Economics of a Crowded Planet by Fraser Murison Smith

Author:Fraser Murison Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030317980
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Spaceship Earth

Buried in an obscure and otherwise unremarkable volume of contributed papers published in 1966 by Resources for the Future is a gem of an article encapsulating where humanity found itself in relation to the planet as the late twentieth century approached. Boulding’s The economics of the coming spaceship Earth has been very influential on thinkers pondering the trajectory of the human enterprise relative to its planetary container. Yet it has remained largely unknown to the general public, despite being fairly non-technical and easy to read.

What Boulding attempted to do in 1966, and which others have done in a variety of ways since,36 was to look at the human economy as a system wholly contained within planet Earth. Most economic writings up until Boulding did not consider the economy’s biophysical container at all. Consequently, most economists had viewed the economy in terms of “throughput from the factors of production,” as Boulding put it, rather than in terms of the maintenance of capital stocks. This view would be acceptable in what Boulding called a “cowboy economy,” symbolized by “illimitable plains and … reckless, exploitative, romantic and violent behavior”37 because, in a cowboy economy, resources are not limiting.

In what Boulding called a “spaceman economy,” however, resources are limiting. Therefore, “the essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality and complexity of the total capital stock.”38 In a spaceman economy, as on a spaceship, the name of the game is to use limited resources with great efficiency, within the bounds of available free energy, so as to preserve and replenish their stocks for future use.

It should be noted that Boulding wrote the article during a period in which systems theory or ‘cybernetics’ was rapidly becoming established as a new, interdisciplinary field. Boulding, along with Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Howard Odum and others, was active in this new area. The 1960s also was the decade of the space race, so the metaphor of Earth as a ‘spaceship’ was apt and topical. Despite the emerging recognition of systems complexity during this period, there remained an underlying presumption of human control over natural systems. In fact, the term ‘cybernetics’ itself is intrinsically anthropocentric. If we recognize Earth as a spaceship then all we have to do is control the parameters of the system to ensure our own long-term prosperity. Boulding’s sometimes anthropocentric language, however, does not weaken his basic argument.

Boulding used four adjectives to describe the capital stock. The nature of the stock has to be right for its uses within the economy. Its extent has to be large enough to support the economy. Its quality must be of a sufficiently high caliber to be useful. And its complexity—or organization—must be sufficient to confer functional redundancy and resilience to perturbation. “It is the capital stock from which we derive satisfactions, not from the additions to it (production) or the subtractions from it (consumption). […] The objective of economic policy should [be] to … enable us to maintain our capital stock with as little consumption or production as possible.

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