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REVKIN">ANDREW C. REVKIN</a></address> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="w480">Ruth Fremson/The New York Times </div> <p><a id="aptureLink_d2QNMkKZey" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://jsterman.scripts.mit.edu/">John Sterman</a>, whose work comparing <a id="aptureLink_7gXCtM26sm" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-bathtub-effect/">the building greenhouse effect to a clogged, filling bathtub</a> has been explored here, has weighed in on the questions I posed about whether <a id="aptureLink_thOzru10Lt" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/business/economy/29consumer.html?em">the recent consumption slowdown</a> is, in the long run, a good thing. His comments below, exploring the “hedonic treadmill,” follow those of <a id="aptureLink_Dyca5zcAtk" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/an-upside-to-the-consumption-chill/">Kenneth Arrow</a>, <a id="aptureLink_fAXmJUAOwc" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/daly-on/">Herman Daly</a> and <a id="aptureLink_D8GUeltM4u" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/an-upside-to-the-consumption-chill/?permid=10#comment10">Juliet Schor</a>. [UPDATE, 10/17: Kevin O'Rourke, a Facebook friend, drew my attention to this long analysis of the <a id="aptureLink_pWyXZlktjj" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5519">deep roots of consumption habits</a> on the Oil Drum.] Also, I’ve got to direct your attention to a comment posted by <a id="aptureLink_l8pzr3sXxz" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/from-gary-peters-a-little-perspective-on-human-numbers-and-environmental-problems/">Gary Peters</a>, who provides an apt quotation from John Stuart Mill, circa 1848. Here’s a teaser: </p> <p> “…If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it” <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/daly-on/?permid=2#comment2">Read more…</a></p> <p>Here’s Dr. Sterman’s analysis of my questions about consumption amid a short-term slowdown in humanity’s blazing growth spurt: </p> <p> You ask whether the downshift in consumer spending during this recession is bad for the economy in the long run. 聽It’s critical to separate the short-run, disequilibrium impact of consumer spending on business cycle dynamics from the long-run impact of consumption on the ability of the global ecosystem to support our economy. In the short run (months to perhaps several years), drops in consumption remove aggregate demand from the economy and affect the length and depth of recessions. 聽But these are short-term and disequilibrium impacts arising, because the drop in demand occurs very quickly compared to the rate at which firms can adjust production and capacity. 聽Thus the faster consumption drops, the greater will be the buildup of excess inventories and the drop in capital spending as demand for plant and equipment dries up. 聽All this leads to cuts in employment, production, and investment, reinforcing the original decline in consumer income, confidence, and consumption, in the familiar dynamics of business cycles. 聽But these are temporary dislocations. 聽Even this recession, though longer and deeper than most due to the role of the housing bubble, credit crisis, and huge over-leveraging of the U.S. economy, will be temporary: 聽as the imbalances are worked off, the economy will recover, and growth will eventually resume. </p> <p>The real question is how consumption relates to the long-term growth path and ability of planetary ecosystems to support our economy. 聽The relevant dynamics don’t depend so much on the balance sheet of U.S. households, businesses, or the Fed, but on the balance sheet of natural capital, the resources that generate the ecosystem services upon which we depend. Here the evidence is not reassuring. 聽We have been consuming natural capital far faster than it regenerates, whether it’s fossil fuels, fish, forests, wetlands, or the capacity of the oceans and other sinks to take up greenhouse gases. 聽Wackernagel et al. (originally in PNAS; see updates at聽<a id="aptureLink_xMfFlajpAG" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.footprintnetwork.org/">footprintnetwork.org</a>) document these dynamics, arguing that we have already overshot the global carrying capacity. 聽Of course, carrying capacity is dynamic, partly endogenous, affected by technology as well as consumption, and a notoriously slippery notion to nail down. Nevertheless, a number of new studies are consistent with these results. 聽In particular, the new “Planetary Boundaries” paper, forthcoming in Nature, makes the case that humanity has overshot the global carrying capacity in a variety of key areas, including GHGs [greenhouse gases], nitrogen, phosphorus, fresh water, land use, and biodiversity. </p> <p>Material consumption is critical to easing down below these limits and building a more sustainable society. 聽And there’s tremendous scope for greater efficiency and de-materialization in our consumption. 聽Through technological and organizational change, supported by proper pricing (internalizing the currently externalized costs and environmental risks of material consumption and waste production), we can almost certainly provide for the needs of the projected population, at a good standard of living. 聽But of course that’s not enough. 聽As long as the dominant ethos is the drive for more consumption per capita — ever greater accumulation and consumption of material goods, energy, etc., then no amount of efficiency will suffice. 聽For example, improvements in the efficiency of water or energy use just let water- and energy-constrained regions grow further until some other limit is reached, or water and energy once again becomes the constraint. 聽And so on. 聽As long as everyone wants more — a bigger home, a bigger TV, a fancier vacation, more stuff, more consumption, more than they consumed last year, more than their neighbors — there can be no technological solution to the problem. 聽As Herman has long pointed out, there is an essential moral character to the dilemma in which we find ourselves.</p> <p>The ironic thing is that the pursuit of more, so stunningly successful so far, has not increased our happiness. 聽Again, this is a contentious arena, and the science of subjective well-being is still emerging. 聽But many studies, including the great work <a id="aptureLink_5w28HBz2B5" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4LdtAJaZPA">Danny Kahneman</a> and colleagues have done, show that, for the developed economies at least, greater consumption per capita is only weakly associated with greater well-being (happiness, utility, life satisfaction). 聽Consumption per capita in the developed economies has increased dramatically over the past half century, yet reported life-satisfaction is no higher. 聽People tend to base their “needs” on habitual consumption, and on the consumption of those they observe around them through their social networks, in their neighborhoods, and in the media, feeling greater satisfaction when they have bigger houses and more expensive cars than those around them, and feeling deprived when they have relatively less. 聽Economic theory used to suggest that as people got richer, the marginal utility of income would fall, so people would naturally shift their energies away from material consumption and towards higher pursuits. 聽This doesn’t seem to be happening, as Keynes long ago feared. 聽Instead, through habituation and social comparison, we find ourselves in a no-win situation in which no level of income or consumption remains satisfying for long — the hedonic treadmill. The more people seek to boost consumption, the more income they require and the harder and longer they must work, undermining those activities that are actually fulfilling and satisfying: 聽for example, Juliet’s work, and that of Kahneman, Krueger and Schkade (I hope I’m not overinterpreting) shows people spend far more time working, commuting, and doing other aversive, unpleasant tasks, while the time spent in satisfying activities such as building friendships and intimate relationships, athletics, spirituality, self-improvement, etc. is small. 聽People move to distant suburbs far from their jobs so they can afford a larger house, thinking this will make them happier, but don’t adequately account for extra hours they must work to pay off the mortgage and the way their long commute erodes their happiness by stealing time they could be spending with their spouse and children, friends and community. 聽Thus even if there were no environmental constraints to endless growth, even if the capacity of the planet to support material consumption where infinite, growth in material consumption, the never-ending quest for more stuff, is not taking us where we want to go.</p> <p>During this economic crisis we have heard a lot about people getting back to basics. 聽From gardening, to carpooling and bicycling, to swap meets and barter, to mending clothes and appliances instead of throwing them out and buying new, people are rediscovering traditional values of frugality and community. 聽The unanswered question is how much of this will stick once the economy recovers and people find themselves feeling a bit flush. 聽Will people keep riding the bus once they can afford gas again? 聽Will they trade that Ford Focus they bought under Cash for Clunkers for a big new SUV? 聽A cynical view suggests that all the talk about the recession fostering frugality, living within one’s means, and the virtues of helping and being helped by one’s community is just talk, and that what’s actually happening is that people are building up a deep well of perceived deprivation, a backlog of buying, such that when the economy recovers we’ll see another binge of overconsumption, carrying us farther still from a satisfying life and speeding the collapse of planetary life support systems. 聽I don’t believe this is inevitable, but it will take a lot of work to shift our lives from the self-defeating path we are on to a more satisfying, sustainable path.<br/> 聽聽</p> <p><a id="aptureLink_egZbeLtY4t" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://jsterman.scripts.mit.edu/">John Sterman<br/> Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management</a><br/> Director, MIT System Dynamics Group<br/> MIT Sloan School of Management </p> </div> </div> </div>   <div id="footer"> <ul> <li><a target="_parent" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html">Copyright 2010</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.nytco.com/">The New York Times Company</a></li> <li><a target="_parent" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.nytimes.com/privacy">Privacy Policy</a></li> <li class="last"><a target="_parent" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600/http://www.nytimes.com/">NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018</a></li> </ul> </div>  <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> if (typeof NYTD.Blogs.user != 'undefined') { if(NYTD.Blogs.user.isLoggedIn()) { var dcsvid=NYTD.Blogs.user.getId(); var regstatus="registered"; } else { var dcsvid=""; var regstatus="non-registered"; } } </script> <script src="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600js_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/app/analytics/trackingTags_v1.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <noscript> <div><img alt="DCSIMG" id="DCSIMG" width="1" height="1" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20101029235600im_/http://wt.o.nytimes.com/dcsym57yw10000s1s8g0boozt_9t1x/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&WT.js=No&WT.tv=1.0.7"/></div> </noscript> </body> </html>