Guest post: They’ll be in prosperity-gospel heaven
Originally a comment by iknklast on Full circle.
Again the sublime indifference to the futures of their children and grandchildren.
One class I had to take for my Ph.D. in Environmental Science was Economics, specifically Economics of Natural Resources. It was interesting to note that in the class, every thing he taught was about maximizing profit right now. In Economics, there is no future, there is only today. The idea that someone else ends up making the money once you’re dead is anathema. You must make as much money as is possible, and that means cutting the forests down, drilling the oil, and in general making mush of the environment right now.
It’s really all about the discounts. What do you predict the future is going to be in terms of the value of a property or commodity? Depending on how you determine the discounts (which is far from scientific, though it is hyped as scientific), you either harvest resources now, or wait until the future. In general, the discounts always tell you to harvest now.
The value of resources such as trees in their living state is never figured into the bottom line. Why? Because a huge percentage of that value accrues to society as a whole. The air we breathe is out there for everyone, and they can’t monetize it. They’ve managed to monetize water, oil, lumber, and food…not to mention many other resources…but protecting the air is not important, because it belongs to everyone, not to them alone. Since they can close their doors against pollution, and use air conditioners and air filters, it isn’t important to them. It never occurs to them that a day might come when that isn’t enough, and if it does ever occur to them, they assume it is so far in the future that it won’t matter. They’ll be in prosperity-gospel heaven, lording it over the little souls just as they lorded it over the little people on earth.
I think they do, in a sense, care about what happens to their children and their grand-children, but they just think the best thing for the next generation is to be able to pass down a whopping inheritance. They don’t worry about their kids and grandkids because they think the money they leave behind will protect them just as it is protecting the wealthy today.
Found the quotation that was rattling about in my mind at last.
Friedrich von Hayek in ‘The Constitution of Liberty’, quoted in ’The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& how It Came to Control your Life)’ by George Monbiot:
“It is the belief [of conservationists] that the natural fertility of the soil should in all circumstances be preserved and that what is branded as ‘soil mining’ should in all circumstances be avoided. It can easily be shown that as a general proposition, this is unsound … In fact, ‘soil-mining’ may in certain circumstances be as much in the long-range interests of the community as the using up of any stock resource … [In these circumstances] it will be desirable to allow the fertility to decline to the level at which investment will still pay … To use up a free gift of nature once and for all is in such instances no more wasteful or reprehensible than a similar exploitation of a stock resource.”
Monbiot remarks: “in other words, as long as thier is economic gain in converting nature into money, we should do so.”
This is, as Monbiot says in his title, a “doctrine”, which fellows like your man unthinkingly parrot. Economics is, we are told, a “science” – in a great many cases, if not most cases, it seems that it involves no serious thought, merely the recitation of the latest party line, and is hardly a ’science’ at all.