I liked the read despite its predictable, unoriginal, oft-repeated decry of technology with respect to its (perceived) environmental burden. There are several replies by Berry's contemporaries which vocalize their disagreement with his position and his justification.
With the distance in time to this piece, I think the point to add to the discussion is that a key implicit assumption of Berry (and in fact even to his opponents) is false. The assumption that the default mode of civilization is prosperity for all. Same mistake we make till today on all levels of politics and education.
Poverty is the natural state of "cosmos", and perhaps an equivalent of physical entropy concept. In a closed system a dis-order increases until we are all equally poor (there is NO natural/social law/system in the cosmos where would guarantee all of us equally rich/valuable by default). At the same time full and complete poverty for all can never be reached because (some) life-agents itself will try to utilize energy within (social/environmental) system to create pockets of prosperity, naturally syphoning out energy from the rest of the system. I do not want to imply a political of economic system within a conceptual paragraph -- that would be overextending the idea. The point is in my view that Berry does not ask the right question, or assumes the wrong default.
> The assumption that the default mode of civilization is prosperity for all.
First off, I'm not sure where you're getting that from reading this article, but maybe I'm missing something.
Secondly, Berry is a Christian so of course he believes that there can be enough for all - this is (at least used to be) a central tenet of Christianity. Christ said: "25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these."
Berry is coming from the worldview that God created a world of great abundance and that if we share, there is enough for all.
> Berry is coming from the worldview that God created a world of great abundance and that if we share, there is enough for all.
Sure, but he/they are simply wrong about that. The natural state of living systems is to propagate until they reach a natural limit imposed by some resource constraint or other. Our current technological civilization is an anomaly produced by the sudden release, over a period of a few hundred years, of solar energy stored over a few hundred million years, with a concomitant rise in CO2 levels and global temperatures. That party cannot be expected to last much longer, computers or no computers.
Alternatively, the anomaly is no anomaly at all. Its origins were fortuitous, but rather than a reversion to the baseline of misery it was an unlocking of a new normal though a series of irreversible (or very unlikely reversible) inventions, much like agriculture was. We used one source of energy to power our leap forward, we'll use a different one to sustain a baseline of plenty, or maybe unlock a new level soon. I see no reason whatsoever why this is less likely than the doom and gloom currently so in vogue.
Berry has written extensively about environmental degradation. Notice the caveat above: "if we share". Human greed is the fly in the ointment. Again, he's written extensively on the impact of human greed on the environment. It's not inconsistent to think that there is enough for all and also to think that when we try to grab too much of that stuff for ourselves (more than what we need) that that mutual enough-ness (I hesitate to use the word "prosperity" here because it's accreted a lot of baggage in our hyper-capitalistic modern world) is threatened.
> Notice the caveat above: "if we share". Human greed is the fly in the ointment.
No, it isn't. Basic physics and economics is the fly in the ointment. For a given level of economic activity, a given amount of material wealth will be produced. That wealth can be distributed evenly or unevenly, equitably or inequitably [1], but there is one basic fact that cannot change, which is the that average wealth per capita will equal the total wealth divided by the number of people. So if the population increases without a concomitant increase in total wealth, everyone will necessarily be, on average, worse off, no matter how much we share.
Christian theology is based on the idea that "God will provide" and intercede miraculously if we have enough faith. Unfortunately, that belief, as with most religious beliefs, collides violently with reality, and when it does, reality wins.
[1] It is also worth noting that an even distribution is not necessarily the same as an equitable one.
As individuals they may have done well, but that has nothing to do with the fact that the nation failed when their attempts to alter the laws of economics collided with reality.
Again - every nation altered those laws and most did just fine. There aren’t any “universal laws of economics”; it’s all entirely man-made and there are many different variations.
Yes, there are. Let's go back to your original claim:
> Economics, on the other hand, is man-made and can be adjusted as required.
Think about it: if this were true, it would be possible to "adjust" the laws of economics to (say) eliminate poverty. So if eliminating poverty is a simple matter of "adjusting" economics, why hasn't any nation on earth ever eliminated poverty by "adjusting" its economics? It's because economics is not "man-made", it's a consequence of human psychology, which is a natural phenomenon and therefore operates according to natural laws, not man-made ones.
It is not possible to eliminate poverty simply by "adjusting" economics. There are actual underlying constraints that you have to operate under: finite resources, the fact that people won't work without incentives, the fact that different people want different things. One man's "poverty" is another man's "freedom."
BTW, even Jesus recognized that you cannot eliminate poverty simply by sharing: Mat26:6-11.
They don't. You are confusing "the laws of economics" with "legislation relating to economics". Those are two completely different things. The latter changes, the former doesn't.
Our knowledge of the laws of economics changes. The laws themselves don't because they are simply logical consequences of the laws of physics. The latter doesn't change, so neither does the former.
But all of our inventions are constrained by physics. We invent airplanes too, we do not invent the laws of aerodynamics. We invent electronics, we do not invent the laws of electrodynamics.
Economics is likewise constrained by natural law. This why, for example, you cannot eliminate poverty by printing fiat currency and giving it to poor people.
No, I am saying that you cannot eliminate poverty by printing fiat currency and giving it to poor people.
(I also happen to believe that you cannot eliminate poverty with UBI, but that is a completely different claim. I also believe that we should adopt UBI despite the fact that it won't eliminate poverty. But that is yet another discussion.)
> what’s the difference between printing money and deducting the same amount of money from taxes
Inflation.
But it's actually much more complicated than just that. An economy is a complex dynamical system. It is chaotic in the formal mathematical sense, which is to say its response to changing circumstances is not 100% predictable. But in general if you print money the result is inflation. In the long run, the value of the money supply has to aymptotically approach the value of the goods and services in the economy. (This is an example of a "natural law" of economics.)
So the answer to your question depends on the details. Do you print money once or do you do it on an on-going basis? If you do it once then you get a transient response. You will eliminate some short-term hardship, but in the long run the economy will most likely settle back into its previous equilibrium with slightly higher prices. If you do it on a continuous basis you will cause hyperinflation and the currency will collapse. Depending on the availability of alternatives, the currency collapse may or may not take the rest of the economy down with it.
Redistributing wealth through taxation doesn't have that problem, but it has other deleterious effects. Figuring out what those are is left as an exercise.
With the distance in time to this piece, I think the point to add to the discussion is that a key implicit assumption of Berry (and in fact even to his opponents) is false. The assumption that the default mode of civilization is prosperity for all. Same mistake we make till today on all levels of politics and education.
Poverty is the natural state of "cosmos", and perhaps an equivalent of physical entropy concept. In a closed system a dis-order increases until we are all equally poor (there is NO natural/social law/system in the cosmos where would guarantee all of us equally rich/valuable by default). At the same time full and complete poverty for all can never be reached because (some) life-agents itself will try to utilize energy within (social/environmental) system to create pockets of prosperity, naturally syphoning out energy from the rest of the system. I do not want to imply a political of economic system within a conceptual paragraph -- that would be overextending the idea. The point is in my view that Berry does not ask the right question, or assumes the wrong default.