[lbo-talk] Is There Anything To This Peak Oil Business?

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Sun Nov 16 13:08:34 PST 2003


Limits to growth arguments involve the problem I pointed to earlier with any use of axiomatic methods to reach conclusions about long run consequences.

Keynes makes this point about limits to growth arguments constructed by one of the originators of "Bedlamite economics" (Keynes's play on "Benthamite economics"), William Stanley Jevons.

Jevons expected the future exhaustion of supplies of coal and paper. Keynes claims (Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 117) that in forming these expectations Jevons "omitted to make adequate allowance for the progress of technical methods" so that, for this and other reasons, "there is not much in Jevons's scare which can survive cool criticism."

Keynes also claims the true source was psychological.

"His conclusions were influenced, I suspect, by a psychological trait, unusually strong in him, which many other people share, a certain hoarding instinct, a readiness to be alarmed and excited by the idea of the exhaustion of resources."

In the case of paper, the expectation led to an accumulation of both writing and packing paper so large that fifty years after his death Jevons's children had not used it up. Moreover, he himself did not make use of his accumulation; he wrote most of his own notes on the backs of old envelopes and odd scraps of paper "of which the proper place was the waste-paper basket."

This raises questions, by the way, about the premise characteristic of much Marxist writing that capital is everywhere and always omniscient and instrumentally rational in its pursuit of accumulation.

This includes the premise that all future consequences of present decisions can be predicted using axiomatic calculative methods. In contemporary Benthamite economics, this has been elaborated at an economics "Nobel" award level by the "beautiful mind" of John Nash.

Ted



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list