The Growth Illusion by Douthwaite Quote from Chapter 9 What Has All the Growth Done Page 168 I just love this little anecdote that follows, which, vast reader that I am, had never heard of before. Imagine learning it from a book by an Irish professor over 25 years after the events described happened in my own country and in the Province in which I lived for thirty years. Having read a lot of educational theory, as I have young children, one of the congruent findings, to this tale, has been that "tests" have continually gotten easier. So the Grade levels and the assumed competency of those levels has been continually falling since the 60's. Television has been blamed and praised and the argument, as so many, is littered with learned pros and cons that prevent any definitive evaluation. Each expert comes with his credentials and convincing stories along with his conclusions which support his research - which he often had to decide in advance when asking the grant giving authorities to give him/her some money to do the study. It gets so bad that most new research is often just a rehash and reordering of works that have been published and bear no relationship to common sense or intelligent analysis or current information from other fields. What passes for analysis in the press is the journalistic credo of always presenting two sides. At least in a book, such as this one, we can enjoy and benefit from a mono-theme in which the author can take as much time and as many examples as required to develop his logic. Read on, this is lots of fun. In 1973 Tannis Williams, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, learned that a town of 2,500 people which had been unable to receive television was to be provided with a signal in a year's time. She immediately began to study the town, which she called (Notel), using standard psychological tests, and arranged for the same tests to be carried out in two similar towns in the same area, Multitel and Unitel, which had been receiving television for years. Guy Lyon Playfair describes what she found in his book The Evil Eye: the Unacceptable Face of Television: (1990) One of her findings was completely unexpected: Notel adults were a good deal brighter than those of the two other towns. Stop and think for a moment. The adults who did not watch television and had not watched television were evaluated as being "brighter", an interesting unscientific choice of words, than those in two other similar towns. When I was younger, I worked in Northern Canada for 19 years in heavy construction. Though my childhood was balanced by summers and occasional school years on the farm, most of my time was urban and so I had a good blend of the two environments. What I noticed from my years in the North was what is described as a "can do" attitude, not to be confused with Candu which is in a very confused state. Canadian construction workers continually amazed supervisors from large, world wide companies with their ability to get the job done under almost impossible conditions. These were "can do" guys who came off the farms of and small towns of the prairies and local industries which had to constantly improvise because the economics were slanted in favour of Eastern Canada and the West had a net loss of income from its raw resources. Later when I moved back to cities and urban employment, I found that many people were good at their jobs but they were not innovative nor did they have the attitude of improvising. The difference, I finally concluded, actually was a different form of intelligence. They were much better at creative problem-solving tests, and even those individuals who were unable to solve the tasks they were given would try for much longer than Multitel or Unitel people before giving up. Again, when it is 40 below and you are three hundred miles in the bush with a problem, it is not feasible to throw up your hands and phone for help - you and those with you are it and you solve that problem or you suffer and sometimes die. I might add that the resourcefulness of Canadian soldiers in two World Wars was the result of these civilians becoming soldiers and by their attitude, they provided the example to the urban Canadians. As for the children of Notel, they came out at the top of the three-town league when they were given the Alternative Uses Task, a standard test in which subjects are asked how many things they can do with something, like a sheet of newspaper. Again, this is cultural, you learn this when you grow up in environments that does not have surplus's or the help of specialists. Children learn it in their play and when they do ask their parents, they are advised to try this or try that, not to give up and stop making a mess. When resources are scarce, innovation becomes a survival skill. Thankfully, we still have that environment and those kinds of men and women and though they are in a minority, numbers are not the relevant evaluation criteria. This is a more revealing test than it sounds because it points to what psychologists call ideational fluency, or the ability to form ideas and mental images, and is considered to be a good indicator of overall creativity and the ability to think properly. The Notel youngsters did not come out top in all tests, however. I think you can see from my comments that this type of environment should produce these results. There is another aspect to this and that your learning is reality based and therefore, errors are in reality, not the abstraction of writing or figuring. I would say that reality is the place where you get instant feedback which hones your ability to think properly. Why many country people are looked down upon is that they are used to dealing with and getting feedback from reality and when placed in the altered reality of cities and school, they find most of it at odds with their experience. In one the came last-that which tested them for aggression. It soon became clear to Dr. Williams that both the young and old of Notel were making much better use of their brains than their counterparts in the other two towns. You don't find much vandalism or senseless violence in small communities. There is a fair amount of alcohol related violence, fights in the beer parlour and spousal abuse, but not the vicious violence that often happens in urban centers. Part of that is that the environment absorbs a large amount of your aggression in survival or productive tasks, while in the city, survival is monetized and productive tasks are specialized skills being applied in controlled circumstances rather than the variability of nature. A year after television arrived things were quite different. There was (a dramatic drop) in community participation, with fewer people going to public dances, parties, meetings, concert, parades and bingo than before they had television in their homes. Moreover, when the young people were retested for verbal and physical aggression the now scored above the two control towns. Readings skills had also suffered, particularly among those who found it difficult anyway, and Williams suspected that individual personality had been lost and that people had become mentally more passive. Well, I would guess that any common sense society would start asking questions about TV after reading this little gem of research. Questions such as the commercially sponsored advertising which pays for shows choosing entertainment over education or practical solutions and advice. Or TV being allowed to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the benefit of the advertisers - for they must be the ones to benefit for they are paying the freight. When was the last time I had any input into programming - never. My choice is to select the least distorted and most interesting and intelligent programming and I can tell you that requires all my resources - the overall offerings are so poor. THE WRONG LIGHTHOUSE (This is a summary to the chapter) Even on the most generous interpretation, it is hard to believe that these changes are the sort of benefits people imagined growth would bring them when they looked into the future from their vantage point in the mid-1950s. Why have the benefits of economic growth proved so meagre? The fact is that those who were driving the process along were being guided by the wrong lighthouse just as Roefie Hueting suggested. And there guiding light was profit, not the welfare of the community. It is scarcely surprising that we have failed to arrive at a destination we never attempted to reach. The "invisible hand" that was meant to ensure that personal profit and public welfare were one and the same has let us down. Well, here we come down to the nub of the problem. We have been taking our bearings from the wrong landmark. As a society, we have been directed to focus on economic growth and the resultant benefit - profit. Perhaps if we had been focusing on community instead of profit, we might have developed a different, hopefully better society. As I have stated before, there is a definite contradiction between the aspirations of capitalism (profit) and democracy (community) and I feel we have been betrayed by our politicians who have allowed themselves to become advocates of businesses needs rather than community needs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the neo-con philosophy that is now predominant. As a consequence, the increased resources produced by the growth processes have been largely wasted. They have been employed to keep the system running, not to bring anyone - even the wealthy - much joy. They have been used to provide pallets and corrugated cardboard, non-recoverable bottles and ring-pull drinks cans. They have built airports, super tankers and heavy goods lorries, motorways, flyovers, and car parks with many floors. So many products. Think of a grocery store, some having over 15,000 different products on their shelves, each screaming at us, we have the best price, we have the best guarantee, we can do the job best, trust us, we have our product on sale to save you money. Think of automobiles, with their constant model changes which creates a planned obsolescence based on style rather than function. Think of all the parts catalogues, prices, discounts, delivery dates, exchanges of parts that are complicated by models changing every year. Do we need a new fridge or toaster ever two or three years - I think not. Go to your closet and take out everything that you have worn in the last 3 months and notice how much is left that you may never wear again - because of style. Why has all this happened - "They have been employed to keep the system running, not to bring anyone - even the wealthy - much joy." And they have taken the resources -which may be desperately needed by future generations and wasted them for the goal of profits. But its not only that, much of this has been to produce jobs, so that workers and their families have income so that they can buy these wasted resources. Technology has stymied the capitalists though because they cannot create enough jobs to provide healthy markets because they have been absorbing the moneys that should have went to labour (citizens) by increasing capital stock and profit. A community based society might have looked for more shared resources. Let me give you an example. I now live in a suburb (what a fate) and I noticed that almost every garage has an aluminium ladder hanging inside. Now aluminium is a pretty high tech metal, but a ladder is a pretty low tech item. Almost any country kid with a few nails and a hammer and axe can knock down some small trees and build a ladder. Now most suburbanites use their ladder two or three times a year. In a consumer society, the prevailing ethic of private property states that you should own your ladder and that it is somehow improper to borrow your neighbours ladder or to use one that you have made. On my St. there are approximately 60 houses with I would guess, 50 ladders. If each ladder cost $25, then $1255 have been invested in ladders. If we multiplied this out to a city, we might find that the number of ladders and their cost to be quite considerable. For all intents and purposes, this is a wasted use of resources. A community shed, holding a few ladders, lawn mowers, garden utensils would considerably lower the investment and still provide adequate access to these kinds of utensils. However the capitalistic model does not consider this kind of economy and the ethics of private property preclude a common sense solution. Someone who is not currently or fully employed in the production of goods and services could be paid to maintain the shed and its equipment. A community ethic would ask people to responsibly use the tools and return them in good shape or acknowledge the problem so it could be fixed. They have enabled in the British banking, insurance, stock brokering, tax-collecting and accountancy sector to expand from 493, 000 to 2, 475, 000 employees during our thirty-three years. They have financed the recruitment of over 3 million people to the "reserve army of the unemployed". Is it surprising that so little was left for more positive achievements when all these had taken their share? Here, Douthwaite brings his unrelenting eye on one of the glaring sins of the capitalistic system. It is the creation of a large, rather useless employment of keeping track of money, beating the government out of tax revenue, tying issues up in the legal system. Most of this effort goes back to the issue of private property, the protection of what is mine, not the protection of what is ours. And of course, there is, "the recruitment of over 3 million people to the "reserve army of the unemployed"." Unemployed means that you are not engaged in activities that have a monetary reward. However, like soldiers in a peacetime army, you are given a minimum amount of money to be on standby and you are encouraged to devote your energy and efforts to becoming good enough for someone to hire your skills and time to make them money. Sidelined, you are an expense, employed you are a resource. Capitalistic reasoning from false premises. There is, however, a more fundamental reason why growth has been such a disappointment. It is that a high proportion of the resources we supposed it had created were never really there: they just appeared to be because suppliers had put their prices up. Think back to Erewhon, whose combined agricultural and industrial sector was able to increase its output per employee by adopting new technologies but whose service sector was not, because teaching and nursing cannot be done by machines. In such an economy, industrial workers ensure that their wages rise in step with their own increases in productivity and with rises in the cost of living as well. Service-sector workers, many of whom are represented by the same unions, naturally seek to retain wage relativities. However, because their productivity has not increased, the price of their services has to go up if these increases are to be given. Douthwaite is relentless. Consider two university graduates, one a civil engineer, another a psychologist. Both have expectations from society that they have paid their dues and they are now valuable. Let's assume they both start off with $30,000 a year in 1970. The engineer produces drawings and specs - a determinable outcome that over time he - through the use of technology, computers, CAD systems, data bases increases his productivity fourfold and in 1997 he is making $50,000. (He still go screwed, he should be making $120,000 if his wages were based on his productivity. However the owner took some of that increase in profit and the market took some by lower prices.) The psychologist was able to see 8 clients a day in 1970, giving each client an hour session and for this was rewarded with $30,000. However in 1997, he was still seeing only 8 patients a day and his income was now $50,000. However there was no increase in his production. To get the extra $20,000, the price of his services had to go up which means that his productivity went down. So we have this curious imbalance that Douthwaite points out and that is in many cases service sector productivity has went down while industrial workers productivity has went up. As we have added more service personnel in the last thirty years, we probably have a net loss in productivity or less bang for our buck. Even in such service sectors as law, the lawyer, though he can access much more information quicker than his predecessor who had to find a physical set of books and read the index, rather than doing a computer search, is now so inundated with potential information that he spends more time trying to select the appropriate information. Therefore, his productivity has not went up as technology has complicated his job. I believe this is true for Doctors, academics, even down to the office secretary, who now doesn't have a job and the executive is expected to do his own typing and filing. Technology doesn't simplify tasks and the technological mind keeps adding more complexity. I am reminded by a memory of my grandfather and I (then about 14) walking out into a 300 acre field with a shovel and an axe to move a wooden granary filled with grain. On the way, he chopped down about a 6 inch tree, took of the bottom to make a block and took some larger branches to make some wedges. He used the tree and block to create lifting leverage and used wedges to get the whole structure up in the air. Then using the tree and block, he was able to start inching the building into it's new location. Within several hours, a 70 year old man and a teenager with a few simple tools accomplished a heavy and apparently impossible task. Last summer I was at my cousins farm and we did a similar task. He got his four plow tractor, costing $100,000 and some wire rope, some 4x4's to use as skids. On the way out, the tractor got stuck in a wet place, and we spent several hours getting unstuck, the cable pulled the building out of true and we had to go back the next day and put some bracing in to keep the building from collapsing. There was always the danger of accident when working with wire rope and heavy equipment, to say nothing of the monetary expense of having all the tools to do the job. My grandfather, who had a tractor, would not waste the gas for something he could do with a little work. This means two things. 1. One is that the growth process is inescapably inflationary; 2. The other is that the national income figure will be distorted by the service-sector wage rises because, although incomes it have increased, the sector's output has not. When statisticians add up everyone's earnings to calculate national income, they will overvalue service sector output. They will try to correct for this by deleting their GNP total according to the rise in the cost of living index but, as the price of service sector output will have risen by more than that of the industrial sector because it has a higher labour content, some error will remain. Moreover, the bigger the service sector becomes in relation to the industrial sector, the more serious the error grows. In fact, in industrial countries whose service sector is steadily increasing in comparison with the actual production of goods, growth figures are becoming more and more unreliable. Essentially, industrial productivity increases are yielding rapidly diminishing returns while at the same time making the relationship between wages and raw material costs increasingly distorted. The incentive to shed labour and use more energy and materials is strengthening at an accelerating rate. Now, going back to the concept of intelligence being derived from reality and reality being derived from abstractions, we can see divergence. Reality constantly corrects. Abstraction can deviate for a period until finally the distortion is made apparent by reality. It is one thing to say we are losing so many tons of topsoil each year through short term industrial farming thinking and another thing when there are not the expected tons of wheat in the granary. The second problem is that increasingly solutions are being proposed on false data, making our efforts to adjust even more wasteful while the original problem continues to escalate. Quite simply, the "additional resources" gained from growth were increasingly a sham, and most of those that were not false were wasted. A large proportion of the increase in incomes measured by the GNP statistics went to people who were charging more for doing the same thing, or to parasites - like the two million extra people recruited to the financial services sector - whose existence is possible only because our system measures money and not real resources or real benefits. A doubling of national income could never have made "each man twice as rich as his father was at the same age" as was expected in the 1950s because of the inevitable path the growth process takes when propelled by people who measure their success solely in terms of monetary profit. Personally, I love that non academic word "parasites." Part of our problem in communicating, I think, is that we shy away from a little vulgarity when trying to make a point. The "can do" guys I used to work for were not polite or politically correct, but you sure didn't have any trouble trying to decipher their message. Conversely, when I spent several years in labour litigation, I was constantly being reprimanded for the evocative way I put things - in fact listening to the average lawyer speak in front of a judge or tribunal is absolutely embarrassing as they mumble and fumble to convey their point. At the end of Chapter 3 I asked whether people living around 1700 would have preferred to live in the society and economy of the 1900 and decided that perhaps there would, but for non-materialistic reasons. I do not have to ask the same question about the late twentieth century: an experiment has actually been carried out. A group of 274 people living almost exactly as their ancestors had done in the 1820s was brought to Britain and invited to stay. The experiment began in October 1961 when the volcano that dominates Tristan da Cunha, the remote island some 1,900 miles west of the Cape of Good Hope began to erupt. A huge river of lava approached the narrow coastal strip on which the inhabitants had built their houses, and total evacuation seemed the only safe course. The refugees were welcomed to Britain, housed in the former army camp in Hampshire, and helped to find work. To outsiders, Tristan is a most unattractive place. The climate is harsh, the soil poor and the landscape bleak. Officials visitors have always recommended evacuation. As Michel Bosquet wrote in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1965: When it was evacuated in 1961, the community was still living as it had in 1827. The staple food was the potato, hand-cultivated in the meagre soil of the coastal strip. The Island's 700-odd sheep provided the 280- inhabitants with a little meat and a little milk, and above all with hides and wool for clothing. When the sea permitted, the men fished for crayfish; what they caught, sold dirt cheat to the ocean going trawlers of a deep-sea fishing Company, enabled the Islanders to buy a few industrial products: paraffin and acetylene lamps, rubber boots, fishing equipment, a little sugar and tea during periods of "prosperity". To a foreigner, these conditions of life indicated a level of destitution, of starvation almost, which would be intolerable to a civilized man. After two years of life in modern Britain, the refugees learned that the danger was over. Should they go back? Their sheep, which had been left on the island, were all dead, the stock of seed potatoes was almost totally destroyed; and the potato fields themselves had been overrun by pests. Their houses had either been burned or wrecked by passing sailors. Lava covered the beach, and there was no trace of the crayfish plant. A vote was taken and, apart from six young women who had married Englishmen, the decision was unanimous: they would go home. Why? "If life were as free in England as it is in Tristan," one of the Islanders said after his return, "I wouldn't mind living there. But I'm not used to working for a boss. Here I work when I feel like it." So some things are more important than the level of production and consumption, than economic growth. As Bosquet concluded: "For anyone who still believes in the absolute value of progress, the lesson of Tristan da Cunha, is a terrible one." I am not advocating a return to nature but I must admit that I don't like where I am. I don't like the state of the world, I don't like all the fancy ways we have devised to kill each other, I don't like being politically correct, I don't like looking at a forest and thinking of it as an economic resource instead of an integration of many self supporting life forms fulfilling themselves. I don't like money, perhaps because I don't have very much, but more likely because if forces me to make choices that I don't want to make about goods, records, honesty, sharing and it does nothing to enhance me as an individual. I feel we have been indoctrinated - much as slaves were indoctrinated to accept slavery. The islanders above were not indoctrinated to a money, work for others system. And when they were exposed to it, they rejected it - that is acceptable for them. For me it is not so easy and so I must put my energies into evolving the system into my perception of what is acceptable. Whether my efforts are laughable such as was Don Quixote's or seminal such as Adam Smith's matters not, the exercise is to be true to myself, not to be right by others standards.
