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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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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Co-creation and agency in the Earth system
Two weeks ago, I attended the meeting of the European Society for Ecological Economics at Turku, Finland. The core topic of the conference was ‘co-creation’. Many people attending had no clear idea what that means, including myself. However, as I had been invited as a keynote speaker, in the recent months I invested some intellectual …
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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 …
