Ecological economists have criticized GDP for decades, yet progress is slow in switching to another measure of growth. We have plenty of alternatives, and government agencies worldwide have adopted a set of additional indicators relating to environment and human well-being. But GDP remains the key indicator of economic growth. One reason is that GDP offers …
The need for emancipating ourselves from the work ethic of the Technosphere
Recently, I read the book The Birth of Energy. Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, Energy & the Politics of Work by Cara New Daggett. This is a fascinating analysis of the role of thermodynamics as a worldview in the 19th century colonial and imperial expansion of capitalism. The linkage between science and ideology runs via Protestantism, with …
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Why technological progress is a delusion and how can get rid of it
Economists and many others are deeply convinced that there is technological progress. Technological progress is a defining idea of Western modernity, originating from the Enlightenment. This is also recognized in the most comprehensive and apparently conclusive account of progress, Pinker’s book ‘Enlightenment Now’. So, it seems insane denying that there is technological progress. Yet, the …
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Anthropocentric ecosystem services versus geocentric technosystem services
In previous posts I have argued against the flawed anthropocentrism of the ecosystem services concept. But what is the alternative? How can we practically achieve a geocentric turn? Literally, that would mean that we reverse the direction of functional analysis. In the ecosystem concept, we ask what ecosystems do for us. Now we might ask …
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Saving the Biosphere or Saving by the Biosphere? The Thermodynamics of Negative Interest Rates
A decade ago, the German economist Carl Christian von Weizsäcker mused that the phenomenon of declining opportunities for profitable investments that is behind the trend towards declining interest rates might reflect the Second Law of thermodynamics, in the sense that the more capital we accumulate, the more we must struggle to keep it in order, …
The Evolutionary Epistemology of the Technosphere
Technology and science are deeply interwoven. Often, this is interpreted in terms of scientific progress driving the emergence of new technologies. But historians of science have always emphasized the fact that science is also enabled by technology that is generated outside the epistemic venture of science. For example, artisanal advances in watchmaking contributed to the …
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Is Anthropocentrism Good Science? Why Sir Partha Got It Wrong
In these days, the ‘Dasgupta Review' receives much attention in policy circles and news reports. The Review pursues the laudable goal to include environmental concerns into economics and to show economic strategies for putting biodiversity at the centre of our efforts to cope with the challenge of climate change. The Review submits many important suggestions, …
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Coral Cultivation: Technosphere on the Edge
"Coral Cultivation: Technosphere on the Edge" by Boris Wille and Stefan Knauß shows how Marine-Biologists are trying fix the coral calamity by “coral cultivation”. These iniatives are particularly feasible to think with about Gaia 2.0 and the Technosphere.
Nature-based Solutions: ‘Naturally’ Growing the Technosphere
In recent initiatives of coping with the challenge of climate change and designing sustainable economies and societies, ‘nature-based solutions’ NBS have become a buzzword. Broadly speaking, this term refers to all sorts of alternatives to techno-engineering (‘grey’) measures directed at adapting and mitigating the impact of climate change which intentionally activate and strengthen ecosystems or …
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Weighing the future more than the present: Paying a negative natural rate of interest to the biosphere
The interest rate is a crucial, if not the pivotal parameter in modelling challenges and strategies facing climate change. It reflects our stances towards the future. There are two basic, though conflicting principles how to determine it, as reflected in the seminal debate triggered by the Stern report in 2007, which opposed William Nordhaus’s position. …
The messiness of human life: the ultimate limit of technosphere expansion
Recently, the term ‘technosphere’ is increasingly used in a slightly different sense than in the Earth system context (see the new issue of ‘The Economist’ and the briefing that inspired and informed this post). The technosphere would be the world of the internet, roughly defined. This refers to the global and comprehensive connectivity and the …
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The Earth: A community of advantage
This post is the follow-up to the previous in presenting core ideas in my recent book chapter draft contributed to the volume edited by Martin Bohle “Geo-societal narratives - contextualising geosciences” (Palgrave). I present a solution to the dilemma in political epistemology that I pinpointed, namely that economists often argue that the market is beyond …
What is the purpose of the economy? The case for a geocentric turn in economics
Recently I have been working on a chapter contribution to a volume on geoethics edited by Martin Bohle “Geo-societal narratives – contextualising geosciences” (Palgrave). Dealing with literature that I was largely unfamiliar with helped me a lot to focus my thinking about ideas that I have been working on for years. This has been condensed …
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The modern corporation: centre of power in the technosphere
There is a black hole in climate research, ecological economics and Earth system models: The corporation. Of course, corporations are recognized as actors, but what happens inside the corporation is normally not included in the macro-scale perspective that most Earth sciences research in the broadest sense adopts. Even when critics claim that the ‘anthropocene’ should …
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The technosphere as a computer: What are the thermodynamic implications?
In modern economics, information is arguably the core notion. Indeed, many economists would agree that the market is a giant distributed computer that processes information about scarcities of resources and generates prices that guide the actions of economic agents accordingly. However, economists rarely consider the physical side of information, although in practice that matters much, …
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The city is dead. Long live the city?
This week edition of The Economist has a very stimulating briefing on New York and the impact of the Corona. Cities are under immense pressure, as they are by definition and purpose places where people are densely packed and crowd together. The article cites an intriguing observation by the Santa Fé physicist Geoffrey West: The …
Eigentimes in co-evolution of biosphere and technosphere: A challenge to policy design
The Corona crisis has highlighted a problem of considerable significance for the study of co-evolutionary processes: temporal dynamics and temporal coordination. In my 2002 book (in German) ‘Elements of Evolutionary Economics’ I devoted a full chapter to time and introduced the term ‘Eigentime’ that is mostly known from physics but is rarely used in other …
Universal basic income: Revolutionizing technosphere governance
Universal basic income UBI has been suggested by many authors as a major institutional innovation in designing the economy of the future. One motivation that increasingly gains acceptance is that it might be the solution to the problem of technological unemployment created by digitization and automation. In our context, that would translate into the assumption …
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The Corona, Oil and the Challenge of Climate Change
Many observers have noticed that the current crisis could serve as a policy template for meeting the challenge of climate change. We collectively experience and manage a ‘de-growth’ process of unprecedented speed, and most governments are busy with finding ways how to recover growth. Yet, astute analysts such as the previous governor of the Bank …
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Will Corona kill capitalism?
Economic historians know well that pandemics and existential crises can change the evolutionary trajectory of economic systems. The most illustrious case was the Black Death that ushered the demise of feudalism via its impact on labour supply and wages. In the 20th century, the Great Depression and WWII fundamentally changed the role of government in …
Do we consume too much?
A staple in debates over how we can counter the climate crisis is that we need to reduce our levels of consumption. Often, this appears to shift the brunt of the responsibility to the consumers aka citizens. But do we really consume too much? I have just completed reading this great achievement of historical scholarship, …
How to restore human agency in the technosphere
Most observers of the current climate crisis argue that we need fundamental changes of our lifestyles and economic policies. There is less emphasis on whether and how we must change the fundamental institutional structures of our economic systems. But when thinking about agency in the technosphere, institutions are central. If the technosphere follows its partly …
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Vaclav Smil on Growth: Seeing the Trees, but not the Forest
Vaclav Smil is one of the world’s leading thinkers on energy, society and nature. He has just published a volume on growth across many scales and domains (“Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities”). As always, he presents an amazing richness of facts, often extremely enlightening. For example, he definitively shows that all thinking about ‘decoupling’ or …
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There is no climate justice without decolonization
By Urs Lindner and Cécile Stehrenberger Climate protection and climate justice are not necessarily the same thing. Last week – climate strike week – Marvin Volk from Fridays for Future Erfurt made this point in a short statement he gave during a class we teach. We spent the rest of the seminar exploring the relationship …
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Global urbanization: The dangerous delusion of economics
In recent debates about reforming capitalism, we observe a problematic tension between the social and the ecological. There are growing concerns about the social consequences of capitalism, which eerily remind me of Karl Polanyi’s political analysis of the ‘Great Transformation’: These social conundrums are increasingly driving the rise of populism worldwide. Many commentators explain them …
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Money and the technosphere
Fifteen years ago, the late and renowned Swiss economist Hans Christoph Binswanger published a book that deeply influenced my own work in economics: The Growth Spiral: Money, Energy, and Imagination in the Dynamics of the Market Process In a nutshell, he argued that the monetary economy is inherently expansive, and that this drives the relentless …
Revolution impossible? Us against Us
These days are replete of ominous climate symbolism. The UN organizes a climate summit, Greta gives a speech, last Friday in Germany hundreds of thousands of people took part in the Fridays for Future movement, with some companies and trade unions even joining, and the weekly ‘The Economist’ published a full ‘climate issue’. Is this …
Why we can regain agency and how – a riposte to James Dyke
I fully agree that at the current stage, we may suffer from partial blindness to the limits and constraints of our agency in technosphere evolution. However, at the same time I believe that in improving our scientific understanding of these, we can regain our human agency and find an escape route, as James hopes for. …
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Marxism and the Technosphere
The problem of agency in the technosphere has much in common with Marx’s treatment of agency in capitalism. In capitalism agency is endogenous to the system: Capitalists are not the bad guys who expropriate workers with sinister intentions, but the forces of ‘capital’ subject them to this type of behavioural governance. The system drives their …
In a Climate-neutral Solar Economy, Would the Technosphere Outcompete the Biosphere? A Provocation.
In his recent post, Axel Kleidon offered a grand view on the thermodynamics of the Earth system that includes the human domain. His fundamental point is that the human economy follows the same systemic dynamics as the Earth system, i.e. Lotka’s Maximum Power principle. That means, it manifests an inherent physical trend towards maximizing energy …
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