BOKRECENSION

"The Wealth of Nature" av John Michael Greer

""The Wealth of Nature" är utgiven 2011, omfattar 240 sidor och är på engelska. Den kostar 137 kr på AdLibris.

Ämnet för denna bok är energi och ekonomi. Greer tacklar ämnet på ett både inspirerande och klargörande sätt, läsningen ger många aha-upplevelser. Ekonomi behöver kanske inte vara ett så svårt ämne.

Greer är inte nådig mot professionella ekonomer. Sedan instiftandet 1968 av även ett ekonomipris till Nobels minne har ju många ekonomer blivit belönade, men långt ifrån alltid har deras teorier visat sig hållbara:

"It´s ironic, in fact, how few benefits industrial societies seem to have gained from their economic experts in the last few decades... it has become uncomfortably clear that whatever the talents of todays economic profession happen to be, making meaningful predictions about economic policy is not one of them."

Lutande sig mot Ernst Schumacher (författare till "Small is beautiful"), skriver Greer om primära och sekundära varor:

"First, Schumacher drew a hard distinction between primary goods and secondary goods. The latter term includes most of what is dealt with by conventional economics: the goods and services produced by human labor and exchanged among human beings. The former includes all those things necessary for human life and economic activity that are produced not by human beings, but by Nature ... primary goods need to come first in any economic analysis, because they supply the preconditions for the production of secondary goods."

"Second. Schumacher stressed the central role of energy among primary goods... energy is the gateway resource that gives access to all other resoruces.."

Third, Schumacher stressed the importance of a variable left out of most economic analyses - the cost per worker of establishing and maintaining a workplace."

Bara tillgången till fossila bränslen i stora mängder har gjort det lönsamt att - som nu skett - ersätta mänsklig arbetskraft med teknologi.

Upptäcktern av nya oljefyndigheter i Alaska och Nordsjön på 70-talet borde, menar Greer, ha använts för den nödvändiga energiomställningen, men man missade s.a.s. det tåget. Greer talar om "a window of opportunity":

"A reasonable approach to energy policy would have treated those discoveries as vital sources of energy to fill in the gaps while industrial nations made the transition to a new economy powered by renewable sources and structured to maximize energy efficiency...As the efficiencies and innovative programs of the seventies gave way to the extravagances of the eighties and nineties, the possibility of a smooth transition to a sutainable future went by the boards."

Så långt bokens inledning. Det första kapitlet har rubriken "The failure of Economics", dvs misslyckandet för den nationalekonomiska vetenskapen.

Här konstaterar Greer att de flesta yrkesekonomer, när fastighetsbubblan växte i USA, förnekade att den kunde utvecklas på det sätt som sedan snart skedde. Ett liknande mönster har, menar han, upprepats gång på gång - man verkar inom denna profesison just inget lära sig av tidigare erfarenheter.

"Somehow... many of these extremely clever people have not managed to apply their intelligence to the task of learning from a sequence of glaring and highly publicized mistakes."

"... an inability to see economics as a subset of a much larger world governed by non-economic forces remains endemic to the discipline and has caused some of its more spectacular failures."

"...our economic thinking has evolved to treat the costliest resource to hand, human labour, as the main limitation to economic growth, and to treat anything that decreases the amount of labour as an economic gain."

"In an age that will increasingly be constrained by energy limits... a more useful measure of productivity might be energy productivity - that is, output per barrel of oil equivalent (BOE):"

"Produktivitetsvinster" som bara gör fler människor arbetslösa är, menar Greer, samhällsekonomiskt ingen vinst.

"After all, a world tat has nearly seven billion people on it and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels can do whithout the assumption that putting people out of work and replacing them with machines powered by fossil fuels is the way to propserity."

Det andra kapitlet har rubriken "The three economies".

Därvid syftar Greer på

1. Det naturen tillhandahåller.

2. Mänsklig produktiv verksamhet (omöjlig utan det första nivån)

3. Pengar och finansmarknader - "the tertiary economy".

"...unlike goods and services that must be produced by labor from resources, money can be conjured from thin air by dozens of different kinds of financial alchemy,.."

"the tertiary economy is simply a way of measuring wealth and managing its distribution..."

"The recent housing bubbel is a ... remarkable case, not least because houses - which are usually part of the secondary economy, being tangible goods created by human labor - were briefly and disastrously converted into tertiary goods, whose value consisted primarily in the implied promise that they could be cashed in for a higher price at some future time."

"When the price of a secondary good goes up, demand decreases, but this is not what happended in the housing bubble; instead, the demand increased, since rising prices made further appreciation appear more likely..."

"Positiva åerkopplingar" fungerade som en omvänd termostat, motsatsen till den "osynliga hand" som annars verkar i en marknadsekonomi.

Samma sak när det till sist vände - då skedde en störtdykning. Förlorarna blev de som inte sålt i tid.

Och mängder att hus hade producerats till ingen nytta, de blev stående övergivna. Ett gigantiskt slöseri med resurser!

"The problem we face now is that the arrangements evolved over the last century or so only addresses the relationship between the secondary and tertiary economies. The primary economy of Nature, the base of the entire structure, is ignored by most contemporary economists,.."

"... official attempts to stabilize the economy are failing because they focus on the abstractions rather than the realities underlying them."

I klimatfrågan refererar Greer till en annan författare som menar att man hellre än "global warming" bör tala om "global weirding":

"...not a simple increase in temperature, but an increase in all kinds of unexpected and disruptive weather events... significant change in the capacity of the atmosphere to do its work... it´s an increase in extreme weather conditions on both ends of the temperature scale."

Detta stämmer ju väsenligt bättre med våra tre senaste vintrar i Sverige!

Under några generationer har vi levt med tillgång till billig olja. En radikal omställning krävs nu - men under decennierna och seklerna av mekanisering och datorisering har värdefull vardagskunskap gått förlorad. Vi har blivit mer beroende och sårbara.

Ett annat problem ligger i att när en omställing blivit ofrånkomlig har vi redan gjort oss av med resurser, nödvändiga för att klara denna:

"This is the trap hidden in the limits to growth; once those limits begin to bite, the spare economic capacity that would be needed to build a way out of trouble no longer exists."

Greer pläderar för en annan skattepolitik, som inte beskattar anställningar och arbete:

"...we arguable tax the wrong things.... no sales taxes and no taxes on income from wages, salaries, dividens, royalties and rents - that is, no taxes on the secondary economy at all. Instead, there are two classes of taxation. The first, on the primary economy, taxes natural goods and services; the second, on the tertiary economy, taxes interest income, capital gains, and all other money made by money."

Detta låter förvisso sympatiskt, men hur genomförbart skulle det vara?

"When you pump oil from the ground you´re depleting part of the patrimony of the nation, and you should have to pay the government for that privilege. When you dump smoke out of a tailpipe, equally, you´re using the nations atmosphere as a kind of gaseous landfill, and you should have to pay for that.

Every natural resource of very kind, under this system, would thus be subject to an extraction or a pollution tax."

"Any tax code that ...makes it more profitable to employ human labor to meet human needs, and less profitable to disrupt the natural cycles that undergird our survival or to feed speculative excesses that pump imbalances into an already troubled economy - could be a very helpful asset in a time of crisis,.."

Jan Milld

oktober 2011