> What if the oil doesn't run out?
Why do you think it won't? The world consumes around 25bn bbls pa. There are about 1,000 bn bbls left. Because oil production declines exponentially (a bell curve) after it hits its Hubbert Peak, which will be any time now, we will face a period of growing shortages and price hikes. As we know, not everyone agrees. Some economists like Morris Adelman, who are not geologists, say that oil is 'infinite'. We shall see.
On the same subject: A big debate has just broken out about whose new book will be the biggest: David Landes' 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations' or A Gunder Frank's 'ReOrient'. My dear and good friend Brad de Long has already put some of his chips down and been duly congratulated by Gunder Frank. The debate is about Eurocentric v. Sinified accounts of world history. Frank accuses Landes of euronating on China from a great height. Landes, who is a talented writer and an extremely clever economic historian, is saying, OK, so even if you're correct and China led the world until 1800, this really still doesn't explain the subsequent rise of Europe, if anything it makes it even more fabulous, promethean and mythopoeic.
Frank has now begun talking a little about coal, and ecology. That interests me. But many of his arguments in his new book, which he has excerpted liberally, in some respects are quite weak. He likes to quote Adam Smith in 1776 to the effect that Europe is more backward than China, but if you go and check the original you find that Smith is actually very critical of China as well as very impressed by it, says it is worse to be a poor Chinese than a poor Brit (this is already saying much, in the circs) and that China is rich but stagnant. Frank has a problem explaining why British capitalists paid for labour-saving devices when Chinese one's didn't, if Frank is right and Chinese workers were better off the Brits. His explanation is that the Chinese had a higher living standard but their labour costs less; also that Chinese coal was in all the wrong places which is why they didn't get steam engines.
There is also much truth in what Frank says, and it is clear that the Chinese had the epidemiological advantages, and they taught the world how to inoculate against smallpox and they practised birth control. Since everybody is now agreed that (a) Newton was actually a loony alchemist and (b) clocks weren't very important to the Ind Revo (c) even if there was a Science Revolution, it made no difference to industrial technology, then it clearly doesn't matter whether or not the Chinese had science, or indeed whether, as Frank argues, Europe was sinified and Indianised in the 18th c.
Incidentally, I recently read an account by a 19th c scholar about how the Mongols at the time of Genghis Khan (13th c) loved mechanical devices and imported them from Europe (automata) cos there were none in China. I believe this. At the same time, I think Needham was mostly right, and mostly said everything 30 years ago which Frank is now announcing as something new, original and his achievement, in his book ReOrient.
So where does it leave us? It leaves us here: David Landes is clever but wrong. Frank is, well he's clever too, and he's mostly right about the history, and so is Jim Blaut. I don't think Frank is right to say the pendulum has now swung back and the future will be Asia's as he says it mostly always has been and deserves to be (for obscure reasons). Frank recently tried to use the Asia meltdown as evidence of this, on the grounds that since a world crisis had for the first time BEGUN in Asia, Asia is now back in the saddle. Unfortunaely however the World Crisis wilfully and persistingly refuses to happen AT ALL so Frank has fallen silent again on that subject.
David Landes is wrong because, as Blaut says, he is recycling the same old Weberian nonsense, which Brad de Long was himself recycling until this morning: "Landes wages intellectual thermonuclear war on all who deny his central premise: that the history of the wealth and poverty of nations over the past millennium is the history of the creation in Europe and diffusion of our technologies... He wins his intellectual battles", Brad thundered in February, but today he heard Ken Pomeranz speak and Saw the Light (better get busy on that Web page of yours Brad; incidentally, why IS it so slow to download?).
Frank, who ostentatiously has abandoned Marx, not once now but several times, each time more loudly as no-one much noticed the first times, has no theoretical model to speak of other than the same blind faith in all things Chinese which the chaps in our local chop suey take-away share. China for the World Cup!
Landes has a theory, and it is a good one, and it is also Brad's or was until this morning. You can find a popularisation of it in Nathan Rosenberg's 'How the West Grew Rich' (answer: because we are more clever and hardworking than the others, as our whole history shows. Lucky for them we're around! All those sly dagoes, paralysed Chinese and lazy tinted folks.You get the idea.). The upmarket version is contained in works like Higonnet, Patrice, Landes, Rosovsky, Henry: Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth and Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution. Landes' history of clocks, which Brad likes, I also very much like. The problem with it all is this hallucinatory faustianism that lies behind it. If ever there was any real evidence for the Weberian idea of European exceptionalism, it is right here in the very works of the Eurocentric historians, cartesian rationalists to a person. This faustianism is the source of the mystificatory nominalism of the neoclassicals, which I was slagging Brad off about yesterday. Brad is totally convinced that there is a Thing called Capital. Brad and all of you, take a dime out of your pocket right now and study it carefully. Here is the very source of Newtonian abstract time and space, for here is a Thing which has No Use Value, which is designed not to have, and which is meant to be eternal and unchanging, ie, ti have no material qualitied EXCEPT to be eternal and changeless, as gold is and which is why gold is the money-material. This coin is quite a philosopher, in fact. Now put the dimes in envelopes and send them all to me.
The correlative of Money, the Thing which has no Use-value except the Absence of Use-value, is of course, Technology, the Thing which has no origins, no social basis (as Brad angrily told me only last week), which just pops fully-formed right into the heads of (mostly white, male) westerners.
In the book I am just finishing I try to show how accumulation regimes produce technologies (or fail to). The question of Britain and the Ind Revo is the key question, which even Frank grudgingly seems to concede. Me, being a patriot, I just love to talk about how we Brits Made It (Landes' words) thus enabling all you lot to live as well as you do now.
The conclusion I have come to, which is obvious when you think about it except that no-one really does, is that the history of industrial capitalism, which Frank, Landes and de Long all agree (if they disagree on everything else) is very hard to explain, is actually easily explained by considering (a) the use of fossil fuels and (b) rising energy efficiencies. You actually only need (I think I believe this) those TWO measures: penetration into production of fossil-fuels, and energy-efficieny curve - to explain everything, particularly the question of increasing productivity, the Residual Whose Name Cannot be Spoken. Of course, this changes nothing in Marx's account of capitalism as self-expanding value based on exploitation of labour, and nothing in the theory of imperialism either. In fact it only adds to Marxian accumulation theory.
All this is just answering Doug's question (above):
> What if the oil doesn't run out?
>
It is absolutely certain that it will, as I say. In fact, the proper way to
look at the history of industrial capitalism since 1750 is as a race against
time, as increasing energy efficiency by better technology, overwhelms or tries
to, increasing entropy (since 1973, not very successgfully, if you factor in
population growth, which I do). I don't think capitalism will win the race.
Why were the Brits first? Too long to explain here, sorry.
Doug also asked:
> What if eco-crisis
> is just the latest refuge of frustrated crisis theorists?
>
Well, that's what Lou Pr and I and the rest of us have been trying to work out. Hence the exceedingly long postings on climate change, biodiversity loss etc.
Mark