas "a cultural achievement of the high-est order." Lindsey sympathizes withthe Aquarians' frustration, and evenlauds the tolerance they introduced,but he finally interprets their rebellionas a predictable response to abundanceitself and thus part of the overall nar-rative of its triumph. By arguing thatenvironmentalism "came along likeclockwork," he ignores Ohio's burningrivers, California's oil spill, and Lon-don's lethal smog, events that brought20 million people (10 percent of theUnited States in 1970) to participate inthe first Earth Day. Lindsey yields noth-ing to Rachel Carson, the marine bi-ologist whose 1962 Silent Spring made.environmentalism into a popular move-ment, calling the book "overwrought,"its supporters "zealots," and the move-ment it inspired "hysteria," even as heacknowledges the necessity of the leg-islation it also inspired.

The weightier book on abundanceis The Moral Consequences of Econom-ic Growth, by Harvard economist Ben-jamin Friedman, who shares little ofLindsey's politics and none of his op-

90 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

timism. Friedman holds, along withLindsey, that a basic materialism un-derlies tolerance and political civility,but he sees these social bonds as fright-eningly tenuous. "I believe," he writes,

that the rising intolerance and incivil-ityand the erodinggenerosityand open-ness that have marked important as-pects ofAmerican society in the recentpast have been, in significant part, aconsequenceof the stagnation ofAmer-ican middle-class living standards dur-ingmuch of the lastquarter of the twen-tieth century.

Friedman makes a great deal of thecorrelation between the economyand crime, seeing an upsurge in hos-tility and anger among Americans-including anti-immigrant rhetoric,private militias, domestic terror-ism, and waning sympathy for thepoor-whenever incomes and GDPflatten out.*

On environmentalism, Friedman'sview is more nuanced than Lindsey's.He takes seriously the need for envi-ronmental policy, and he has absorbedsome of the thinking prevalent amongindustrial ecologists-that greater effi-ciency in resource use can prolong thesupply of non-renewable metals andoil, holding out the possibility that sub-stitutes will be found. Industrial ecol-ogy also aims to reduce or eliminatepollution. Friedman rightly associateshigher national living standards withlower levels of air and water pollution,but here his political economy runsinto difficulty. One reason that Amer-ican cities are cleaner than they used tobe is that heavy manufacturing is nowconcentrated in countries where cor-porations are bound by fewer envi-ronmental restrictions. We have ex-ternalized the externalities of ourconsumption, calling that an im-provement in our quality of life. Fried-

* Some of his claims on this subject seemthin. A number of the ills he cites (privatemilitias, say, or anti-immigrant sentiment)appeared or worsened during Ronald Rea-gan's presidency, when GDP increased by aremarkable 3.8 percent a year. Or takemurder: when the economy surged after theend of World War II; murder surged withit, climbing from 4.6 per 100,000 people in1950 to 10.2 in 1980, and, after showingno clear trend during the booming 1980s, itdeclined to levels not seen since the 1960s.The economy cannot explain both the riseand the fall.

man's claim that pollution is a transi-tional phase in economic develop-ment sounds almost utopian. It doesnot consider the problem of how toexport clean technology to countriesthat cannot afford it, or the narrowingtime frame in which we might holdoff the melting of polar ice and Arc-tic permafrost.

In the end, Friedman does ac-knowledge that "the environmentwill not simply take care of itself"and that preserving growth meansinvesting in "the existing environ-ment." He seems to understand thebind he is in, observing that to raisethe worldwide standard of living upto the level now prevailing in Portu-gal (the last country on the list ofthe richest thirty) would quadrupleworld economic output over thenext fifty years. By calling this rise a"challenge," Friedman puts a braveface on what must reasonably be de-scribed as an impossibility.

Our trouble lies in a simple con-fusion, one to which econo-mists have been prone since

the beginning of the Industrial Rev-olutiorrGrowth and ecology operateby different rules. Economists tend toassume that every problem of scarci-ty can be solved by substitution, byreplacing tuna with tilapia, withoutfactoring in the long-term environ-mental implications of either. Butwhereas economies might expand,ecosystems do not. They change-pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrivein New England-and they reproducethemselves, but they do not increasein extent or abundance.year after year.Most economists think of scarcity asa labor problem, imagining that onlyenergy and technology place limitson production. To harvest more wood,build a better chain saw; to pumpmore oil, drill more wells; to get morefood, invent pest-resistant plants.

That logic thrived on new frontiersand more intensive production, and itheld off the prophets of scarcity-fromThomas Robert Malthus to PaulEhrlich-whose predictions of famineand shortage have not come to pass.The Agricultural Revolution that be-gan in seventeenth-century Englandradically increased the amount of foodthat could be grown on an acre ofland,

and the same happened in the 1960sand 1970s, when fettilizer and hy-bridizedseedsarrived in India and Mex-ico. But the picture looks entirely dif-ferent when we change the scale.Industrial society is roughly 250 yearsold: make the last ten thousand yearsequal to twenty-four hours, and wehave been producing consumer goodsand CO2 for only the last thirty-sixminutes. Do the same for the past1 million years of human evolution,and everything from the steam engineto the search engine fits into the pasttwenty-one seconds. Ifwe are not care-ful, hunting and gathering will looklike a far more successful strategy forsurvival than economic growth. Thelatter has changed so much about theearth and human societies in so littletime that it makes more sense to becautious than triumphant.

Although food scarcity, when it oc-curs, is a localizedproblem, other kindsof scarcity are already here. Groundwa-ter is alarmingly low in regions all overthe world, but the most immediatethreat to growth is surely petroleum.The world consumption of oil is84 mil-lion barrels a day. American cars aloneconsume 21 million. Yet even thoughworldwide production has peaked andprices now hover around $100 perbarrel, there is no substitute for oil-nothing stands ready to replace even 10percent of present consumption. Fossilfuels underwrite our material lives.Long before we deplete all known de-posits, their escalating cost could makeour highly dispersed, energy-intensiveeconomic geography unworkable. Oilis not simply implicated in everythingwe call growth. There has never beengrowth without it.

Consider, too, the world's fisheries.The planetary marine catch increasedfrom 19 million tons a year in 1950 to80 million tons by 1990. Seventy per-cent of the world's top saltwater fishspecies are now considered overex-ploited or fully exploited. The harvestof Atlantic cod, in particular, peakedand began to decline in 1970. In 1991the cod fishery collapsed; fleets wentout to the Georges Bank off the coastofNewfoundland to find nothing. Thegovernment ofNewfoundland has beenintermittently closing its two largestfisheries since the early 1990s to buildup the spawning biomass to its long-

term average. The catch is kept at alevel below the average.rate of repro-duction. It will never again exceed it.Fishermen now catch fewer fish thanthey did in 1950, when the expansionbegan. The limiting factor, in otherwords, is no longer tools but naturalcapital. The cod themselves now de-termine the size of the industry. In aneconomic sense, the cod fishery is nowin stasis.

Newfoundland and its fishingcommunities represent a shift in thedirection and purpose of investment,one that might soon spread to theentire economy. Since the 1770scapitalists have learned to invest inthe limiting factor of productionin order to maximize productivity.In the past that always meant im-proving the tools of the take, but itnow means something different-enhancing natural capital, the newlimiting factor. Herman Daly, aneconomist at the University ofMaryland, finds a precedent in "fal-lowing," or the practice of lettingland regenerate after a period of cul-tivation. Fallowing is investment inshort-term non-production in orderto maintain long-term yields. Dalyapplies the same idea to every re-newable resource: "Leave it alone.Let it grow in order to slow or reducethe exploitation. This conforms per-fectly to the economic definition ofinvestment-a reduction in presentconsumption in order to increasea future capacity to consume."Of course, this is not the way thateconomists-let alone bankers orbond traders-think of investment.Fallowing is investment withoutgrowth, and in our current economicmindset, lack of growth is tanta-mount to the end of progress.

What would it mean to live in ano-growth economy? How might thatchange the culture of abundance? InDeep Economy, Bill McKibben-anessayist and frequent contributor tomany publications, including thisone-argues against the troubledunion between more and better. Forthe poor everywhere, for economicrefugees from the blighted Chinesecountryside who now assemble DVDplayers in Guangdong, more is cer-tainly required. But the requirementis surprisingly modest. Once people

REVIEWS 91

have the security of enough food, ad-equate shelter, access to education,and consumer goods sufficient to al-low them to be comfortable and pro-ductive, more ceases to be better; itceases to increase happiness, as Me-Kibben goes to lengths to argue. Sur-veys over the past six decades havefound that Americans' happinesspeaked in the 1950s. It fell five per-centage points between 1970 and1994, even amid the flush times ofthe Clinton boom. Americans reportevery imaginable familial and occupa-tional misery regardless of their bur-geoning possessions. In the UnitedKingdom and Japan, economies thatexpanded powerfully after World WarII, satisfaction has remained flat inspite of all the consumer electronics,cable TV stations, first-rate food, anddesigner clothing now available. Thepoint is not that growth has causeddepression and anxiety, writes Me-Kibben, "only that it didn't alleviatethem." Growth should meet basicneeds because these really do createhappiness, but beyond that, it failsto deliver.

The liquidation of natural capitalfor export profits will not last. Chinais spending spectacular sums to cleanup its air and water, yet McKibbenquotes the deputy environment min-ister admitting that the great eco-nomic miracle "will end soon be-cause the environment can no longerkeep pace." Growth at such an ex-pense is not economic, as Daly puts it,but uneconomic-greater in its nega-tive externalities than in its positivereturns. Our failure to grasp this dis-tinction is embedded in our measureof GDP. An automobile accident, asudden rise in cancer cases, a toxic-waste spill-all of these require ser-vices to be rendered, wages to bepaid, and materials to be acquired, sothey all contribute to GDP, whereasthe steady erosion of a country's re-sources, its species, and its openspaces-all crucial assets---do not de-tract from it. As McKibben writes,"Growth is no longer making peoplewealthier, but instead generating in-equality and insecurity."

Deep Economy is about solutions,and its most pointed solution iscommunity autonomy. By separatingproduction from consumption on

92 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH Z008

such a scale, globalization since theeighteenth century has allowedpeople to live off the fruits of far-away places without having to ab-sorb the societal costs, like buyinggroceries with someone else's creditcard. Community thinking, by con-trast, stresses the internalizing of re-sources and consequences. Ratherthan depend on the deforestation ofsome other place for food, to whatextent can a town dedicate its ownland for its own needs? What wouldwe do if energy came from our ownsolar budget, our own forests, ourown thermal sinks in our own backyards-not from Nigeria or WestVirginia? In a world reeling from theeffects of export capitalism, nothingcould be more stable than peopletaking responsibility for their owndemands on the biosphere. Aneconomist might counter that notown or county can fulfill all its ownneeds. True, but each reduction inthe number of imported goods-andthe distance they travel-makes acommunity both more autonomousand more accountable.

McKibben believes that we canthrive, not just survive, withoutgrowth. The view may not be popu-lar, but it is gaining. Robert Solow,who won the Nobel Prize in econom-ics in 1987 for innovations in growththeory, now calls himself "agnostic"as to whether growth can continue,and is cheerfully willing to contem-plate a zero-growth economy. AsSolow said to me, "There is no rea-son at all why capitalism could notsurvive without slow or even nogrowth. I think it's perfectly possiblethat economic growth cannot go onat its current rate forever." This doesnot mean that productivity will ceaseto increase our quality of life; itmeans that people might find it in-creasingly costly to tum productivityinto the kinds of things they are nowaccustomed to buying with theirearnings. "It is possible," says Solow,"that the United States and Europewill find that, as the decades go by,either continued growth will be toodestructive to the environment andthey are too dependent on scarcenatural resources, or that they wouldrather use increasing productivityin the form of leisure .... There is

nothing intrinsic in the system thatsays it cannot exist happily in a sta-tionary state."

Astationary state. The termcomes from John Stuart Mill,who argued, in 1848, that

"the increase of wealth is not bound-less." Economists should know, saidMill, that "at the end of what theyterm the progressive state lies the sta-tionary state, that all progress inwealth is but a postponement ofthis." A steady-state economy nolonger increases its physical stock ofwealth. We could take 1 or 2 percentof a forest or fishery a year withoutcutting into its reproductive capacity,a rate that would "bring finance intobalance with the real underpinningsof finance," according to HermanDaly. He comes up with the samerate for future productivity as a resultof technological progress: it is also onthe order of 1 or 2 percent a year,though it could go higher. The biglesson is that technological civiliza-tions have arcs of expansion, andalthough for the past 250 years theyhave created an enormously morecomplex material world than thatof hunter-gatherers, in the endboth reach their stationary states-the point at which they cannot ex-pand without grinding down natur-al capital.

We will likely look back at the pe-riod between 1600 and 2050 as theEra of Expansion. The first date marksthe beginning of surplus agriculture inEngland, when its population beganto climb out of famine, when agrarianpeople all over the world entered aphase of wildfire frontier settlement,and when capitalism appeared. Thesecond date marks the year whenpresent trends in consumption willreach a level equal to double theearth's capacity, requiring a secondplanet. The U.N. projects that thenumber of humans will increase by 36percent between now and 2050, toaround 9 billion. Rising populationwill offset any savings from improvedefficiency and any reduction in per-capita consumption. As the advocacygroup World Watch has pointed out,even if Americans were to eat a fifth

Continued on page 94

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less meat per capita by 2050, totalU.S. meat consumption would be 5million tons greater in 2050 simplybecause there will be more people.Economists have long insisted thatwealth is not zero-sum, that it can becreated. Yet if the biophysical capaci-ty of the earth comes under strain,the wealth of one nation might growonly at the expense of others. Chinaand India now demand an increasingshare of the energy and resources thatthe United States and Europe onceclaimed for themselves, triggering un-precedented oil prices that reverber-ate throughout the global economy.Lindsey and Friedman both fasten

our freedom and equality to ourabundance, but the conditions thatmade possible the twentieth-centuryformula are quickly vanishing. Ifecological economists are right, wesimply have no choice but to thinkabout how to maintain social toler-ance without continued physical ex-pansion. There is no guarantee thatan economic transition won't bringresentment and hatred to the sur-face, as during the Great Depression,when totalitarianism from the rightand left attracted vocal advocates.But we can take solace in the simpletruth that societies change, and thatthey cannot choose the circum-stances or the conditions that forcechange. It may seem unrealistic toimagine our culture adopting a newenergy regime, or large-scale re-source recycling; but both are lessfar-fetched than the notion that wecan maintain the status quo into thedistant future.At Costco, when I ask a manager

to point out items that come from re-cycled material or that save energy-items, in other words, that representfewer inputs from the environmentand higher efficiency-he looks deepinto the cavern before answering, asthough he is divining something inthe shelves. "We have over 3,000items here," he says finally. He di-rects me to look at individual pack-ages. I notice a number of "EnergyStar" appliances, a selection of com-pact fluorescent lightbulbs, andsalmon farmed in Canada. But not

94 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2008

one of the paper products indicatespost-consumer content, and justabout everything else is made from(or powered by) petroleum. Thetwenty or so items that represent"less" and not "more" offset about asmuch as a kitchen sponge tossedinto the Atlantic. And yet Costco isnot an offender so much as a bell-wether, indicating that Americansare heading in two directions atonce. They have accepted efficiencyas the soul of what it means to begreen, but they have not yet recog-nized a biophysical limit on thescale of their consumption. The endof growth will not mean the end ofprogress, to the extent that we canredefine progress as consisting ofsomething other than accumulation.Instead, we can accept our limita-tions, view progress as the creationof efficiency rather than wealth, andwork for just institutions even whenlean times come. _

March Index Sources1 U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; 2United Nations Statistics' Division(N.Y.C.);3,4 The Economist(London);5,6Economic Research Service, U.S. Depart-ment ofAgriculture;7 InternationalCoun-cil of Shopping Centers, Inc. (N.Y.C.); 8Global Insight, Inc. (Lexington, Mass.);9TurnerEnterprises,Inc. (Atlanta); 10 FrankDe Blase, Rochester City Newspaper(Rochester, N.Y.); 11 TASER Interna-tional (Scottsdale, Ariz.): 12 U.S. FederalBureau of Investigation; 13,14 Prince &Associates (Redding, Conn.): 15 BMRBSports (London); 16 George J. Mitchell(N.Y.C); 17 Jack Darkes, University ofSouth Florida (Tampa); 18 BarbaraPrud-hommeWhite, University ofNew Hamp-shire (Durham); 19,20 KforceGovern-ment Solutions, Inc. (Fairfax,Va.): 21,22The Chronicle ofHigher Education (Wash-ington)fHarper'sresearch;23 TigerAthleticFoundation, Louisiana State University(BatonRouge);24,25 U.S. ArmyCorpsofEngineers (New Orleans); 26,27 TheGallup Poll (Washington); 28,29 U.S. So-cial Security Administration; 30,31 EricG. Campbell,MassachusettsGeneral Hos-pital (Boston); 32 U.S. OfficeofManage-ment and Budget;33 Attrition.org (Den-ver);34 UnggiYoon,SuwonDistrictCourt(Suwon, South Korea); 35,36 Korea Ser-vice Driver Society (Seoul); 37 McKay&Sisters (Milan); 38 U.S. Defense Intelli-genceAgency;39,40 Google Inc. (Moun-tain View, Calif.).