Heading for the cliff in a 2.5 ton battery car?

– In a dream of eternal growth

Haven't had a car in twelve years. I cycle, walk or take public transport. Rent a car when the need arises. Usually a battery operated Toyota with the designation Bz4x. The reflections appear when I back it into the parking lot after a pleasant ride.

1. It's ugly but great to drive, comfortable and packed with electronic goodies. A rolling palace of technology.

2. It weighs two and a half tons but needs only 6.9 seconds to reach 100 km/h. (My first car, an Opel Kadett, weighed 650 kg.)

3. If everyone has a two and a half ton car, our civilisation collapses.

To my surprise, I heard a reporter at the liberal market magazine The Economist express similar thoughts in a podcast the other week. He said something like: We have to think about whether everyone really should be driving around in cars that weigh several tons. The objection sounded like heresy against the market liberal belief in eternal economic growth.

Have since investigated the history of heresies a little more closely. What appears to be the most stubborn feature was launched in the early 1970s. A group of researchers at MIT University in the USA then issued an alarming report about the consequences of continued global growth.

Based on a global computer model, the researchers examined the five basic factors that limit growth: population growth, agricultural production, depletion of non-renewable resources, industrial production and the generation of pollution.

The report was designated World3 and pointed towards a societal collapse that begins with an economic decline, probably at the turn of the century in 2100.

Only one scenario, designated SW (stabilized world), showed that a future collapse can be avoided or at least controlled. It assumed that the overall societal goals were reprioritised. No small change in other words.

The report was published by the Club of Rome, an international association that engages in international political issues. The published World3 report in the book Limits to Growth in 1972, which sold millions of copies, generated debate and was forcefully refuted.

One of the most significant critics of the report in the 1970s was the American economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow. As an economist, he should have questioned the calculations of society's economic gains, since natural resources are not included among the assets of the planet's balance sheet. 

A company that does not record the reduced value of the assets in the financial statements is, as you know, cheating with the accounting. The profit can pave the way for bankruptcy in the long term.

Solow did not deny the problem but anticipated a correction of the development pointed out by the MIT researchers. Partly through price increases on raw materials, partly through taxes that halted the depletion of scarce resources.

However, the book Limits to Growth continued to appear in updated editions - continued to be dismissed, including by The Economist – and supported. The journal American Scientist which analysed World3 in 2012 stated that the forecast was not entirely correct but that the main messages were fixed:

There are limits.

A steeply rising growth curve is unsustainable.

A society that measures prosperity in exponential growth is in bad shape.

Nine years later, in 2021, econometrician and sustainability researcher Gaya Herrington examined whether World3 holds up when newly available data is taken into account, including on global warming.

Herrington noted that Solow's predictions of rising prices and regulatory taxes had not materialised. From the end of the 1970s, instead, a long period of deregulation of the market began, led by another Nobel laureate, Milton Friedman, and carried out politically with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the head.

The wave of globalization that followed led to sharply falling prices. The average price of a basket of 50 commodities, from uranium and rubber to tea and shrimp, fell 72% worldwide between 1980 and 2018.

Nor were scarce resources taxed more highly. Solow was wrong here too. Studies by the World Bank in 2014 and the OECD in 2017 show that neither the costs of pollution nor the depletion of non-renewable resources have been balanced by taxes. Furthermore, fossil fuels are still supported by large government subsidies.

After modelling World3 with new data, Herrington compiled four scenarios.

The first two start from business as usual, of which the first ends with societal collapse due to dwindling natural resources. The second is based on the assumption that a doubling of natural resource extraction is possible – and leads to collapse due to environmental degradation and climate change.

The third, CT (Comprehensive Technology) points to opportunities to avoid collapse. It requires exceptional technological progress in, among other things, resource use and the environment. The price for it is an economic decline due to high technology costs.

Only the fourth scenario can provide human welfare at a high level. It presupposes that CT is carried out, and that society's priorities are reassessed.

It is inevitable that growth can no longer remain an overall goal in the rich world, Herrington believes. Industrial production needs to be limited. Values, politics and human behaviour change. Environment, health and education are prioritised.

​Footnote: There are more scholarly reports besides Gaya Herrington's that dismiss constant growth as a societal goal (or that the material growth, factories, skyscrapers, cars, etc. can be replaced by services such as hairdressers, teachers, physical therapists, etc.). The magazine Foreign Policy addresses three similar reports (among others from the UN Environment Program in 2017) in an article in 2018: Why Growth Can’t Be Green

Sources:

¹ The Limits to Growth, 1972

²American Scientist, 2012

³ The Economist 2022

⁴Gaya Herrington, Earth4 All Deep Dive, 2022.

⁵Gaya Herrington, 2022: Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse

⁶The Economist, 2023

⁷Europe portal: EU misses all climate targets, 2023

Paranoid Nationalism: The Ugly and Power-Mad Cousin

Nationalism is born. It exists in the longing and striving for freedom, historically in battle against distant oppressors. In today's Ukraine. It becomes a force with promises of community, independence  and security. But it has an ugly cousin: paranoid nationalism.

The concepts "Paranoid nationalism" and "the ugly cousin" are taken from the market liberal magazine The Economist, which in September fires a broadside against the growing nationalist movement.

This "cousin" that the newspaper writes about has no particular color on the ideology, neither his own nor that of those he designates as enemies. They can be red or blue, or just dark skinned.

Some examples:

In China, Xi Jinping paints regime critics as evil agents of Western imperialism. Putin claims that Ukraine is a puppet that plays on the strings of NATO, controlled by a Nazi clique that wants to destroy Russia. India's leaders warn against Muslims. Claims to be waging a "love jihad" to seduce young female virgins of Hindu origin. Tunisia's president paints a black African plot that threatens the country's Arabs.

In Sweden, nationalists call political opponents socialists and traitors with reference to the large immigration. The leader, Jimmie Åkesson, claims that all other parties "stand for an overriding ideology with the stated goal of breaking our nation".

The Economist describes how the paranoid nationalism use fears to gain power. Fear of the unknown, the strange people, the unfamiliar ideas. Fear of poverty, starving people, climate change, violence.

Fear of threats to ordinary life with gasoline and diesel-powered cars, as it seems in Sweden. 

Nationalist leaders exploit the fears. They whip up mistrust and hatred to benefit themselves and their cronies. In the pursuit of power, they fight the global order and supranational institutions with the same poisonous mixture of exaggerations and lies.

Leading EU lawyer Michael Dougan at the University of Liverpool claims that the "Brexit" leading-up to the 2016 referendum was "one of the most dishonest campaigns this country has ever seen."

The ugly cousins' intention is to deceive their followers. Once in power, they throw new wood into the nationalist fire to distract the people. Abuse is covered up by evoke demons that steal the spotlight.

Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua. He returns to power in 2006, takes control of the media and summons his old enemy the United States as a demon. He labels political opponents as "agents of the Yankee empire" while behind the scene he positions the family in the corridors of power. When mass protests break out in 2018, he calls the protesters vampires and locks them up. Earlier this year, a Jesuit order was branded a "centre of terrorism" and banned. It's been there ever since Nicaragua wasn't even a country.

While the people are preoccupied with the demons, nationalist leaders take the opportunity to rob their own country. Like Ortega, they capture the state by distributing positions of power to cronies, family or relatives. Like Jacob Zuma in South Africa, they corrupt state-owned companies and put money in their own pockets. Cronies of Putin, the oligarchs, become billionaires.

The more nationalistic they are, the more corrupt they tend to be, writes The Economist. The tool, paranoid nationalism, is used to dismantle the checks and balances that watch over the country's governance and democracy: free press, independent judiciary, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society forces and political opposition.

The cousins don't say: By directing the administration's commissioners, I want to block my political opponents.

They say: The commissioners are traitors!

They do not admit that they want to push back NGOs to avoid scrutiny.

They instead single them out as agents of the globalists, enemies of the nation, and impose absurd controls or simply ban them.

They do not close the media, but they put pressure on critical journalists and publicists. In the perfected state, they control or own the media companies.

According to an estimate by The Economist's analysis panel, at least 50 countries have reduced the space for civil society in recent years.

One example is Tunisian President Kais Saied. Before he started blaming black people for his country's problems, he was unpopular. The management of the economy was heavily criticised. Now he has brought Tunisians with him against the small minority of blacks. At the same time, Saied has eroded the judiciary and closed down the anti-corruption commission, according to the Economist. 

With weak institutions, the abuses of the nationalist leaders are facilitated. The despots in Nicaragua, Iran or Zimbabwe are certainly less limited than the leaders in, for example, Hungary or Israel. But in all these countries (and many more) those in power have invented or exaggerated threats to the nation. The threats are used as a pretext to weaken the courts, the press or the opposition and give room for a corrupt administration.

In Sweden, as in other European countries, the EU is portrayed as a threat to the nation's independence and Islam to its very existence.

Authoritarian forces are on the rise after being pushed back after the end of the Cold War, when democracy spread. Country after country then introduced free elections and limited executive power. The space for politicians hunger for power and plunder was reduced. But in the general disillusionment after the 2007-09 financial crisis, they saw the opportunity to regain ground. Paranoid nationalism provided the space and tools to dismantle irritating checks and balances: the democratic institutions.

The space is created by suspicion. If a leader can create a climate of such deep suspicion that loyalty comes before truth, then every critic can be branded a traitor, writes the Economist. In countries that have endured colonial rule – or US involvement, like many in Latin America – there is an audience ready to receive the messages.

Critics are trying to make their voices heard in the noise. In Twilight of Democracy, award-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how authoritarian forces are dismantling democratic institutions, including in Hungary and Poland.

The Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl analyses in the book Radicalised Conservatism the movement of established parties in the political landscape. Using, among others, the Austrian Sebastian Kurz and Donald Trump as examples, Strobl shows how conservative forces copy right-wing radical language and the nationalists' relationship to media and truth. The political normal is displaced in the pursuit of power.

Paranoid nationalism is not going away. Leaders learn from each other. They are freer now. The Economist believes that the West has lost faith in its program to spread democracy and good governance.

But if ordinary people could only see through the lies behind paranoid nationalism, they would realize how wrong it is, the newspaper writes with the Chinese population in mind, but that probably applies to all countries where paranoid nationalism is on the rise.

The text is partly a translation and interpretation of an editorial in The Economist, from which parts of the country data are taken. The article is available here. 

Right-wing Nationalism on the Rise

Europe: Number of seats for right-wing nationalist parties with social conservatism and opposition to immigration as common positions, 2022-09-26. Source: Statista.

     Democracy in decline

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Aristotle's Travels through History | Chapters & Sources

(In Swedish)

1. Babylon: Good but not Enough

Briefly about the birth of astronomy in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece. 

Lecture by Johan Kärnfelt at Humanisten, Gothenburg University 2022.

Ofer Gal, 2021: The Origins of Modern Science, Chapter 3: The Birth of Astronomy.

The image is probably from a popular science magazine, Flamarionne from 1888.

Aristotle 350 BC On Heavens. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html

2 Macedonia: Orphan in Royal Company

Aristotle and his father Nikomachus leave Stagira in northeast Greece for the Macedonian capital Pella.

J J O'Connor, E F Robertson, 1999. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Aristotle/

School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland.

3. Athens: Plato Was Not There

Aristotle arrives in Athens that recovers after the defeat against Sparta. Briefly on locations in ancient Athens.

Ofer Gal, 2021. The Origins of Modern Science.

Alf Henriksson: Antiken historier 1958: (Environmental descriptions and political situation in Athens.)

Svante Nordin 2017, Filosofins historia.

4. Plato on the Death of Socrates

About Plato. Travels, wars and disappointments. Reason's for Plato's school Academia. 

J J O'Connor, E F Robertson: 1999: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Plato/

Alf Henriksson, 1958: Antiken historier. (Details of the trial against Socrates and his defense speech and death.)

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Notes about sources

I have taken the liberty of using imagination to fill in less important details: such as Aristotle traveled with his father in a ship from Stagira to Pella, that he played with the son of the Macedonian King (historians find i likely that they got to know each other though). I don't know if he came in the company of a slave to Athens, but it is not a bold guess since it was natural for aristocrats to have many slaves. Years, major events, quotes and descriptions of the lives and activities of the various people are taken from the sources above (which of course also contains a lot of assumptions due to time distance and insufficient original sources).

Aristotle's travel through history. Part 4. Plato on the death of Socrates

 

Athens 367 BC: Writing about Aristotle without mentioning Plato is difficult. Maybe impossible. And with Plato comes Socrates into the picture.

Chapters & Sources

Aristotle story in Swedish

Plato is not only well-educated and rich. He is also a powerful and experienced soldier with awards for bravery. A man of the world with connections among kings and businessmen. It is an impressive person that the 17-year-old Aristotle meets.

He is certainly not satisfied, however. The 40 year older man is rather disillusioned after many setbacks. After the defeat in the war against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, he ventured into politics, at the age of 23. He joined the 30 tyrants, those who threw out democracy and took over the state. The maternal uncle and Socrates' good friend Charmides was one of the leaders. But it did not turn out as Plato had expected. He quickly had enough of the tyrants' brutal methods and retreated.

New hope was lit when the tyrants' rule was overthrown a few years later and democracy was reintroduced. But although commerce and trade were running well again, it became clear that Athens' heyday was over. Democracy was probably not the best solution, which he had certainly heard before. Plato's aristocratic family had never had much faith in democracy.

The signs were obvious. In the south, the Spartans, black soup slurping with militarised brains, had proved stronger in battle. In the north, war drums were heard from the increasingly strong kingdom of Macedonia. No, Athens' political life of lies and excesses did not impress. The only wise man was probably the man who claimed to know nothing, Socrates.

He could never get over Socrates' fate, which Aristotle eventually wrote about. Plato was less than 28 when the death sentence was handed down. The city council claimed that Socrates had corrupted the youth and was therefore to blame for the loss of Athen's greatness. 

According to Plato, the truth had indeed come from Socrates himself during the defence speech. Certainly it was so, that Socrates with sharp questions and biting irony had provoked the council members, exposed their ignorance. He made them unresponsive and stupid.

When the sentence came, he refused to plead for his life. He also declined a friend's offer to help him escape from custody. Instead, he asked them to send his wife and children home. They wouldn't have to witness the end.

He had emptied the goblet of hemlock with his own hands. He had laid down on his back, waiting for the paralysis that had already started in his feet and was now spreading upwards. The friends burst into tears and Plato comforted them. He was old, seventy one. He said that death was nothing dangerous but more to be considered a dreamless sleep. Wasn't it good to sleep without being bothered by dreams?

Plato could not let it go. Miserable, he set off. First to Egypt and then to Italy where he made the acquaintance of disciples of Pythagoras. A Greek mathematician who had lived in Croton in Southern Italy in the 5th century BC.

The Pythagoreans fascinated him. Their religious faith, rationality - numerological mysticism and mathematical precision made an impression. They carried the idea that reality could be described with numbers, which suddenly seemed self-evident for Plato. The goal of scientific thinking – reality, must be expressible in mathematical terms—the most precise and definite kind of thinking of which we are capable. 

Plato was also convinced by the Pythagoreans' belief that the earth was spherical - that the entire cosmos was spherical with celestial bodies and stars in Pythagorean orbits. Exact, infallible. Mathematical.

Astronomy was certainly nothing new to the well-educated Plato. As a young man, he had studied under Cratylos, who in turn had been a student of Heracleitus, known for a cosmology based on fire being the basic material of the universe. Now he had new ideas to deal with.

After the trip, at the age of 32, he once again went to war, the Corinthian. It was there that he received awards for bravery. It was also during the war that he began writing down his ideas in dialogues, starring Socrates; the ever-questioning and the revealer of ignorance.

He probably also worked with the idea of starting the Academy in order to produce a more capable generation of political leaders, a philosophical elite with the knowledge that contemporary leaders obviously lacked.

But more important to this story is that, inspired by the Pythagoreans, he began to form his image of the cosmos, which he would eventually pass on to the knowledge-hungry Aristotle.

To be continued

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