Birdsong, wilderness and bio-fuels

Nor did Keynes engage with these problems. Like many institutionalists, he was a soft Marx. The market was not self-regulating but it could be guided and made to work by a benign state. Marx judged it has hopelessly compromised - partly because he looked upon a very different state. But the finite planet was outside of the purview of both. The idea of a green stimulus package and green demand management would have been surprising to Keynes. In our time he may well have embraced it.

The green critique of value theory suggested here is based on unpublished work experimentally undertaken some 20 years ago. (Then it took me hundreds of pages to reach such simple conclusions.) But I still think that value is at the bottom of it, ultimately accounting for why we are drowning in nonsensical carbon prices and assessments of climate change costs more generally. The planet has no objective value within the frame of contemporary economic theory. Hardly a contemporary, Mill nevertheless stands out here.

He still worked in the old objective-theory-of-value school but was also an exceptional figure within it. He was the first economist ever to look upon human artifice in its totality and to see its aggressive ugly side not just in relation to the abuse of humans but in relation to the abuse of the natural world. He saw horizons that could not be reengineered. This allowed him to ask questions that would, in a sense, not be asked until Rachel Carson came along, mourning the possible loss of birdsong. Or, perhaps, until a contemporary ecological economics was born later in the 20th century.

Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation … every flowery waste ploughed up … all quadrapeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food … every superfluous tree rooted out and scarcely a place left where a wild flower or shrub could grow. From Chapter 4 of J.S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy.

This almost mimics a romantic poetry of protest that Mill would have been reading and that’s where modern environmental concern was born. But Mill rendered the protest as economic theory and asked: won’t the natural world at some point just run out, putting an end to further growth? His answer to this question was an emphatic “Yes”. Other classical political economists had asked this question before but what set Mill apart was his answer.

Where others saw only unfolding tragedy as they contemplated capitalism without growth, what Mill saw is an occasion for celebration. Whatever one makes of his technical argument, he theorised a benign and even superior stationary state. From this vantage point, he scorned economic growth. This was utterly remarkable - and it set his argument apart from everyone’s - his fellow classical political economists, the neo-classicals and even orthodox Marxism.

A few more snippets of what he said:

I confess, I am not charmed with the ideal held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels are not the most desirable lot of human kind or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.

The world of trampling and crushing is for fools. Just what Mill says too:

Where minds are coarse, they require coarse stimuli, and let them have them. In the mean time, those who do not accept the present very early stage of human improvement as its ultimate type may be excused for being indifferent to the kind of economic progress which excites the congratulations of ordinary politicians - the mere increase or production and accumulation.

Were words ever more scornful: “disagreeable symptoms”, “coarse stimuli” and “mere increase of production and accumulation”? Our politicians remain “ordinary”, too. The fine and elaborate prose tells us this was written over 150 years ago, but the content is for our time. Or have we not caught up with Mill yet?