The settled dwellers, then, in their natural desire to remain settled, and facing the “promises” of development, certainly are going to have questions for the developers, and the first would be this: What is the net good that industrial economists, their employers, and their clients appear customarily to credit to growth, development, and “social progress”? In the United States, since at least the Civil War, and ever more rapidly after World War II, we have achieved industrial versions of all of those goals. But almost nobody is asking what is the worth of that achievement after we deduct its ecological and human costs. We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.
As a second question, we should ask why commodities, the material goods that support our life, and the work of producing them, should be “low cost” or significantly cheaper than the goods and services of a “knowledge-intensive economy.” There is no reason to believe that the present market values of technological (developmental) knowledge and of commodities are absolute or in any way permanent. Nor is there reason to believe that such issues of value are, or can be, reliably settled by the free market of our present economy, or by any market. The good health of the land economies is a value that a market as such cannot consider and cannot protect. Moreover, agribusiness in all of its aspects is a knowledge-intensive system, which uses knowledge ruthlessly to control and exploit land and people.
Apparently it is assumed that a country’s economy of commodity-production, which could be as diverse as the country’s climate and soils permit, can safely be replaced or further depreciated by an economy of knowledge only. And so, as a third question, we must ask how secure and how beneficent is a one-product economy. Is the market for knowledge infinite in its demand, or can it be over-supplied and depressed, as the one-product economy of coal in the Appalachian coal fields has often been? And it hardly needs to be said that in the Appalachian coal fields the benefits of the coal economy to a rich and distant few has never adequately been measured against its impoverishment of the local people and their land.
Perhaps no outsider—no visiting expert, no dispassionate observer, certainly no outside investor—will notice the inherent weakness and cruelty of a one-product economy in a region or a country. But the adverse effects will certainly be visible and acutely feelable to the resident insiders. Those who live and must make their lives within the boundary of such an economy experience daily the readiness of their political leaders to endorse and excuse the destructiveness of “the economy,” as well as the public unwillingness to remedy or compensate the damages to the land and the people. The Appalachian coal economy has not only inflicted immeasurable and immeasurably lasting ecological and social damage to its region, but it has also distracted attention and care from the region’s other assets: its forests, soils, streams, and the (too often exported) talents of its people.
And so a fourth question: How, even in a knowledge-intensive economy, even unendingly “growing” and wealthy, are the people’s needs for food, clothing, and shelter to be met? Does the development of a highly lucrative knowledge economy entirely eliminate the need for the fundamental economies of subsistence? Do people eat and wear knowledge? Do they sleep warm in it? I know very well what the far-seeing economists will answer: People earning large salaries from “high-growth, knowledge-intensive economies” will buy their material subsistence from “low-cost producers of commodities” at home or, if not at home, then elsewhere. It is assumed that where there is a demand, and enough money, there will be unfailingly a supply, and this is another article of the industrial economic faith: The land and its “resources” will be always with us, and so will the poor who will dig, hack, and whittle an everlasting supply of low-cost commodities until they can be replaced by knowledge-intensive machines that will dig, hack, and whittle, no doubt on solar energy, faster and at a lower cost.
And so we come to question five: Do the economists of development ever attempt a fair assessment, or any assessment, of the value to a knowledge-intensive economy of a dependable local supply of life-supporting commodities? The answer, so far as I have learned, is that the developmental economists do no such thing. Their dream of human progress calls simply for the replacement of the commodity economy by the knowledge economy, and that is that. As evidence, let us consider a review of our economic past and future, “Moving On from Farm and Factory,” by Eduardo Porter, in the New York Times of April 27, 2016.
Mr. Porter’s premise is that the economies of farming and manufacturing, as a fixed and final consequence of historical trends, are now obsolete, or nearly so, and his statistics are sufficiently precipitous:
Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent.
To this state of things Mr. Porter grants something like half an approval. Whereas nearly all of the “work force” once employed in farming have been “liberated . . . from their chains,” he thinks that “The current transition, from manufacturing to services, is more problematic.” Though for workers in the United States there are “options: health care, education and clean energy, just to name a few,” these options “present big economic and political challenges.” The principal challenges will be to get the politicians to abandon their promises of an increase of employment in manufacturing, and then to provide the government help necessary to make “the current transition from manufacturing to services” without too much rebellion by workers “against the changing tide.” Mr. Porter’s conclusion, despite these challenges, is optimistic:
Yet just as the federal government once provided a critical push to move the economy from its agricultural past into its industrial future, so, too, could it help build a postindustrial tomorrow.
Mr. Porter’s article, which clearly assumes the agreement or consent of a large number of his fellow economists and fellow citizens, rests upon the kind of assumptions that I have been calling articles of faith. Though it is certain that a lot of people, economists and others, are putting their faith in these assumptions, they are nonetheless entirely groundless. The assumptions, so far as I can trace them out, are as follows:
1 The economy of a country or a nation needs only to provide employment, it does not matter at what. And so of course no particular value can be assigned to the production of commodities.
2 So long as there is enough employment at work of some kind, a country or a nation can safely dispense with employment in sustainable farming and manufacturing, which is to say a sustainable dependence upon natural resources and the natural world.
3 Farming has little economic worth. It is of the past, and better so. Farm work involves no significant responsibilities, and requires no appreciable intelligence, knowledge, skill, or character. It is, as is often said, “mind-numbing,” a servile condition from the “chains” of which all workers, even owners who work on their own farms, need to be “liberated.”
4 The “output” of industrial agriculture will continue to “soar” without limit as ever more farmers are “liberated from their chains” by technology, and as technologies are continuously succeeded by more advanced technologies.
5 There is no economic or intrinsic difference between agriculture and industry: A farm is no more than a factory, a plant or an animal is no more than a machine or a substance.
6 The technological advances that have disemployed so many people from farming and manufacturing will never take away the jobs of service or postindustrial workers.
7 History, including economic history, is a forward motion, a progress, made up of irreversible changes. These changes can be established absolutely and forever in so little time as a century or two. Thus the great technological progress since perhaps the steam engine—a progress enabled by the fossil fuels, war, internal combustion, external combustion, and a sequence of poisons—will carry us right on into the (climactic? everlasting?) “postindustrial