John Mulrow responds to the romanticized vision of the future promoted in the book Abundance (by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson).
Over the past year, I’ve had many folks recommend the book Abundance to me as a foil to my own calls for economic degrowth. Finally, I had to dive in and see what it was all about. Here’s my one sentence summary: Abundance is a call for government leaders and political hopefuls to use the reality of climate change as a motivator for big public spending initiatives, e.g., high speed rail, renewable energy rollouts, medical research, and food production efficiency.
I totally agree with the authors that a bold and exciting political narrative is needed to garner action on existential problems. On the technicalities of facing climate change, however, the book paints a vision of the future that is disconnected from reality in three key ways:
1) Climate change is treated as the only ecological issue facing humanity, meaning that all non-fossil-fuel technologies are assumed to scale widely and rapidly without environmental disruption.
2) The political wins they seek (high speed rail, affordable housing, and increased tech investment) are focused on case studies from Los Angeles and San Francisco, which makes them potential wins for a narrow subset of humanity that is already (on average) highly privileged.
3) Although the technological solutions they propose are not fantasies (they are all methods or equipment proven at prototype-scale or beyond), their environmental potential is framed as an inherent quality of those technologies. This ignores the many economic forces, social values, and cultural commitments that must be confronted in the long winding path to true sustainability.
The opening passage of Abundance reminded me of techno-optimist dreams of the late 19th century… when it was assumed that all the new-found capabilities of steam and petroleum would offset humans’ reliance on nature, allowing landscapes to return to wilderness. Rudolf Diesel, Elisha Gray, and the Wright Brothers all thought their inventions (engines, telephones, and airplanes) would catalyze a softening of human-nature relationships.
The best passage I found to match the Abundance narrative comes from a French chemist, Marcellin Berthelot, who summarized the eco-potential of his field in an 1894 speech entitled, “Chemistry in the Year 2000.”
“There will no longer be hills covered with vineyards and fields filled with cattle. Man will gain in gentleness and morality because he will cease to live by the carnage and destruction of living creatures…. The earth will be covered with grass, flowers and woods and in it the human race will dwell in the abundance and joy of the legendary age of gold.”
Now, over a century later, we have most of the technologies that Berthelot foretold – operating at commercial scale. What we do not have is the other part of his techno-promise: planetary health, freed up landscapes, and a right relationship with global ecology (even if he too promised abundance).
It is comforting to expect that some new energy or material method will beget “gentleness and morality” for us. This is, essentially, the Abundance hypothesis – tested over and over again for over a century without success. Its power is mainly in kicking the can further down the road, ultimately worsening our planetary predicament.
The more exciting path is to get to work on the social and technical innovations required for something humanity has never done: Shrink the global economy back within planetary limits, and in the process provide lasting abundance to both humans and the more-than-human world.
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John Mulrow is a council member of the Gaian Way and director of the Degrowth Institute. For more details on creating a just transition to a smaller global economy, read on at: www.degrowthinstitute.org/c2g.
Ashwani Vasishth
Many of us accept that one part of our problem is we are trapped in a Newtonian, mechanistic, binary worldview, And yet we persist on framing most issues in a binary way. Either this or that. Abundance or scarcity.
In the 1980s there was a book, Catastrophe or Cornucopia (Cotgrove, I think), and I’d rejected the “or” meme even then. Can we wrap our minds around the thought of catastrophe AND cornucopia?
What would it take for us to actually accept that there is truth in BOTH the Klein and Thompson view of unbridled Abundance AND John Mulrow’s excellent essay are only facets of the same complex reality.
What’s wrong with necessary, but insufficient?
As Edward de Bono said decades back, yes and no cannot be the only two options
We WILL pay a heavy price (many of us across the world) for our actions or lack thereof. Consequences follow every intervention into the happening world.
AI is BOTH harmful and helpful. Which it is, in any particular case, rests on us. AI is a tool, and its morality rests with us, the users.
Gaia is the supra-system to our constellation of sub-system, and the hubris of “we must save the Planet” overwhelms.
We all accept the principle of Yin and Yang. We find it very hard to live by that root principle.
Ashwani Vasishth
And let’s not forget that another thing that is “as old as technological change itself” is the contrarian view. Remember Malthus? The Luddites?
Yin and yang. In all (non-engineering) cases.
John Mulrow
Thanks Ashwani. I bet we could find a yin and yang in all engineering cases too – curious what you think.
Tom Mulhern
Thanks John for this take on Abundance. It is an accurate read that raises important critiques. As Yogi Berra may have said, “Predictions are very hard to make, especially about the future.”
I found Abundance interesting mostly as political advice, and we do see some using it in that way — Mamdani notably. Specifically 1) we need to advance politics that deliver more often than lecture; and 2) we need regulatory regimes that are less byzantine and less prone to gaming by elites of all kinds.
But as an argument about a planetary path forward, it’s more of the same. Resource-fueled growth is the premise and the engine. More stuff for everyone. Planet as piggy bank, until it isn’t…
Raworth’s Doughnut might be relevant here, especially since, to one of your points, it considers ecological ceilings beyond just emissions. I think the issue with Abundance (and perhaps with the Doughnut itself) lies less with the ceilings than the “floors.”
There are two types of social foundations in the model. Those — gender equality, equity, peace, voice — that exert no clear pressure in the direction the ceilings, and those — housing, energy, water, food, income/work — that, because they require material resources of some kind, do.
When it comes to these resource-sapping foundations, our definition of “enough” just keeps rising. Does California “need” more energy, faster trains, etc.? Do we “need” cheaper tee shirts and Corn Pops? So the ceilings, or our collective idea of what we might allow ourselves to put at risk in terms of those ceilings, will float upwards.
And it’s not just greed and gluttony driving us upward, it is also our material-deonominated definitions of “equity,” “justice,” and “voice” which mean everyone should have equal shot at getting enough of whatever.
We have placed ourselves on an escalator to the moon…or rather to a state of our planet in which it might come to resemble the moon. Klein and Thompson would just have us go up on one that is electric, solar-powered, and data-optimized.
I had picked up Abundance in the hope that it might be about a conceptual reframing to celebrate that we *already* have abundant resources and that the greatest innovation challenge of our time is to work out means to share in that abundance more widely and sustainably.
…which of course, John, is what you are on about and have been a tireless advocate for. As a communicator and framer, I might not have chosen “Degrowth” as the label…maybe something more like “Regrowth” to place emphasis on the “re” competencies that can get us there and on the revitalization of our relationship to our planet. But either way, the aim of human innovation needs to shift from growing the numerator (where winning = absolute growth of human-available resources) to the denominator (where winning is measured in resource efficiency and ecological harmony).
John Mulrow
Great to hear from you Tom. Replace “Moon” with “Venus” in your phrase – “We have placed ourselves on an escalator to the moon…or rather to a state of our planet in which it might come to resemble the moon. Klein and Thompson would just have us go up on one that is electric, solar-powered, and data-optimized” – and I totally agree!
The problem with Abundance is that it is not a prediction about the future, it’s a proposed course of action for humanity, entirely based on *hope* that the political advice they give will translate into ecological sustainability. And I’m always skeptical of anyone proposing *hope* as a course of action – no matter who says it.
For ceilings and floors, the best possible ceiling (for action) is a cap on economic size (measured as the totality of production and consumption), though @Erik Assadourian here at Gaian Way has proposed other social ceilings here: https://gaianway.org/what-are-floors-without-ceilings/
Your point on “Degrowth” naming is well-taken. I’m dissatisfied with doughnut, circularity, and wellbeing terminologies for their fuzziness. Rob Davies at Planetary Thinking Initiative calls it “metabolic right-sizing” and even the Club of Rome gave it a term in their second report, Mankind at the Turning Point (1975): “organic growth” – since organic life tends to biophysically grow to a point, then mature in other ways.
I think of degrowth as a robust course of action for sustainability; one that needs a diversity of minds, hearts, hands working on it. When you’ve got to achieve something difficult with a diverse team, the best possible description of the goal is the one that is most clear and easy to understand. Imagine you’re a football coach explaining the point of the game to a batch of new players, and you get to the question “what’s a touchdown?” You don’t say, “it’s when the players get together and celebrate in the endzone” even though it may be tempting to focus on the fun part of a touchdown. You say, “it’s when a player carries the football into, or catches the football inside, this box (the endzone).”
We’ll be on course for sustainability when we agree to downscaling the global economy.
Hope to catch you soon here in Chicago Tom!