In a way, it's completely understandable that Americans generally would veer away from a perspective formed during the long bummer we now call the 1970's. Back then, the intellectual authority of the scientist was greater than it is today, and much of the erosion of this authority has to do with the battle between science and commerce, which science plainly lost. And, no, I don't attribute the collapse of scientific reasoning in America purely to the counter-revolution of religious belief. It was rather the alliance of religious and commercial political forces, combined in the Republican party, which shared a common cause against scientific reasoning, or any other kind of reasoning. Paradoxically, the attack on science was born from a very reasonable conclusion, which goes something like this: If we do as the scientists say, then our bottom line is fucked. As it turns out, that was an astute observation.
Industrial commercial interests don't require much convincing to ignore natural law when it runs counter to its needs. As it heedlessly obeys the Maximum Power Principle, commerce can deny its existence, or, at the very least, its implications. "Nature will take care of itself" I've heard it said from libertarian minded economic agents. No argument there. It surely will take care of itself. We just won't like the manner in which it does. As Greer, and Catton, point out, the laws that determine the success of the industrial economy are the same that will be responsible for its undoing. In other words, Nature will take care of itself. We can't pick and choose which laws to follow and which laws to break. Or which laws to make and then obey, as is the case with the global banking system.
For most people, the gloomy scientific inquiry of the 1970's has been disproved or forgotten as their predictions have not borne out the way they said they would. The world has added a few more billion people since then, the economy has about doubled since 1970, the march of technological progress goes on that make life better, the price of commodities has remained stable...oh wait, scratch that last one. The political victory of Neoliberalism capitalized on the failure of the gloomy predictions to show up in time. The reason this is so has a lot to do with the subject of time. More specifically, it has to do with different scales of time that are observable.
To better understand this, I will meditate on my brand new Matryoshka dolls. These represent a historical time scale. Each doll is a manifest historical occurrence, with the latter ones nested in the previous. Each one is also acting simultaneously in the present in a dynamic way. Beyond the scale of the Earth doll, nothing matters. The Neoliberal doll is the most recent and therefore has the shortest time scale. Because of how Neoliberalism is conceptualized (markets, free trade, information, etc.), it relies on shorter time scales for its justification as well as operates day to day, week to week, and by and large the historical knowledge base it draws from only dates back to the end of WWII.
With all this in mind, the gloomy prognostications of 1970's scientists worked on a different time scale than the market. The immediacy of the oil shocks of the 70's gave the disaster forecasts a corresponding perceived immediacy, but the true time scale they had in mind was over decades or a century. Think about global warming, which is also a product of the 70's, to get an idea of what time scale scientists were thinking on. In terms of resource depletion and industrial production, the world was certainly able to keep going the way it was going. In fact, that's exactly what happened. But doing so physically changed the Earth so that it is not the same Earth now as it was in the 1970's, or the 1920's, and so on. The United States was once the largest producer of almost any mineral you can think of. It was the world's greatest producer of oil, and its largest exporter. The lesson of resource depletion was almost learned in the 70's, after oil production reached its all time peak. You need look no further than the production peak for the origin of the economic trouble seen in the 1970's. This event aligned with the interest of scientists to research the relationship between nature and the economy.
But the world still had lots of resources, and still does now, and the Neoliberal political force, funded by the capitalist class, could puncture the long term view of scientific research. But it did not invalidate that research, as events have shown. Neoliberalism won because people are by nature short term thinkers. They were by and large willing to push back against a gloomy environmentalism after the big oil fields in Alaska and the North Sea flooded the market and dropped the price of oil. The computer revolution was at the same time gaining huge efficiency benefits in the form of globalized markets in labor and finance. This had the effect of expanding what ecologists call the carrying capacity of the energy system we know as the economy. But as is evident, this has run headlong into another law, and there is no better indicator of it than the one represented in the graph below:
In my mind, this is a graph what the Law of Diminishing Returns looks like slamming against the Neoliberal experiment. Overlay a chart showing the 3.5x increase in debt accumulated since 1980 and you can see the death of Neoliberalism quite clearly. It is only a matter of time. For all the efforts of information technology and of the expansion of the carrying capacity of the global economy, the U.S. and the rest of the world are struggling mightily. There are no new frontiers to explore, no new exploitable continents brimming with resources being formed or discovered. The ones we live on are just that much less able to support our current lifestyles. What of that next doll, Our Lady Capitalism?
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