Relevant article from the past on methods of media communication, misinformation and shared techniques between Putin’s Russia e.g. IRA Internet Research Agency troll farm, Fox News and related media outlets.
While Roger Ailes was apparently not well liked by Lachlan or James Murdoch, he was left to his own devices at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch to assist in creating narratives and talking points for the right and profits, especially amongst the GOP Republicans, developing mistrust amongst voters.
A couple of weeks ago, Josh Marshall wrote about “how Russia’s new defense doctrine is like Fox News.” He pointed out that because of Russia’s economic weakness, they can’t engage in the world via military muscle and have, instead, focused on the asymmetric warfare of psy-ops and disruption campaigns.
As Neil MacFarquhar writes, this goes beyond the possible hacking of the server at the DNC that we heard so much about just before the Democratic Convention. He begins with an example about how Sweden was bombarded with “a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media” as the country was considering whether to enter into a military partnership with NATO. We also know that the same kind of campaign was launched in Britain to spread misinformation about membership in the EU. He points out that Russia uses both conventional media sources – Sputnik and RT – as well as covert channels that are hard to trace.
When it comes to covert channels, you’ll want to read this fascinating piece by Adrian Chen titled simply, “The Agency” to get a picture of what is happening. Chen went to St. Petersburg, Russia to track down one of the locations that seemed to be the source of bizarre stories here in the U.S. about a non-existent Ebola outbreak and a refinery natural disaster. In the end, Chen’s digging into this story wound up leading to him being an actual target of a misinformation campaign.
You may wonder why Russia would want to spread false stories about things like an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. MacFarquhar explains the goal.
The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis…
“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.
“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”
Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said.
“The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”
While Josh Marshall’s piece about all this focused on similar motives for that led to the formation of Fox News and Russia’s disruption efforts, this is what struck me about the similarities. The focus is not on facts, but on building a narrative of distrust – especially in the media. Let’s take a look at how they do that. There is an example of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange being interviewed on RT.
I noticed that one because it was shared on Facebook by someone who is a huge Trump supporter. It’s been interesting to note how many times he shares stories that either originate at RT and/or have clear Russian points of view.
If you watch that video you’ll see Assange creating a whole false narrative about why Hillary Clinton chose Tim Kaine (rather than Bernie Sanders) as her VP running mate. He has a few actual events that he spins into a story that has absolutely zero factual basis. I could do the same thing and suggest (as I’ve seen some actually do) that Assange recruited Edward Snowden to steal secrets from the NSA which were then passed on to China and Russia. In doing so, I could spin a few real events into an explosive story of subterfuge without any actual facts to back it up.
This is the more nefarious side of the “merchants of doubt” that we’re seeing so much of in the media these days. In too many places it has gone from being a Fox News phenomenon to standard practice. All one has to do is tell an explosive story that is wrapped around some actual events and claim that you are simply concerned about the questions that are raised or the “appearance of corruption.” Facts that prove/disprove the narrative are unnecessary. It is very reminiscent of how Heather Digby Parton described the efforts of the group Citizens United.
Citizens United became a clearinghouse for all this shady material, alternating between spoon feeding enticing tidbits to the press and dumping vast amounts of incomprehensible material that sounded bad but ended up being misleading at best when the facts were untangled. This was the essence of ’90s-style “smell test” politics in which many people observed the sheer volume of complicated accusations, threw up their hands and assumed that where there’s this much smoke there must be a fire somewhere.
This is precisely why, over the weekend, Paul Krugman wrote that Hillary Clinton is getting “Gored.” The difference this time is that it is not just Fox News and right wing media that is priming the pump. They now have a partner in Vladimir Putin. If you doubt that, take a look at what Adrian Chen said about what is happening with the social media accounts he’s been tracking for a while now that led to his original story.
Because we value freedom of speech and the press, there is no acceptable way to stop this sort of thing from happening. The best defense is to always look for and demand the facts before buying into a narrative. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to provide here at the Washington Monthly…and will continue to bring to the table.’
Analysis via Rolling Stone article on GOP Representatives being informed by and using Russian talking points e.g. to denigrate Ukraine, EU European Union, the west and liberal democracy.
However, this assumes that the same GOP representatives have always been informed well, while avoiding media, influencers, Christian groups and think tanks?
One would argue that no man or woman is an island, let alone purely objective and original as most of our knowledge is gained from media, especially in US and Anglosphere, that is informed by Atlas – Koch Network think tanks, Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News and influencers, while many Christian groups have had long term links with Russia from Soviet times (and influence operations?).
Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.
Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.
Fox owner Rupert Murdoch allegedly fired FoxNews’ Tucker Carlson which may be plausible, but not credible if one observes other allegations apart from Christian beliefs that have emerged?
Following are excerpts from an interesting article written by Stephen Cushion in The Conversation ‘How UK broadcasting’s key principle of impartiality has been eroded over the years’ with focus and excerpts including BBC, Fox News, US fairness principle, Ofcom, GB News, personalities and public confidence.
In the Anglosphere there is still much confusion around Assange, Wikileaks, stolen DNC emails, Russian influence, Russia Report, Mueller Report, Trump campaign, Murdoch’s Fox News, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, Cambridge Analytica, Tufton St. think tanks linked to Atlas or Koch Network, Steve Bannon and right wing grifters, out to defeat Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential Campaign in 2016.
Noah Smith (see his Substack Noah Opinion & subscribe) an accomplished wordsmith, journalist, data analyst and thinker revisits Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, limits to growth and degrowth; still apparent in faux environmental narratives in mainstream media, but are coming from the fossil fuel nativist right.
Missed a few details including ZPG Zero Population Growth, Rockefeller Bros., Rockefeller Foundation, long standing donors like the Scaifes etc., whiff of anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and Asiaphobe sentiments that were channelled via deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and his Social Contract Press; colleague of Ehrlich at ZPG.
Not to forget the roots of this movement including Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and post World War II the Rockefeller Commission, UN Population Division, green revolution, Club of Rome and tracking symptoms of previous high fertility i.e. ‘population growth’ but ignoring decline in fertility globally, to this day.
And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes
Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.
And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss:
When the news program was roundly ridiculed for giving Ehrlich air time, the 90-year-old scholar defended himself on Twitter by citing his academic credentials, and the fact that The Population Bomb had been peer-reviewed:
As many acidly pointed out, the fact that Ehrlich has impeccable credentials and was peer-reviewed is a reason to take a more skeptical eye toward academic credentials and peer review in general. Maybe we’ve gotten better at these things since the 60s, and maybe not. But being spectacularly wrong with the approval of a community of experts is much worse than being spectacularly wrong as a lone kook, because it means that the whole field of people we’ve entrusted to serve as experts on a topic somehow allowed itself to embrace total nonsense.
Anyway, it’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today — i.e., the “degrowth” movement — are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.
Why Ehrlich was so wrong in 1968
Ehrlich’s basic prediction in The Population Bomb was that overpopulation would soon cause massive famines. Matt Yglesias has a good Twitter thread with some screenshots:
Ehrlich also predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s, that England would cease to exist by the year 2000, etc. etc.
Obviously, nothing like this ever happened. But why? In fact, there are a number of reasons. But the most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.
In the case of overpopulation and food supply, two big things happened to make Ehrlich wrong. The first is that a bunch of new agricultural technologies — collectively referred to as the Green Revolution — emerged that boosted crop production dramatically. For example, corn production has more than quadrupled since Ehrlich’s book came out:
The other thing that changed was the number of mouths that had to be fed. Population growth has not remained exponential; it has slowed all around the world, thanks to lower fertility rates. Ehrlich wrote right around the peak; since then, population growth has been more than cut in half.
These two factors, in combination, mean that human beings consume substantially more calories today, on average, than when Ehrlich made his sensational predictions
Nor is this just because a few rich-world people are hogging all the food. Global deaths from hunger and malnutrition have fallen steeply, to about 212,000 in 2019
So whether or not Ehrlich got his math right, the fact is that his assumptions were wrong. But why were they wrong? A bit of it was due to what I might call “quasi-natural” processes — economic growth led to urbanization, which drives down fertility rates. Increasing education, which also tends to accompany growth, reduced birth rates as well. But most of Ehrlich’s mistakes come from his failure to anticipate that human beings would act intentionally to avert most of the trends he was warning about.
Scientists of the 1960s, like Norman Borlaug, knew that feeding the world would be a problem as global population rose; they didn’t need Paul Ehrlich to tell them that. That’s why they dedicated their lives to working on improving crop varieties and fertilizers and irrigation. The inventors of birth control knew that for many families, having one more accidental child just meant one more mouth to feed, and they invented new forms of contraception specifically so that people could choose the family size they wanted. Human ingenuity — what Julian Simon, who famously beat Ehrlich in a bet about commodity prices, called “the ultimate resource” — was one of the stabilizing mechanisms that acted to damp out the runaway trends Ehrlich was predicting. (In fact, human ingenuity was also the reason Simon won the bet about commodities; people worked hard to develop new sources of supply and new ways of using resources more efficiently.)
Another stabilizing mechanism was government action. Concern about overpopulation was what prompted many countries to make new birth control technologies more available to their people, even when it violated their conservative values — for example, worry about food supply prompted Iran’s religious leaders to implement one of the world’s most effective (and totally voluntary) family planning programs in the 1990s.
What about coercive programs? Brutal, repressive policies like India’s mass sterilization program or China’s one-child policy were motivated in part by the overpopulation panic that originated in the West (though in China’s case the key book was The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Of course, China and India hardly needed some American intellectuals to tell them that they were poor countries who struggled to feed their gigantic populations. But these were definitely the kind of brutal totalitarian measures that Ehrlich was recommending.
And yet it’s not at all clear how much of an effect these repressive policies actually had. China’s fertility rate had already declined precipitously by the time they enacted the one-child policy, and further declines didn’t happen until a decade later.
Meanwhile, India’s mass sterilization campaign in 1975 produced no discernible change in the slow, steady downward fertility trend in that country.
In other words, the stabilization mechanisms that made Ehrlich so laughably wrong were generally not the massive coercive top-down government actions that he hoped for. Instead, stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.
There is a lesson here for the modern day.
Ehrlich’s modern-day heirs
In general, my advice to people who want to understand the late 2010s and 2020s is to read about the late 1960s and 1970s. The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but the broad-based social and political unrest that emerged in the late 60s has an obvious parallel with the unrest of the late 2010s. My general thesis is that unrest is a “macro variable” that trickles down and basically infects everything in a society, including what scientists think about and write about.
For many, I think, unrest creates a sense of catastrophic runaway change, which results in a desire to “stop the bus” and slow change down. If you’re a biologist, then perhaps that fear of change manifests in catastrophic predictions about population and natural resources. Ehrlich has caught an especially large amount of flak, but he was hardly unique for his day; Mark Perry has a good roundup of apocalyptic predictions that environmentalists made around the same time, some of which are even more extreme than Ehrlich’s!
Nowadays, as in the 70s, many intellectuals on the left have become afraid of economic growth and resource limitations. This is why Ehrlich is back on TV — wildlife loss is one of the things people are scared of. But the biggest thing people worry about is climate change. And though some environmentalists have embraced the idea of green growth as the solution to climate change (which it is), there’s also a degrowth movement that’s especially popular in the UK and North Europe, and has gained a foothold in some intellectual circles in the U.S.
So far, degrowth’s popularity in the U.S. has been limited due to vigorous pushback from liberals and many leftists, who realize that its proposed solution of massive coordinated global anti-growth planning is A) unworkable, B) would stall the transition to renewable energy, and C) would require developing countries to make untenable sacrifices. But the idea still gets regular exposure in the American press, and sensible folks are forced to be constantly vigilant against the steady drumbeat of degrowtherism from across the Atlantic.
It worth mentioning, though, that degrowthers aren’t just calling for unworkable solutions; they’re also incredibly sloppy in their predictions. For example, degrowthers regularly base their assessments of unsustainable resource use on aggregate measures of material usage.
The British intellectual Jason Hickel also uses aggregate measures of resource use by gross tonnage to support his own jeremiads against growth.
This is a terrible metric, for several reasons. First, it includes materials that are recycled or sustainable (e.g. commercial forests, or farming itself). If resources shift to a more sustainable form — for example, the massive switch from fishing to fish farming — that won’t be recorded in these numbers.
Second, it ignores one of the most important sources of sustainability: resource substitution. When humans figure out how to substitute a commonly available resource for a scarce one, sustainability increases even if the gross tonnage used also increases. For example, if we use widely available magnesium instead of scarce lithium for our batteries, that increases sustainability even if tonnage doesn’t change. Humans are always looking for ways to substitute plentiful resources for scarce ones, and we often find them.
But no matter what metric they use, degrowthers always make the same fundamental mistake, and it’s the same one Paul Ehrlich made: trend extrapolation. The tweet above is just classic “line go up” thinking. And degrowthers treat the past correlation of economic growth and resource use as if it’s a law of the Universe, when there’s no reason to believe that correlation will continue. For example, many countries have managed to decouple their carbon emissions from their GDP growth:
When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.
This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.
In the meantime, however, degrowth might push some countries’ policies in a decidedly foolish direction; I’m particularly worried about the UK. Just as India and China pursued self-destructive policies in response to the population panic, the UK may be tempted to make its grinding post-2008 stagnation even worse in the name of degrowth.
But enviro-catastrophists are not always wrong
Witnessing the follies of environmental catastrophists, from the 1970s to today, it’s tempting to conclude that people who make dire environmental predictions are simply kooks whom we should just never listen to. Indeed, many people do draw exactly that conclusion, especially on the political right. This is a bad response, for a number of reasons.
First, environmental catastrophes are a very real possibility. Climate change is the main example; if we don’t do something to limit emissions (and, probably, pull some carbon out of the air), we really do face a whole lot of extremely negative consequences. Sober scientists who believe strongly in the power of human ingenuity, technical solutions, and economic growth nevertheless recognize both the necessity and the magnitude of the task.
It would be very, very bad to ignore the people warning about climate change. If we do avert catastrophe, technology will be how we do it. But just as with Norman Borlaug, scientists have to be sufficiently worried about the problem in order to be motivated to devote their lives to this project. It’s easy to mock climate alarmism, but without some sort of alarm, people wouldn’t have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to make solar power and batteries cheap. Ingenuity is one of the great stabilizing forces of human society, but it doesn’t just happen automatically.
(So how do we tell the difference between the sober, realistic warnings and the overblown panics? There’s probably not a good general mechanism for doing this; we just have to use our intelligence to evaluate the claims various people are making. But one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions. In general, expertise in identifying a problem isn’t the same as expertise in solving it, so people who insist that mass sterilization is the only solution to overpopulation, or that degrowth is the only solution to climate change, often have a political axe to grind, or are just overconfident people to begin with.)
But there’s one other situation where prophets of enviro-doom might come in handy even when their warnings are overblown. Humans, who set all the policies and invent all the technologies, simply don’t care enough about nonhuman life. We may stop climate change and overpopulation and resource scarcity and air and water pollution out of self-interest, but it’s unlikely that pure self-interest will be enough to stop habitat destruction.
And we are destroying the animals — or at least, many of them. Wild mammals, for instance, have declined by 85% (in terms of biomass) since humans arrived on the scene.
I’ll write a lot more about why this is happening, and how bad it really is, and what we can do to prevent it, but for now I’d just like to note that it’s highly unlikely that human beings care as much as we should about the welfare of non-human living beings. Some people do care, a lot; but the fact that self-interest is rarely a major factor in our calculations about other animals means that we’ll always tend to care less about actions of ours that harm those voiceless, powerless creatures.
This lack of caring can often be utterly chilling. In an otherwise strong post criticizing Ehrlich’s recent 60 Minutes appearance, Cato senior fellow Marian L. Tupy ended with this disturbing assertion:
But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress…Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming.
This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness. It also happens to omit animals’ desire to live, to avoid starvation and pain — wildlife exists not just for humans’ benefit, but for its own. And the idea that the savage necessities of life in the wild provide moral justification for human destruction of wild habitats needs some stern reexamining.
Seeing the prevalence of attitudes like this, I wonder if alarmism like Ehrlich’s isn’t a useful counterweight to human callousness. In economics jargon, perhaps overestimating the probability of a sixth mass extinction is a way to better match the private utility functions of the humans who make global economic policy with the social welfare function that includes all living, feeling beings. At the very least, alarmism might help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.
So I’m not ready to throw the degrowth people and the doomers under the proverbial bus quite yet. I just want them to focus their efforts on wildlife, biodiversity, and habitat destruction, and leave climate change to more sober-minded folk.’
Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics
In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.
However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.
We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.
This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.
In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.
John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?
The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.
Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.
The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.
The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.
Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.
The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.
However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.
Population Growth or Decline?
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Since the 1970s, and earlier with Malthus and eugenics movement, we have been presented with the threat of catastrophic population growth due to fertility rates in the less developed world, then due to ‘immigration‘ from the less developed world when in fact we are facing population decline from mid century; contrary to UN Population Division data which inflates future headline growth?
This ‘misunderstanding’ has been highlighted by science journalist Fred Pearce in ‘The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future’; Hans Rosling in ‘Don’t panic the truth about population’; Prof. Wolfgang Lutz of Vienna’s IIASA and Sanjeev Sanyal demographer at Deutsche Bank.
Article from Michel in TNR The New Republic on the right’s obsession with, respect and desire for authoritarians and dictators, even if corrupt and nativist including Trump and Putin.
While ‘free market’ think tanks, especially US fossil fuel Atlas or Koch Network promote right wing policies for the 1%, and related white nativist Tanton Network entities promote eugenics and the great replacement.
Further, two other central elements include media and ageing citizens; hollowed out legacy media including ‘news deserts’ and now social media being colonised or flooded with far right nativist agitprop to increasing numbers of ageing and/or disadvantaged voters who are less urban, less diverse, less educated and less informed.
Right wing parties, nativists and populists are being used to support both eugenics and corporate friendly policies for the 1% versus 99%, even if against the latter’s interests; see Brexit, Trump and Putin.
For years, an imperialistic, hard-right European dictator unleashing bloodshed across the Continent cultivated supporters across the U.S. This despot claimed he was leading a “unique, anti-Western culture,” and, in so doing, cultivated allies and fellow travelers among conservatives across America, all of whom were disgusted by “corrupt Western liberal values” and who “scorned Western liberalism as a bankrupt ideology.” Nor was this appeal just rhetorical; as investigators later discovered, this right-wing revanchist bankrolled both propaganda efforts and agents on the ground, successfully turning Americans, especially on the right, to his cause.
To modern readers, the story is a familiar one — not least as it pertains to Donald Trump’s affections for Vladimir Putin, to say nothing of how Russian forces have cultivated conservative Americans from Tucker Carlson to the National Rifle Association and beyond. But the aforementioned case has nothing to do with Putin or with Trump. Instead, it took place a century ago, when conservatives across the U.S. flocked to the cause of Germany’s militarist tyrant, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In so doing, as Jacob Heilbrunn successfully argues in his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators, they created a blueprint for how foreign dictators even decades later could cultivate conservative communities to their cause — and could, by the early 21st century, help propel one as far as the presidency. The story of the Americans who worshipped Wilhelm is just one of a range of pro-dictatorship efforts that Heilbrunn excavates, threading a century-long conservative infatuation with right-wing dictators. It’s not only a corrective to the voluminous (if also accurate) investigations on how communist tyrannies fostered leftist supporters in the U.S., but also an able — and wildly timely — effort to stitch together nominally disparate views, from different epochs and eras.
It all adds up to a convincing conclusion: that Trump, in “lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators … wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics,” Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a previously acclaimed book on the history of neoconservatives, writes. “Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”
It’s a tradition that has seen surprisingly little scrutiny, allowing Trump’s treacly fealty to Putin to seem like an aberration. To be sure, there are elements unique to Trump’s personal predilections — not least his history as a luxury real-estate developer, an industry that profited arguably more than any other from the illicit, kleptocratic flows linked to foreign dictators, laundering untold millions of dollars (and potentially more) in the process. Never before could foreign despots so easily, and so effectively, patronize the company of a sitting American president.
But in other far more conspicuous ways, Trump is simply building on a legacy long predating his rise. There were, for instance, the early devotions to the Ur-Fascist himself, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce presented himself not only as a guarantor of order and stability — and a bastion against left-wing forces in Italy and beyond — but as someone who posed “as a defender of whites,” Heilbrunn notes, who prioritized “family values” and who, “in stark contrast to hedonistic America, cherished manliness.” (He also cherished Wall Street with JP Morgan organizing a loan for the Fascist government worth nearly $2 billion in modern currency.) Conservatives in America lapped it up, fêting not only Mussolini but salivating for a similar leader in the U.S. One conservative writer, Irving Babbitt, bleated that circumstances “may arrive when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”
So, too, did plenty of conservative Americans view the rise of Mussolini’s younger brother, ideologically, in Berlin. While the organization of pro-Nazi sympathizers in America has seen more detailed treatments elsewhere, Heilbrunn ropes in other conservatives who freely platformed Adolf Hitler. Germany’s dictator was freely supported by conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst, who “not only admired the Fuhrer, but commissioned him and Mussolini to write for his newspapers for handsome fees.” Later investigations revealed that Hitler’s regime picked up on the kaiser’s previous model, not only covertly funding agents in the U.S. but even slipping pro-Nazi propaganda into official congressional mailings, recruiting some of the U.S.’s most conservative representatives of the time.
The postwar smothering of fascism didn’t seem to slow conservatives’ lust for right-wing strongmen. By the 1960s, the primary home for such reverence was found not necessarily in Washington but in the pages of National Review, where founder William F. Buckley and his claque of writers apparently never found a hard-right despot they couldn’t support. There was Spain’s Francisco Franco, whom Buckley dubbed an “authentic national hero,” Heilbrunn writes. There was Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who wrote in the magazine that he was “fighting for Western civilization and Christian values.” There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whom Buckley viewed as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” (After Pinochet used a car bomb to assassinate a political opponent in Washington, D.C., Chilean officials turned directly to Buckley for advice on how to “sanitize Pinochet’s reputation,” for which Buckley happily obliged.)
Soon, though, such sentiments swelled back into the White House. By the Reagan era, American affections for right-wing despots during the late Cold War blossomed into official policy. The architect for such fondness was Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as an “unabashed defender” of right-wing regimes throughout her tenure. Nor was she picky about the form. Militarists in Argentina, those running death squads in El Salvador, the authors of apartheid in South Africa: Kirkpatrick, with Reagan in tow, succored them all.
But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later, the Soviet Union shattered. America — and liberalism — stood triumphant. Supporting such regimes was suddenly gauche, out of step with this American moment. And the patterns and preferences that propped up American backing of right-wing dictators slunk back into the shadows.
But it never disappeared entirely. As with so much of the paleoconservative architecture of Trumpism — the nativism and the racism, the suspicion of the federal government and the amorality undergirding it all — Heilbrunn identified Pat Buchanan as the figure who kept the flames of such fawning for right-wing dictators alive. Not only did Buchanan refer to leaders like Hitler as “an individual of great courage,” but Buchanan whipped up opposition to American intervention in the Balkans, calling time and again to let Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic have his way and commit genocide.
As Heilbrunn writes, Buchanan — who would later turn his affections toward figures like Putin, even before Trump entered the White House — “longed for a kind of internationalism rooted in those small towns and conservative values and in whiteness, whether in the U.S. or in Serbia or Russia or South Africa or elsewhere.” For years, Buchanan “seemed like a Cassandra,” but as Heilbrunn added, “One prospective candidate for the presidency who picked up on … Buchanan’s unusual history lessons was a loudmouthed Manhattan real estate mogul” — a figure who gave Buchanan’s views the biggest platform yet, carving an entire political movement out of a conservative tradition few Americans had any idea existed.
Thanks to Heilbrunn’s book, however, that confusion is no more. And while the book’s actual writing verges on the overwrought — words like oneiric and pursuivant belong in spelling bees, not mainstream political analysis — Heilbrunn correctly identifies the core of this conservative strain. Trumpists, and those who came before, “are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.” Just as the white supremacist Redeemers before them claimed they were simply advocating a restoration of democracy, so, too, do the Herrenvolk reactionaries of the MAGA world claim they’re simply restoring supposed American greatness — and that right-wing despots abroad should be allies in the fight.
If there’s a fault in Heilbrunn’s writing, it’s that there might be too much emphasis on such ideological affinity. After all, dictatorships’ abilities to inflame and inflate American conservative support can’t operate without a latticework of supporters. And as we’ve learned in recent years, those operatives — the lobbyists and the PR specialists, the law firms and the consultancies, the former congressional officials who leave office and immediately transform into mouthpieces for foreign regimes — don’t require any ideological overlap with their despotic clients. All they need is to get paid, and they’ll be happy to transform into foot-soldiers for tyranny.
Just look, for instance, at the network that serviced Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian thug who ruled Ukraine until Kyiv’s democratic revolution a decade ago. There was Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. But there was also Tony Podesta, who until the mid-2010s oversaw arguably the leading Democratic lobbying shop in Washington. There was even Tad Devine, who helped Yanukovych grab power in 2010 — and who then steered Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was an ideological potpourri, all working at the behest of an autocrat who tried to cement pro-Russian rule in Kyiv — and whose ouster lit a fuse that detonated stability in Europe and that now risks far more devastation.
But that’s all the subject for another book (mine, called Foreign Agents, will be hitting bookshelves in August). In the meantime, Heilbrunn’s analysis of this glorification of right-wing dictatorships is a warning — as if more were needed — of what a potential Trump second term could look like. Whether it’s Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, or even the echoes of Wilhelmine Germany, the conclusion is clear: “Aggrieved … by what they perceived as their own society’s failings — its liberalism, its tolerance, its increasing secularism — conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model of home.” The kaiser would be proud.
Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded. This is not organic.
We have observed the rise of neo authoritarian conservative leaders using nativism and sociocultural issues with media PR support to inform the public, especially voters, suboptimally, including east and west.
However, there are pitfalls for democracy in manipulating access to information by the public or electorate, not just feeding the needs of narcissistic leaders (see article ‘Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons’), but developing societal collective narcissism for populism and electoral advantage aka Brexit, also observed in Hungary, Turkey and Russia.
Interesting article from CARR reflecting conservative parties across the world dealing with demographic change, and especially the Anglosphere of the UK, US and Australia where they have been beholden to corporate supporters from the old economy i.e. fossil fuels, agriculture and industry including assembly lines and construction. Nowadays the new economy of Big Tech, innovation, services and government with more educated and empowered citizens is problematic for the Kochs, Murdochs, DeVos, Scaife et al.
Liberal democracies in western world need to make sure they do not become populist gerontocracies with changing demographics creating elderly ‘Gerrymandering’ where influence and numbers of older voters (with short term horizons) increasing proportionally over younger generations with longer term interests but less voice and influence.
When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?
Across the Anglosphere and Europe many mostly ageing dominant voters, politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.
Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.
One has written previously on the wilful confusion around immigration and population data used for demographic analysis in the Anglosphere, also to dog whistle refugees, immigrants and population growth.
However, requires the misrepresenting of data and research using climate science denial techniques used by entities linked to both Tanton Network and Koch Network, deflecting from carbon or fossil fuels and promoting eugenics; in Australia and US using proxies to replicate previous race based immigration restrictions.
Following is an addition to a previous post ‘NOM Net Overseas Migration – Immigration – Population Growth’ endeavouring to explain the data that is misrepresented in the mainstream by nativist influencers and NGOs, right wing media and political parties, informing above median age and low info voters; see Brexit, Trump and indigenous Voice Referendum in Australia.
The following analysis was done by the Quixotic Quant who disagreed with related analysis presented by a right wing finance blog, partly inspired by Zero Hedge, that did more to confuse subscribers than inform them.
Strategy to dog whistle proxy white Australia policy, put a psychological floor on house values and FOMO ‘fear of missing out’; without any insight, research or data into housing types used by international students, and their housing behaviour, but let’s blame them anyway?
It’s time that someone took a proper tilt at Australia’s high migration rate. No, I don’t mean like Dick Smith, splashing millions on an advertising campaign arguing that such a high rate is unsustainable and that we should return down to previous levels. I mean taking a few hours with the data source to figure out whether Australia’s migration rate actually is any higher than it was at previous levels.
The Population Ponzi story tells us that sometime in the mid-2000s the Howard government kicked the gate-open to mass migration to feed the mining boom, then an un-holy alliance between big retailers, property developers, and budget-stressed politicians allowed the gate to stay open ever-after. The sustained influx of immigrants post-boom can then explain most things weird and worrying about our economy, including per-capita real income falling, low wage growth, and high house prices.
The alternative story is that sometime in the mid-2000s the Australian Bureau of Statistics changed the definition of an official statistic called “Net Overseas Migration”. The arbitrary definition they had at the time was malfunctioning, and the next arbitrary one they changed to has been malfunctioning even worse. A blithely ignorant press didn’t even notice the change, let alone query the disfunction that inspired it, so the entire country has been putting their faith soaring population figure that has the integrity of custard. The harder alternative figure shows that our migration rate is actually flat. The confusion probably explains even more weird things, like low nominal GDP growth, low tax revenues, not to mention wage growth and per-capita everything. House prices are worrying, but not weird. Something else simple explains them, but that’s a tilt for another day.
Read this post if you’re not sure which to believe.
Why the NOM graph matters more than most
As far as graphs go, Net Overseas Migration, (NOM) would have to be one of the rising-stars in Australian economic policy debates. The significance of NOM to housing (hence banking, hence sharemarket) is pretty obvious. It also makes a crucial contribution to ‘Estimated Resident Population’, perhaps one of the most important statistics that’s relied on for imputing, scaling and basing a host of other crucial statistics.
But this particular graph’s influence has also risen the tide of confusion swamping the world’s economists, who are floundering to explain the new low-inflation, low-growth new-normal paradigm that has beset the Western World. Everyone’s casting around for a theory. With a slightly selective date-range (say from around 1991 onwards), this graph gives some Australian pundits and commentators exactly what they want: some substantial level-shift that occurs somewhere around the GFC, and hasn’t returned to old normal levels. (Use the zoom/selector tool to cut out the pre-1991 part to soak in the less-than-full picture.)
(Notice the spike pre 2010 that signifies new and 2006 expanded NOM starting to take effect)
You can see why people are arguing that someone kicked the gate open. Apparently in the 2000s Australia suddenly started letting over 200,000 people in every year, when previously we took about half that amount.
Overseas there is plenty of credibleeconomic commentary, particularly in the US and Europe arguing that more migration would be a very good thing for their economies. It’s fair to say that social issues dominate the case against migration, which would probably be economically beneficial if it was legitimised, and very much so if you could select well-educated foreigners who weren’t refugees. Land-borders make that a non-trivial issue in the US and Europe.
Two things set us apart. Sea-borders are one, which means we take control of migration for granted. You don’t have to sound bombastic by proposing to build a wall when you’ve already got a moat. The second is this graph, which appears to show a such a dramatic level shift to a higher level than most other Western Countries. The shift appears so clear that it has sparked something of a dalliance between some respectable economic thinkers, and the ‘Population Ponzi’ theory, which makes out that Australia’s rapid population growth could be masking, or worse even causing, some real economic problems.
The devil’s in the detail. Or maybe just the definition.
I mightn’t have ever noticed the definition shift if I hadn’t attempted to reproduce two columns in an ABS Demographics spreadsheet called ‘Arrivals’ and ‘Departures’ from numbers in two other spreadsheets called ‘Arrivals’ and ‘Departures’. That’s right, the ABS keeps these series in separate places, with different catalogue numbers (310101, 340101 & 340102), with different date ranges, and different frequencies of data entries. One would think they’re keen fend off amateur analysts attempting to check their numbers.
I couldn’t get any of the series to add up together, even after creating a little package of code in R to manage the necessary wrangling to compare the periods. I wanted to assume that some simple addition of the Permanent and Long Term Arrivals would produce the 3101 Arrivals, and same with Departures, and the net of those would produce (or at least closely follow) the hallowed NOM. Please enjoy chuckling at my naivety. In fact the net Permanent and Long Term movements give a trend that’s far higher than Net Overseas Migration. The Net Short Term movements, on the other hand, used to be trivial, but had in recent decades had become quite large and negative.
This demanded the question: how did the ABS decide just how many of those net movements that were classified in one series as ‘short-term’ to blend in with the ‘long-term’ ones to conclude what constituted ‘migration’? I expected somewhere deep inside the explanatory notes that I’d find some arbitrary rule that had to be followed. The explanatory notes had two, with the switch between them occurring just before the ‘level shift’. Here are the direct quotes:
‘22 The ABS developed and introduced an improved method, called the ‘12/16 month rule’ methodology, for estimating NOM. It has been used in calculating Australia’s official ERP since September quarter 2006. The ‘12/16 month rule’ methodology is a result of reviewing the treatment of temporary migrants (both long-term and short-term) who are away from or resident in Australia for a period of 12 months or more.
23 Estimates of NOM based on the previous methods and those based on the ‘12/16 month rule’ methodology are not comparable. The key change is the introduction of the ‘12/16 month rule’ for measuring a person’s residency in Australia, replacing the previous ‘12/12 month rule’.’
“Not comparable” is the correct (one would hope unavoidable) conclusion about such a substantial change in method. But overall I think my gratitude for the ABS spelling out the obvious is overwhelmed by my dismay at their burying this insight in paragraph 23 of the ‘Explanatory Notes’ tab, where only the most determined and tireless of data consumers are likely to encounter it.
Not the slightest mention, flag, warning, column change, name change, or label can be seen anywhere near the actual spreadsheets available for download. So with almost no exceptions users tend to string it together on one axis, in sequence, in one line, in one colour, blithely ignorant of the fact that they’re plotting two different bits of data which are “not comparable” according to the producer of the data.
It’s hard to overstate how bad that really is. It’s the kind of slop which hung-over first-year uni students cobble together on the bus on the way to a tutorial which requires attendance but doesn’t grade exercises. If they do it in assignments, they fail. Yet all of Australia’s leading economists are doing it relentlessly, if accidentally.
How one should, or should not present “not comparable” data
Let’s be geeky and consider how to properly present the data. (Feel free to borrow my code if you’ve been unwittingly guilty of the misdemeanor and would like to produce some better plots.)’
Interesting article on immigration and NOM net overseas migration by former Australian Department of Immigration Deputy Secretary Abul Rizvi endeavouring to insert some understanding and clarity round the ‘immigration’ debate when most misunderstand, misinterpret or misrepresent immigration and population data.
Immigration Population Growth Decline NOM Net Overseas Migration
For the past 10+ years Australia, the Anglo and western worlds have been obsessing in the mainstream about ‘immigration’ and ‘population growth’ as negative factors for the environment, economy, quality of life, infrastructure, traffic congestion, ‘carrying capacity’ etc. based upon misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding of data, analysis and facts.
However, in Australia as opposed to most nations, pension reform, introduction of superannuation, skilled permanent immigration and net financial contributions from temporary resident ‘churn over’ should maintain a balance between social responsibilities of the government and financial management.
The Australian Migration Review Report has been published, based on narratives and submissions, but little meaningful grass roots feedback or data to support any grounded analysis for good future reforms?
This post will focus on NOM Net Overseas Migration and major source or factor i.e. international education and students, but for now, not the other main factors including WHV Working Holiday Visas (2nd year) and temporary workers.
Expert Analysis of Australia’s Populist Immigration and Population Growth Obsessions
Interesting article ‘Australia’s facile immigration policy debate’ by former former Immigration Department senior official Abul Rizvi in John Menadue’s Pearls and Swine, parsing through and commenting on Australia’s immigration policies, media and societal narratives that are not well supported by the literature nor demographic research.
These positions are distilled into either for cliched ‘Big Australia’ on the side of the corporate sector or anti-immigrant through proxy issues such as ZPG like ‘population growth’ leading to environmental degradation. However, these are both corporate positions or tactics supported by the same and neither explain why Australia has modest permanent immigration and the more significant temporary churn over via the NOM Net Overseas Migration.
Meanwhile mainstream media and niche outlets obsess about (undefined) post 1970s ‘immigration’ always presenting as negative with few if any positives; although Australia promotes itself as an ‘immigration’ nation and the ‘world’s most successful multicultural society’.
Harvard University study recently found that people in Western countries, including America, have succumbed to many restrictionist myths…… About 3 percent of the world’s population lived outside its birth country in 1900. And 3 percent does so now. By any objective metric, the modern age has experienced no historic flood of immigration.
The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.
However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.
There is an increasing body of research, knowledge and awareness of population and demography in nations and globally thanks to Jack Caldwell, Fred Pearce, Wolfgang Lutz, Hans Rosling, Sanjeev Sanyal, then recent years Bricker & Ibbitson (‘Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline’); outside of the UNPD, right wing and faux centrist media, think tanks, politics and influencers.
Is ‘degrowth’ genuine economics theory or astroturfing for greenwashing the status quo i.e. by demanding degrowth that leaves already wealthy or <1% with existing economic and social mobility or status, but precludes upward mobility for 99%> of future generations?
Why? Creates confusion and delay for the economic, industrial and fossil fuel status quo of over a century to transition away from carbon to renewable sources.
Although not cited by either The Conversation or Grist below, the degrowth, steady state and autarkist constructs are not new, see 1930s Italy and Germany, then fast forward to the Club of Rome which promoted the construct ‘limits to growth’; good things like technology grow linearly vs. bad things like emissions and people grow exponentially.
Aided both the fossil fuel ‘free market’ Atlas or Koch Network and nativist faux environmental movement related to Tanton Network demanding closed borders, immigration restrictions, withdrawal from trading blocs e.g. EU & multilateral agreements in favour of bilateral agreements, that favour more powerful nations and entities over the less powerful; suggests eugenics?
The degrowth movement has become very popular in recent years, particularly among younger people who appreciate its critique of the endless pursuit of economic expansion. The problem with growth, advocates argue, is that it implies the use of more and more resources and energy, as well as ever larger quantities of waste.
Well, the good news for the movement is that one of the world’s leading economies has offered itself up as a case study. If you look past the debate about whether the UK’s recent technical recession is going to deepen or peter out, the economic situation is pretty dire.
One main reason for the UK stagnation is a lack of investment in productivity, which advocates of degrowth would argue is an essential part of moving away from a resource-hungry economy. So what can we learn from the UK’s experiences so far?
The degrowth perspective
Degrowth has become the latest element in a long line of critiques of economic growth. One leading proponent, the Spanish ecological economist Giorgos Kallis, defines it as the “socially sustainable reduction of society’s throughput”, which is “incompatible with further economic growth, and will entail in all likelihood economic (GDP) degrowth”.
Pursuing GDP growth is criticised, both because of its increased use of resources and for “unrealistic expectations” that technological improvement and productivity growth would allow us to stay within so-called “planetary boundaries” (meaning the limits beyond which humanity will be unable to continue to flourish).
Kallis argues that degrowth implies reduced spending on goods and new technology, while distinguishing “good” and “bad” investments:
We will have to do with less high-speed transport infrastructures, space missions for tourists, new airports or factories producing unnecessary gadgets, faster cars or better televisions.
We may still need more renewable energy infrastructures, better social (education, and health) services, more public squares or theatres, and localised organic food production and retailing centres.
Yet this fails to appreciate that a reduction in GDP implies lower investment in technologies across the board, including those underpinning renewable energy. It also misunderstands that modern economic growth is not driven by accumulating and using more resources, but by innovation through investment. Witness what has happened in the UK…
….Degrowth advocates will not welcome this kind of approach, but technological improvement is ultimately likely to be a better way of achieving their goals than impoverishing people.
For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.
This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.
Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries.
“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.
It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.”
The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’”
The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.
Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050.
That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population….
….Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit.
“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.
Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.
Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality.
“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”
They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt.
Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”
Reposting a 2012 article from Renew Economy Australia from Giles Parkinson on Jorgen Randers of Norway in ‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?’
Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.
The Guardian in article following, is a victim of astroturfing again on the environment, presenting the Club of Rome and MIT’s ‘Limits to Growth’ model as science, and resurrected by media as contemporary, along with obsessions about Malthusian ‘population growth’ (and ‘immigration’) by non-scientists i.e. ZPG and other related ‘theories’ such as Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’.
Following is an article written by presumably a non science journalist Edward Helmore highlighting KPMG’s Gaya Herrington (econometrics and sustainability studies, again not science) who is a researcher and advisor for the Club of Rome predicting catastrophe.
A recent ABC article ‘The day that plunged Australia’s climate change policy into 10 years of inertia’, endeavoured to describe how climate change consensus was broken by former Liberal MP Andrew Robb who claimed he had followed the ‘Limits to Growth’ (LTG) theory via the Club of Rome but changed his mind, hence withdrew support on bipartisan support on carbon emission measures.
In recent years with pressure on fossil fuels and the need to transition to renewable sources, now compounded by Russian invasion of Ukraine, has seen renewed promotion of ZPG Zero Population Growth with Herman Daly and Club of Rome inspired ‘steady-state economy’ and ‘degrowth’ as scientific theories; part of a crossover between nativist Tanton Network and libertarian Koch Network.
While the fossil fuel supported ZPG Zero Population Growth, with Malthusian and eugenics based arguments round the environment, population growth and immigration being mainstreamed, especially by the time of Trump, who were the prime movers of the past?
The following article and excerpts of Berger, looking through Focauldian prism, follows some of the history of this movement including now deceased John Tanton (‘the most influential unknown man in America’), Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) et al. and organisations that emerged from ZPG including FAIR, CIS, US English, then IRLI and SLLI with their links to the Koch Network ‘bill mill’ ALEC, leading up to the Trump White House.
Education Training Society 