The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know.
Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form.
But on a substantive level, it does strike me that this debate over newts offers a pretty good microcosm of why arguments between YIMBY abundance people and old-fashioned anti-development greens are genuinely hard to resolve.
Because it seems to me fair to think that maybe we should care about the newts, and not just take it for granted they ought to be sacrificed on the altar of progress.
Recently, Congress passed a bipartisan housing bill that eased some environmental review conditions on some housing projects. It's probably a good idea.
So too, California recently committed to revamping its longstanding environmental laws that critics had accused of throttling infrastructure development—including, perversely, clean energy development.
Maybe that was a good idea on its own too.
And right now, Congress is actively debating various "permitting reform" proposals that would weaken environmental review and community/tribal consultation requirements in order to speed development.
Here again, the argument from an abundance perspective is that we actually need to make it easier to build even to solve specifically environmental challenges like climate change. Current permitting requirements are so onerous that they are blocking even clean energy projects that we will need to make a green transition.
Maybe they're right about this too.
But with each step on the journey, I get a little more uneasy.
And once we start saying overtly: sacrifice the newts! I really want to call a time-out.
I wrote in a recent post about how I've been reading Edmund Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois, and it reads as sort of ground zero for the anti-development bias of much of today's green left—exactly the attitudes, in short, that the "abundance" people are trying to train out of us.
My point in that post, though, was that Wilson's concerns about hydro-power mega-projects (which would, let us recall, count as renewables and "clean energy," from a climate standpoint) are perfectly valid—they were displacing tribal communities and violating Indigenous treaty rights.
The anti-development bias on the Left, then, has at least some pretty sympathetic origins.
If we don't have so many mega-projects displacing Native communities from their land today, it is at least partly thanks to the community and tribal consultations requirements in federal environmental laws that the current abundance push for "permitting reform" seeks in part to weaken.
The Abundance types are probably right that "de-growth" as a goal in itself is a dead end for the Left.
Their objections to the outright degrowthers are pretty irrefutable:
We would not actually be happy in a world without economic growth. A lot of the economic "stability" and predictability we yearn for actually depends, paradoxically, on continued growth.
The periods of the past for which we are most nostalgic are actually ones that enjoyed considerable technological change and progress, so we are paradoxically nostalgic for growth, rather than for stasis.
(The genuine stasis of the Middle Ages, say, as opposed to the 1950s, would pall very quickly. We would have no trouble identifying this, not as stability in a desirable sense, but as stagnation).
As John Kenneth Galbraith pretty inarguably puts it, "the good society must have substantial and reliable economic growth—a substantial and reliable increase in production and employment from year to year."
He adds: "Economic stagnation cannot be accepted or openly urged as a condition of the good society, although this does, in fact, reflect the quiet preference of many of the better-situated citizens"—viz. the "Right NIMBYs" who oppose development because it will obstruct their sightline or diminish their property values.
But, as much as there is a paradox in the anti-development Left's longing for a "stable" world without growth—since, as we see from Galbraith—growth is actually essential to our sense of stability and predictability—so too, there is a paradox inherent in Galbraith's own notion of "reliable" growth.
Economic growth, after all, is necessarily unreliable for some. It operates through rewarding some competitors on the marketplace and putting others out of business. It is "creative destruction" at best, as they say—the opposite of anything "reliable."
It thus in part fails one of the elementary tests of economic justice, in that it "redistributes Fortune’s favours so as to frustrate design and disappoint expectation," as Keynes writes of inflation, in A Tract on Monetary Reform.
As Albert O. Hirschman accurately writes, in The Passions and the Interests: "economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries uprooted millions of people, impoverished numerous groups while enriching some, caused large-scale unemployment during cyclical depressions," and more.
How can a force that by its very nature requires the failure of some economic actors in order to maintain the dynamism of competition ever fulfill people's desires for "stability" and "reliability"?
We thus seem to be at an impasse: we both need economic growth in order to feel that we can plan our futures—but economic growth necessarily destabilizes our plans for our futures—at least for some of us, some of the time.
This longstanding paradox in a capitalist marketplace is only sharpened by the new mania for AI. Here is a technology that, on some of the most grandiose predictions, may really end up displacing most forms of human cognitive labor (maybe even eventually physical labor).
Yet, it seems pretty essential to our current growth trajectory. If we don't keep building and improving this potentially destabilizing new technology, we may lose out on all the productivity gains it promises to unlock—and then our economy really will stagnate.
And stagnation, as we've already seen, can "frustrate design and disappoint expectation" as much as growth can—if not more.
And so—as so often in the history of capitalist development—we seem faced with a market force that none of us really wants or would have chosen—but which now somehow seems inescapable; and which—more paradoxically still—also somehow emerged from nothing other than our own collective efforts.
Humans made AI, and we all contributed with our texts and writings and social media posts to training it. Yet, this creation of ours now somehow has the power to dictate and limit our futures in a way that confronts us as an insoluble dilemma.
Dwight Macdonald, in his The Root is Man, aptly quotes Marx and Engels's words from The German Ideology: "[T]his consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up to now."
Macdonald—who was writing long before AI development, but was actively confronting in his era another dangerous and potentially world-altering new technology—namely, atomic power—suggests that the answer to this problem might really be to just accept a pause or limit on scientific and technological advancement.
He articulates a kind of "Small is beautiful" approach that could be seen as a manifesto for "de-growth." (The Root is Man too, then, might be seen as one potential ground zero for the anti-development bias of the modern Left, up there with the later Wilson.)
Embracing smallness as preferable to alienation, Macdonald proposes that we simply bite the bullet on any loss of growth or productivity that this might entail. "If automobiles cannot be made efficiently in small factories," he writes, "then let us make them inefficiently. If scientific research would be hampered in a small-unit society, then let us by all means hamper it."
As Robert Frost once put it, in a plea for pausing technological development: Bounds should be set / To ingenuity for being so cruel / In bringing change unheralded[.]
Of course, people in Macdonald's day retorted that if we paused atomic research and development, the Soviets would outstrip us.
One hears the same arguments today about AI: "if we don't build it, the Chinese will."
And so, yet again, this thing that no one really wants—that threatens to "bring change unheralded"; to "thwart our expectations" and "bring to naught our calculations"; to "frustrate design and disappoint expectation"—in short, to deprive us all of control over our own lives and destinies, as Gandhi would put it—nonetheless keeps advancing by a seemingly irresistible inner logic.
It acquires "an objective power over us, growing out of our control."
I don't know if small is beautiful is a sufficient or workable answer to this. I don't actually see a clear way around the argument that if any one government pauses AI development in its own borders, someone else will do it instead—just as one can't really meet the objection to unilateral nuclear disarmament that this wouldn't get rid of nuclear arms, but only increase the incentive of the "other side" to use them.
There are some genies that, once unleashed, notoriously can't be fitted back into the bottle. Several of humankind's most Faustian technological achievements of the last century or so take this form.
Hence Martin Amis's apt and endearingly frank remark, in the midst of his book railing against the evils and the dangers of nuclear weapons: "I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don't know what to do about them."
So too, here, I am merely going on about AI and economic growth and technological displacement. I don't know what to do about them.
But I do think AI calls into question any Abundance argument that takes the form of: "let us sacrifice this current social good—tribal consultation, community input, local small-scale direct democracy, wildlife habitats and ecology—because it will clear the way for Progress."
As Macdonald puts it: "All ideologies which require the sacrifice of the present in favor of the future [should] be looked on with suspicion."
And as we saw at the outset, many Abundance arguments do indeed take this form.
Sacrifice the newts, we are told. "Who care about newts?" What are newts when weighed in the balance with the Abundant future we are building?
So too: sacrifice permitting restrictions! Sacrifice community input and direct democracy! Sacrifice tribal consultation on development projects! Sacrifice environmental review! None of these are worth anything compared to what's possible if we would just build, baby, build!
But as most of the people making these same arguments will now freely admit—we actually have no idea how the economy will work in a world of vastly expanded AI capabilities. We actually have no idea which or how many human jobs will remain. We hope many of them; maybe new kinds of them; but no one really knows or can say for sure.
We are being asked to sacrifice present goods, then—really existing newts, for example, who are right now alive and living their newt existences—for the sake of some imagined future that the Abundance advocates freely admit they can no longer describe or predict.
"[N]o one can say definitely what will happen in another decade or so of Atomic Progress," Macdonald wrote in his era.
"What becomes of the chief argument of Progressives," he wanted to know, "—that out of present evil will come future good—if we now confront the possibility that there may not be a future? [... I]nstead of manufacturing solar systems, man seems more likely to destroy his own little globe. And our sufferings , far from being for the benefit of those who are to come, are more likely to remove the first condition of their coming: the existence of an inhabited earth."
Macdonald was aware that calling for "a moratorium on atomic research" was an unpopular view that was readily condemned as anti-science and Luddite—just as calling for a similar moratorium on AI development today often is. But while it "might lose us cheaper power" it would "gain us the inhabited globe," he argues.
As he writes with acid sarcasm: "[W]e, too, may perish in the next war because atomic fission is the latest stage of scientific discovery, and Progress depends on the advancement of science. But a simple-minded person might see in such modern truisms as that [...] atomic fission holds ultimate promise of the Abundant Life [...] a similarity to that promise of a better life in Heaven on which the Catholic Church banks so heavily."
Macdonald's point is that all these pleas to sacrifice present good in the name of that great god, The Future, is so much pie in the sky.
We are told: sacrifice the newts! Newts must perish so that higher life—Abundant Life—may be born—Just as we were told in the past that Stalin's regime was just a necessary transition period on the road to socialist utopia; just as we are consistently told that the displacements and chaos wrought by technological change and economic development are merely the inevitable price we must pay for "growth" and "progress"—
Yet this promised abundant future that will justify all the pain and injustice never seems to arrive.
As Isaiah Berlin once put it—in lines with which Macdonald would undoubtedly sympathize:
"The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead. [... T]he ideal for the sake of which they die remains unrealized. The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelette remains invisible."
And so I say, with Macdonald, that we should instead strive to live in the "here and now," as he repeatedly puts it.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof say the Scriptures. Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Do not sacrifice what we know is good here and now for what we dimly imagine might result from destroying them in some utopian future that never seems to actually come—that has never yet been seen on this planet and probably never will be.
And so, to the question of "who care about newts???" I say: we all should care about newts.
Let the newts be. Let them be spared. Let the newts live. For—
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. (Hopkins)
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