I'm not sure if the headline is deliberately trying for the Club of Rome/Limits to Growth connotation, or if it's just me, but if so it is still early days before nature imposes a steady-state economy on the world. Even the current hubbub regarding the immense amounts of material that will be required for changing energy production/consumption will probably be met with advances in our understanding of electrons and their little buddies and advances in material science that will fulfill the Arthur C. Clarke definition:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The political angle though....there are a lot of people who want to impose a steady-state economy NOW, with themselves, naturellement, making the rules.
On the other hand maybe the metaverse, combined with a version of Brave New World's soma, will leave everyone so blissed out that they will use zero resources.
Anyhoo, here's the Institute for New Economic Thinking, February 10:
James K. Galbraith discusses the shift of US capitalism from an industrial state to what he calls a predator state: a finance-led, military-centered corporate republic that continues to prevail. To overcome it, he lays out what is needed to focus on employment, stability, and adjustments to rising resource costs. Lynn Fries interviews Galbraith on GPEnewsdocs.
Transcript
LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs with guest James Galbraith.
It is normally thought that large investments and technological developments can ensure fast economic growth and prosperity. In the book The End of Normal, James Galbraith argues that while fixed-capital and embedded technology may be essential in a capitalist system, rising resource costs can render any such arrangement fragile. [1]
As it is not possible to obtain cheap resources indefinitely, be it domestically or from the rest of the world notably the Global South, Galbraith argues that the US needs to design institutions and policies to cope with rising resource costs. Not doing so has been one important reason that explains the shift from the American capitalism as described by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1967 book The New Industrial State to an economy shaped by crises, institutional breakdowns and predatory tendencies, as described by James K. Galbraith in his 2008 book The Predator State.
In today’s program, James Galbraith analyses this long-term transformation of the US economy, describes its current state as a corporate republic in which finance has gained the upper hand and co-opted democratic institutions to forward its narrow interests, and discusses solutions for the way forward, which will also re-shape the future of growth.
Joining us from Texas, our guest, James K Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and is Professor of Government at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A prolific author, James Galbraith’s published work includes The End of Normal, Inequality and Instability and The Predator State among numerous other books.
Welcome, James.
JAMES K. GALBRAITH: Thank you.
FRIES: Let’s start with some context on the analysis of American Capitalism presented in The End of Normal. In your words: “this is the economics of organizations developed by John Kenneth Galbraith modified to emphasize that large, complex systems are not only efficient but also rigid…”.[2] The economics of organizations is a concept developed in The New Industrial State and John Kenneth Galbraith of course was your father. Let’s start there. Tell us something about that body of work and related terms like technostructure and countervailing power that John Kenneth Galbraith coined in his analysis of American capitalism.
GALBRAITH: The New Industrial State was the culminating book of a trilogy essentially that my father started in 1952 and completed in 1967. The three books were American Capitalism, the concept of countervailing power, The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State.
And what he developed in that body of work was a portrait of how American capitalism actually worked. And it was clear that it was an industrial capitalism that was rooted in the functioning of large organizations of large industrial corporations. And not in this notion that really was a hangover from the 18th century of essentially independent, small businesses and farmers and so forth all transacting with the so-called market as the dominant institution.
You can’t do advanced production/advanced manufacturing that way, because you have to have a mastery of a whole raft of technologies. And in order to do that, you have to have specialists. In order to have specialists and use them, you have to give them very specific things to do. Someone does the chemistry, someone does metallurgy, Someone does the engineering, hydrodynamics and on and on and on. to bring this all together. And that has to happen in an organization.
And then when the organization actually masters the technology, it has to figure out a way to present it to the public so the public is interested in buying it. It has to manage a regulatory process. It has to manage the financial aspects. It has a whole range of functions that go beyond the pure matters of mastering the technical aspects of production.
So the technostructure, (which was by the way, not my father’s, um, most felicitous coinage. And he was somewhat ambivalent about it as well as a word), [the technostructure] is a group of people who make up as a group the functioning brain of a large organization. And one of the ideas in The New Industrial State was that this group of people were really the governing force.
They were the ones on whom the organization depended. That the top manager, the person, the CEO, the so-called entrepreneur was somebody who could be replaced generally speaking. The Board of Directors didn’t really do anything at all. It was a symbolic body. The shareholders had no role.
The people who actually ran the show were the people who knew how to fit the pieces together and could work together as a team. And that was the message of The New Industrial State.
And that was also the dominant feature of the whole American capitalist system. On the one hand you had the alternative, which was the Soviet Union which was an industrial and behemoth but very centralized and very rigid. And obviously at the end of the day, very fragile. And on the other, you had the developing world which hadn’t mastered the capacities that the American corporation mastered.
So the US system at that time was widely regarded as being a model toward which effective developmental strategies would be attempting to trend. All of that, of course, has changed. The world does not stay still and nobody captures it for any indefinite period of time....
....MUCH MORE
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth and waiting around for the dire predictions to come to pass [so as to get some bets down, not because of a generalized misanthropy] brings to mind the interminable lawsuit in Dickens' Bleak House:
"...Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.
The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.
Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane..."
