2AC – General Frontline Cards

1. Alternative causes backlash, fails to resolve environmental challenges, and

causes transition wars – growth solves.
Karlsson 21 – (Rasmus, "Learning in the Anthropocene" Soc. Sci. 10, no. 6: 233.
https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10060233 18 June 2021)// gcd

Unpacking this argument, it is perhaps useful to first recognize that, stable

as the Holocene may have seemed
from a human perspective, life was always vulnerable to a number of cosmic risks, such as
bolide collisions, risks that only advanced technologies can mitigate. Similarly, the Black Death of
the 14th century should serve as a powerful reminder of the extreme vulnerability of pre-
industrial societies at a microbiological level. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to think of the Holocene as providing a
relatively stable baseline against which the ecological effects of technological interventions could hypothetically be evaluated. With
most human activities being distinctively local, nature would for the most part “bounce back” (even if the deforestation of the
Mediterranean basin during the Roman period is an example of that not always being the case) while larger geophysical processes,
such as the carbon cycle, remained entirely beyond human intentional control. Even if there has been some debate about what
influence human activities had on the preindustrial climate (Ruddiman 2007), anthropogenic forcing was in any case both marginal
and gradual. All this changed with the onset of the Great Acceleration by which humans came to overwhelm the great forces of
nature, causing untold damage to fragile ecosystems and habitats everywhere, forever altering the trajectory of life on the planet
(Steffen et al. 2011b). Ina grander perspective, humanity may one day become an interplanetary
species and thus instrumental in safeguarding the long-term existence of biological life, but for the
moment, its impact is ethically dubious at best as the glaciers melt, the oceans fill up with plastics,
and vast number of species are driven to extinctio n. Faced with these grim realities, it is of course not
surprising that the first impulse is to seek to restore some kind primordial harmony and
restrain human activities. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, even if their aggregate impact may have been
within the pattern of Holocene variability, pre-modern Western agricultural societies were hardly
“sustainable” in any meaningful sense. Experiencing permanent scarcity, violent conflict was
endemic (Gat 2013), and as much as some contemporary academics like to attribute all evils to “capitalism” (Malm 2016), pre-
capitalist societies exhibited no shortage of religious intolerance and other forms of social domination. It is thus not surprising that
some have argued the need to reverse the civilizational arc further yet and return to a preliterate hunter-gather existence (Zerzan
2008) even if this, obviously, has very little to do with existing political realities and social formations. Under Holocene conditions,
the short-term human tragedy may have been the same, but it did not undermine the long-term ability of the planet to support life .
In a world of eight billion people, already accumulated emissions in the atmosphere have
committed the planet to significant warming under the coming centuries, with an increasing
probability that committed warming already exceeds the 1.5-degree target of the Paris
Agreement even if all fossil-fuel emissions were to stop today (Mauritsen and Pincus 2017). This means that
sustained negative emissions, presumably in combination with SRM, will most likely be needed
just to stabilize global temperatures, not to mentioning countering the flow of future emissions. According to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assuming that all the pledges submitted under the Paris Agreement are fulfilled,
limiting warming to 1.5 degrees will still require negative emissions in the range of 100—1000
gigatons of CO2 (Hilaire et al. 2019, p. 190). The removal of carbon dioxide at gigaton scales from the atmosphere will
presumably require the existence of an advanced industrial society since low-tech options, such
as afforestation, will be of limited use (Gundersen et al. 2021; Seddon et al. 2020), especially in a future of competing
land-uses. It is against this backdrop of worsening climate harms that the limits of “precaution”, at least as conventionally
understood, become apparent. While
degrowth advocates tend to insist that behavioral change, even
explicitly betting on a “social miracle” (Kallis 2019, p. 195), is always preferable to any technological risk-taking
(Heikkurinen 2018), that overlooks both
the scope of the sustainability challenge and the lack of public
consent to any sufficiently radical political project (Buch-Hansen 2018). While there may be growing willingness
to pay for, say, an electric vehicle (Hulshof and Mulder 2020), giving up private automobile use altogether is obviously a different
animal, to say nothing about a more fundamental rematerialization of the economy (Hausknost 2020). Again,
the problem is
one in which change either (a) remains marginal yet ecologically insufficient or (b) becomes
sufficiently radical yet provokes a strong political counterreaction . A similar dynamic can be expected to play
out at the international level where countries that remain committed to growth would quickly gain a
military advantage. To make matters worse, there is also a temporal element to this dynamic since any regime of
frugality and localism would have to be policed indefinitely in order to prevent new unsustainable patterns of
development from re-emerging later on. All this begs the obvious question, if the political and economic
enforcement of the planetary boundaries are fraught with such political and social difficulties,
would it not be better to instead try to transcend them through technological innovation ? Surprisingly, any
high-energy future would most likely be subject to many of the same motivational and psychological constraints that hinder a low-
energy future. While history shows that existing nuclear technologies could in theory displace all fossil fuels and meet the most
stringent climate targets (Qvist and Brook 2015), it seems extremely unlikely, to put it mildly, that thousands of new reactors will be
built over the course of the coming decades in response to climate change. Outside the world of abstract computer modelling, real
world psychological and cultural inertia tends to ensure that political decision-making, at least for the most part, gravitates to what
is considered “reasonable” and “common sense”—such as medium emissions electricity grids in which wind and solar are backed by
biomass and gas—rather than what any utilitarian optimization scenario may suggest. Even if the global benefits of climate
stabilization would be immense, the standards by which local nuclear risks are assessed, as clearly illustrated by the Fukushima
accident which led to a worldwide retreat from nuclear energy despite only causing one confirmed death (which, though obviously
regrettable, has to be put in relation to the hundred and thousands of people dying every year from the use of fossil fuels),
underscores the uneven distribution of perceived local risks versus global benefits and the associated problem of socio-political
learning across spatial scales. Almost two decades ago, Ingolfur Blühdorn identified “simulative eco-politics” as a key strategy by
which liberal democracies reconcile an ever-heightened rhetoric of environmental crisis with their simultaneous defense of the core
principles of consumer capitalism (Blühdorn 2007). Since then, declarations that we only have “ten years to save the planet” have
proliferated, and so have seemingly bold investments in renewable energy, most recently in the form of US President Joseph Biden’s
USD 2.25 trillion climate and infrastructure plan. Still, without a meaningful commitment to either radical innovation or effective
degrowth, it is difficult to see how the deployment of yet more wind turbines or the building of new highways will in any way be
qualitatively different from what Blühdorn pertinently described as sustaining “what is known to be unsustainable” (Blühdorn 2007,
p. 253). However, all is not lost in lieu of more authentic forms of eco-politics. Independent
of political interventions,
accelerating technological change, in particular with regard to computing and intelligent
machine labor, may one day make large-scale precision manipulation of the physical world
possible in ways that may solve many problems that today seem intractable (Dorr 2016). Similarly,
breakthroughs in synthetic biology may hold the key to environmentally benign biofuels and
carbon utilization technologies. Yet, all such progress remains hypothetical and uncertain for now. Given what is at stake,
there is an obvious danger in submitting to naïve technological optimism. What is less commonly recognized is that naïve optimism
with regard to the prospects of behavioral change may be equally dangerous. While
late-capitalist affluence has
enabled many postmaterial identities and behaviors, such as bicycling, hobby farming, and
other forms of emancipatory self-expression, a collapsing economy could quickly lead to a
reversal back to survivalist values, traditional hierarchical forms of domination, and violence
(Quilley 2011, p. 77). As such, it is far from obvious what actions would actually take the world as a whole closer to long-term
sustainability. If sustainability could be achieved by a relatively modest reduction in consumption rates or behavioral changes, such
as a ban on all leisure flights, then there would be a strong moral case for embracing degrowth. Yet, recognizing how farreaching
measures in terms of population control and consumption restrictions that would be needed, the case quickly becomes more
ambiguous. While traditional environmentalism may suggest that retreating from the global
economy and adopting a low-tech lifestyle would increase resilience (Alexander and Yacoumis 2018), it
may do very much the opposite by further fragmenting global efforts and slowing the pace of
technological innovation. Without an orderly and functioning world trade system, local resources
scarcities would be exacerbated, as seen most recently with the different disruptions to vaccine supply chains. In
essence, given the lack of a stable Holocene baseline to revert to, it becomes more difficult to distinguish
proactionary “risk-taking” from “precaution”, especially as many ecosystems have already been
damaged beyond natural recovery. In this context, it is noteworthy that many of the technologies that can be
expected to be most crucial for managing a period of prolonged overshoot (such as next-
generation nuclear, engineering biology, large-scale carbon capture and SRM) are also ones that
traditional environmentalism is most strongly opposed to. 3. Finding Indicators From the vantage point
of the far-future, at least the kind depicted in the fictional universe of Star Trek , human evolution
is a fairly straightforward affair along an Enlightenment trajectory by which ever greater instrumental capacity is matched by similar
leaps in psychological maturity and expanding circles of moral concern. With the risk of sounding Panglossian, one may argue
that the waning of interstate war in general and the fact that there has not been any major
nuclear exchange in particular, does vindicate such an optimistic reading of history. While there will
always be ups and downs, as long as the most disastrous outcomes are avoided, there will still be room for learning and gradual
political accommodation. Taking such a longer view, it would nevertheless be strange if development was simply linear, that former
oppressors would just accept moral responsibility or that calls for gender or racial justice would not lead to self-reinforcing cycles of
conservative backlash and increasingly polarizing claims. Still, over the last couple of centuries, there is little doubt that human
civilization has advanced significantly, both technologically and ethically (Pinker 2011), at least
from a liberal and secular perspective. However, unless one subscribes to teleology, there is nothing inexorable with
this development and, it may be that the ecological, social, and political obstacles are simply too great to ever allow for the creation
of a Wellsian borderless world (Pedersen 2015) that would allow everyone to live a life free from material want and political
domination. On the other hand, much environmental discourse tends to rush ahead in the opposite direction and treat the c limate
crisis as ultimate evidence of humanity’s fallen nature when the
counter-factual case, that it would be possible
for a technological civilization to emerge without at some point endangering its biophysical
foundations, would presumably be much less plausible. From an astrobiological perspective, it is easy to
imagine how the atmospheric chemistry of a different planet would be more volatile and thus more vulnerable to the effects of
industrial processes (Haqq-Misra and Baum 2009), leaving a shorter time window for mitigation. Nick Bostrom has explored this
possibility of greater climate sensitivity further in his “vulnerable world hypothesis” (Bostrom 2019) and it begs to reason that
mitigation efforts would be more focused in such a world. However, since climate response times are longer and sensitivity less
pronounced, climate mitigation policies have become mired in culture and media politics (Newman et al. 2018) but also a statist
logic (Karlsson 2018) by which it has become more important for states to focus on their own marginal emission reductions in the
present rather than asking what technologies would be needed to stabilize the climate in a futur

e where all people can live a modern life.

Transition - People use low-cost fossil fuels instead of renewables during a

collapse
George MONBIOT 9. Fellowship and Professorships, Oxford. “Is There Any Point in Fighting to
Stave Off Industrial Apocalypse.” Guardian. August 17.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-
change.

The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel but too much . As oil declines,
economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines they’ll switch
to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably
applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever
greater proportion of the world’s surface . We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our
wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, fresh water, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not
before we have pulled everything else down with us.¶ And even if there were an immediate
economic cataclysm, it’s not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for
destruction. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted,
people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-
scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use
of natural assets.

Alt fails---transition is impossible and causes conflict. Even if transition occurs, it

doesn’t solve
Smith 19 [Noah; 4/5/19; Bloomberg Opinion columnist, former assistant professor of finance
at Stony Brook University; "Dumping Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet,"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-05/capitalism-is-more-likely-to-limit-
climate-change-than-socialism]

It has become fashionable on social media and in certain publications to argue that capitalism is
killing the planet . Even renowned investor Jeremy Grantham, hardly a radical, made that assertion last year. The basic
idea is that the profit motive drives the private sector to spew carbon into the air with reckless
abandon. Though many economists and some climate activists believe that the problem is best addressed by modifying market
incentives with a carbon tax, many activists believe that the problem can’t be addressed without
rebuilding the economy along centrally planned lines.

The climate threat is certainly dire, and carbon taxes are unlikely to be enough to solve the problem. But eco-
socialism is probably not going to be an effective method of addressing that threat. Dismantling
an entire economic system is never easy , and probably would touch off armed conflict and
major asdasd upheaval . In the scramble to win those battles, even the socialists would almost
certainly abandon their limitation on fossil-fuel use — either to support military efforts , or to
keep the population from turning against them. The precedent here is the Soviet Union , whose
multidecade effort to reshape its economy by force amid confrontation with the West led to
profound environmental degradation . The world's climate does not have several decades to
spare.

Even without international conflict , there’s little guarantee that moving away from capitalism
would mitigate our impact on the environment. Since socialist leader Evo Morales took power in Bolivia,
living standards have improved substantially for the average Bolivian, which is great. But this has come at
the cost of higher emissions. Meanwhile, the capitalist U.S managed to decrease its per capita
emissions a bit during this same period (though since the U.S. is a rich country, its absolute level of emissions is much higher).

In other words, in terms of economic growth and carbon emissions , Bolivia looks similar to more
capitalist developing countries. That suggests that faced with a choice of enriching their people or
helping to save the climate, even socialist leaders will often choose the former. And that same
political calculus will probably hold in China and the U.S., the world’s top carbon emitters — leaders who
demand draconian cuts in living standards in pursuit of environmental goals will have trouble
staying in power .

The best hope for the climate therefore lies in reducing the tradeoff between material
prosperity and carbon emissions . That requires technology — solar , wind and nuclear power ,
energy storage , electric cars and other vehicles, carbon-free cement production and so on. The
best climate policy plans all involve technological improvement as a key feature .

The aff is a middle ground approach which solves a majority of their offense and
the full weight of ours
JOSEPH MULLEN ‘20, SEPTEMBER 18, “Saving American Capitalism in an Age of Radical
Inequality,” THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, https://prospect.org/essaycontest/joseph-mullen/
This will change. Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism elucidates how to prevent pre-distribution of wealth during the pandemic. The
“the market is a human creation.” A truly free market depends on a
central tenet of Reich’s work reveals that
democratic economy with countervailing power from the people. In this essay, I’ll examine the rules Reich proposes and how they
can be rewritten to not just save capitalism amidst the pandemic, but vaccinate it against future
outbreaks of greed.
Reich analyzes the foundations of capitalism: property, monopoly, contracts, bankruptcy, and enforcement. Reich details how
corporations abuse intellectual property, using the example of vaccines. While products from nature once could not be patented, “in
the 1990s, the rules changed. Pharmaceutical companies were allowed to patent the processes they used to manufacture vaccines
and other products from nature.” Additionally, the use of pay-for-delay agreements has prevented cheap alternatives, with approval
from the government. “In 2012, Congress authorized U.S. customs to destroy [generic alternatives].” If a pharmaceutical company
patents the COVID-19 vaccine, they could exploit the vaccine for profit. This hypothetical demonstrates why we must democratize
market rules to revitalize competitiveness within the market of intellectual property .

Modern monopolies have frightening implications. “A handful of giant corporations are reaping
the rewards of … network effects. The larger their networks become, the more data they collect, and therefore the
more effective and powerful they become.” Amazon presents the perfect example, as Reich describes anti-competitive practices
contributing to a cycle wherein “as Amazon’s economic power increases, so does its political clout.” These monopolies use their
clout to annihilate competitors. As Reich notes, “Unlike the old monopolists, who controlled production, the new monopolists
control networks … the new monopolists have enough power to keep antitrust at bay.” What happens when consumers are trapped
at home, and one company has “become the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers looking to buy anything”? A
the first trillionaire. This is anathema to the millions of Americans
startling headline recently heralded Jeff Bezos as
unemployed by the pandemic, but can be prevented if the government enforces antitrust.
As the pandemic began, U.S. senators dumped stocks using advance knowledge about the severity of the recession. Reich details
how contracts based on confidential information have created a system whereby the average consumer is unable to compete
An empowered government would be
against the upper class because of their access to this “coin of the realm.”
able to regulate Wall Street by punishing insider trading. Rules on contracts must also protect
workers from exploitation, such as contracts forcing worker attendance during a pandemic.
Echoing Palihapitiya’s argument, Reich uses the airline industry to demonstrate the failure of bankruptcy rules. “Over the last two
decades, every major U.S. airline has been through bankruptcy at least once, usually in order to renege on previously agreed-upon
labor union contracts.” The rules of bankruptcy, coinciding with the promise of being bailed out by the government, have allowed
corporations to exploit bankruptcy to fail their workers. What will happen to employees as corporations file for bankruptcy amidst
the COVID-19 recession?

The final pillar of capitalism, the enforcement mechanism, is the source of reform. The
government is uniquely able to enforce the regulation of corporations. Unfortunately, “wealthy
individuals and corporations that can afford … experienced litigators have a permanent, systemic advantage.” This ability to exert
influence over the enforcement process has been exposed by the pandemic, as corporations robbed the Paycheck Protection
Program with impunity. Reich affirms that “Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism.” This apathy has allowed
corporations to continue pushing their candidates into office, who serve as what Reich dubs their “friendly congressional patrons”
A government empowered by the people would democratically rewrite these
who write the rules.
rules, holding corporations accountable.

But the pandemic has exposed that corporate wings of political parties aren’t working. Reich cites a prominent
study by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, concluding that “the preferences of the average American
appear to have only a minuscule … impact upon public policy.” This has manifested deep
cynicism as both parties squabble over stimulus checks while bailing out big business. As Reich
describes in his proposed set of reforms, one catalyst for change would “reform the nation’s system of campaign finance in order to
get big money out of politics. That would require that the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon be
reversed.”

We can’t rewrite the rules before expunging the “congressional patrons” from office. Countervailing power for the democratically
represented American citizen would “end the upward pre-distributions currently embedded in market rules” that enable
By reforming the pillars of capitalism and
corporations to odiously increase their power during this pandemic.
democracy, we can safeguard against future inequality. Take the hypothetical vaccine creation as an example;
Reich stipulates reforms to the rules of property, stating that “the lengths of patent and copyright protection would be shortened …
and pay-for-delay agreements banned.” The “free market” has written the rules to make restricted access to a lifesaving COVID-19
the government must step in to make the rules fairer not just to save capitalism,
vaccine inevitable, so
but to save lives.

under a rewrite
As for breaking up Big Tech monopolies that have abused anti-competitive market rules, Reich theorizes that,
of the rules of the market, “antitrust would be returned to its original purpose, not only
achieving market efficiency and maximizing consumer welfare but also reducing the political
influence of large aggregates of economic power.” Contract law would be rewritten to prohibit “all stock trades
based on information unavailable to the general public,” thereby banning insider trading and preventing both elected officials and
Wall Street from making profit at the expense of an efficient market and consumers. “Bankruptcy law would give labor agreements a
higher priority,” which will prove essential as businesses continue to file for bankruptcy, leaving their workers nothing.

As these businesses request bailouts, we must heed Palihapitiya: Companies that pour money into stock buybacks shouldn’t be
bailed out. Reich notes that “not only do stock buybacks enrich CEOs … at the expense of smaller investors, they also drain away
money the corporation might otherwise spend on research and development.” Stock buybacks have become a tool for wealth
expansion at the expense of economic sustainability, and corporations suffering right now because of their investment in stock
buybacks should not be bailed out without restructuring to prevent the proliferation of this wasteful manipulation.

Reich’s contention that “instead of directly taxing the current income … of a few and transferring it to the many, a more sensible
approach is to more widely share future wealth” may not be enough in a post-pandemic world where the wealthy have
exponentially enriched themselves. This is illustrated by the game Professor Reich instructs his students to play, detailed in the book.
Rather than accept less money, students (and the majority of Americans) must demonstrate their unwillingness to accept less than
what’s fair, and quit the game if the rules aren’t changed immediately. The students “worry that if their partner ends up with more
of the money, he’ll also end up with far more power, which will rig the game even more.” The end of the pandemic must not lead to
an even further rigged game. We must heed Reich’s words: “If America’s distributional game continues to create a few big winners
and many who consider themselves losers by comparison, the losers will try to stop the game … out of a deep-seated sense of
unfairness and a fear of unchecked power and privilege.”

Other reforms, from increasing the minimum wage to investing in public education, all
stem from the reclamation of
the enforcement mechanism, as politicians take back their power to set fair rules of the game derived from
democratically distributed political power. If the election of political leaders who rebuke the tether of corporate interest isn’t
Perhaps
implemented first, the congressional patrons will continue to rig the game. We return to Chamath Palihapitiya’s treatise:
this pandemic, in exposing the failures of capitalism, serves as the perfect opportunity to
extirpate the congressional patrons and the boards they bail out. If we don’t act, our nation has a lot more
to lose than a summer in the Hamptons.
Growth is sustainable---no limits to growth, decoupling, dematerialization, and
human ingenuity via capitalism
Dr. Rainer Zitelmann 8/8—Doctorates in History and Sociology and is the author of 21 books,
After working as a historian at the Freie Universität Berlin, he later served as section head at the
daily newspaper Die Welt, 8/8/2021, “The Fairy Tale of Finite Resources”, The National Interest,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/fairy-tale-finite-resources-191314, language edited change
denoted by brackets] AMarb

At first glance, it
is an argument that seems to make sense —and it would be crazy [absurd] to oppose: Because
the earth’s raw material resources are finite, infinite growth is impossible. This leads many to
conclude that, somehow, growth must be limited. What is there to this argument?

Warnings about the limits to growth are not new; they have been around for centuries. Here are just a few
examples from the last eighty years: In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared that U.S. oil
reserves would last only thirteen more years. In 1949, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior
announced America’s oil supplies would soon run out. Having learned nothing from its earlier false claims, in
1974, the U.S. Geological Survey said that the United States had only ten years of natural gas
left.

In 1970, the scientist Harrison Brown published a graph in Scientific American in which he estimated
that humanity
would run out of copper shortly after the year 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver were
expected to disappear before 1990. Also in 1970, the ecologist Kenneth Watt predicted that the world would soon run
out of oil. “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any,’” Watt said.

How the Club of Rome Got It Wrong

Published that same year, the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” study attracted a great deal of attention. To date, more
than thirty million copies of the study have been sold in thirty languages. The book warned people to change their ways and
offered a stark message: the planet’s raw materials would soon be depleted, especially oil. In twenty years,
the scientists predicted, the last drop of oil would be used up. And it wasn’t only in relation to oil but for almost all relevant raw
materials that the Club of Rome’s report completely misjudged the date by which they would be exhausted. Predictions
issued at the time suggested that natural resources such as natural gas, copper, lead, aluminum
and tungsten would not still be found in the earth today. Those predictions were based on forecasts for
continued economic growth between the 1970s and the present day. Everything should have been used up by now ;
in some cases, decades ago. Silver was supposed to be depleted in 1985. In fact, in January 2020, the United States
Geological Survey estimated silver reserves worldwide at 560,000 tons.
Before anyone starts shaking their head at all these false predictions, it is worth pointing out that from the beginning of
industrialization until about the 1970s, there was indeed a close correlation between economic growth on the one hand and energy
and raw material consumption on the other.

But based on numerous data series, the American scientist Andrew McAfee proves in his book More from Less,
which was published in 2020, that economic growth has decoupled itself from the consumption of raw
materials. Data for the United States shows that of seventy-two commodities, only six have not yet
reached their consumption maximum. Although the U.S. economy has grown strongly in recent years,
consumption of many commodities is declining.

Back in 2015, the American environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel

noted in his essay The Return of Nature: How Technology
Liberates the Environment, which was published by, that Americans are consuming fewer and fewer raw
materials per capita. Total consumption of steel , copper, fertilizer, wood and paper, which had
previously always risen in tandem with economic growth, had peaked and had been declining
ever since.

Such developments are all due to the laws of much-maligned capitalism: companies are constantly
looking for new ways to produce more efficiently, i.e. to get by with fewer raw materials. They do this, of course,
not primarily to protect the environment, but to cut costs.

Miniaturization and Dematerialization

What’s more, innovations have promoted a trend we call miniaturization or dematerialization. One
example of this trend is the smartphone. Just consider how many devices are contained in your
smartphone and how many raw materials they used to consume. There is a calculator,
telephone, video camera, alarm clock, voice recorder, navigation system, camera, CD player,
compass, answering machine and many more besides.

Many people today no longer have a fax or use paper road maps because they have everything
at their fingertips in their smartphone , and some even do without a wristwatch. In the past, most people had
four separate microphones in their telephone, audio cassette recorder, Dictaphone and video
camera. Today, a smartphone needs only one microphone for all these devices.
I used to be proud of my large record collection, which spanned several shelves. As technology advanced, I bought CDs that all fit on
a single shelf and consumed far fewer raw materials. Today, my girlfriend teases me because I still buy CDs. All of her music is in
digital files, which don’t take up any space. I admit I’m a bit old-fashioned and own several thousand books. I don’t have enough
shelf space for them all, so most of my books are in storage. My father, despite being ninety-two years old, is more modern than I
am and reads lots of books as e-books on his Kindle.

These are just a few of many examples of a trend toward dematerialization. So the reality is more
complex than it might seem at first glance when people say, “Our planet has limited resources, so we can’t grow
indefinitely.” One resource, in particular, is unlimited: Human ingenuity. And this—as the last two
hundred years have repeatedly shown— can best develop under capitalism.
.

Market-based sustainability solves extinction.

Shi-Ling Hsu 21, D'Alemberte Professor of Law at the Florida State University College of Law, “2
How Capitalism Saves the Environment,” Capitalism and the Environment, Cambridge University
Press, 10/31/2021, pp. 28–55
2.8 CHOOSING CAPITALISM TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT: LARGE-SCALE DEPLOYMENT

Finally, a third reason that capitalism

is suited to the job of environmental restoration and protection is
its ability to undertake and complete projects at very large scales. In keeping with a major thesis of this
book, construction at very large scales should give us a little pause, because of the propensity of capital to metastasize into a source
of political resistance to change. But some global problems, especially climate change, may require very large-scale enterprises.
For example, because greenhouse gas emissions may already have passed a threshold for catastrophic
climate change, technology is almost certainly needed to chemically capture carbon dioxide from
ambient air. But carbon dioxide is only about 0.15% of ambient air by molecular weight, and a tremendous amount of
ambient air must be processed just to capture a small amount of carbon dioxide . This technology has
often been referred to as "direct air capture," or "carbon removal." Given that inherent limitation, direct air
capture technology must be deployed at vast scales in order to make any appreciable difference in greenhouse
gas concentrations. There is certainly no guarantee that direct air capture will be a silver bullet. But if it is to be an effectual
item on a menu of survival techniques, it will more assuredly be accomplished under the incentives
of a capitalist economy.

Capitalism might also help with the looming crisis of climate change by helping to ensure the
supply of vital life staples such as food, water, and other basic needs in future shortages caused by
climate-change. In a climate-changed future, there is the distinct possibility that supplies of vital
life staples may run short, possibly for long periods of time. Droughts are projected to last longer, with water
supplies and growing conditions increasingly precarious. Capitalist enterprise could, first of all, provide the impetus
to finally reform a dizzying multitude of price distortions that plague water supply and agriculture
worldwide. Second, capitalist enterprise can undertake scale production of some emergent
technologies that might alleviate shortages. Desalination technology can convert salty seawater
into drinkable freshwater.54 A number of environmental and economic issues need to be solved to deploy these technologies
at large scales, but in a crisis, solutions will be more likely to present themselves .

A technology that is already being adopted to produce food is the modernized version of old-
fashioned greenhouses. The tiny country of the Netherlands, with its 17 million people crowded onto 13,000 square miles,
is the second largest food exporter in the world,55 exporting fully three-quarters that of the United States in 2017.56 The secret to
Dutch agriculture is its climate-controlled, low-energy green-houses that project solar panel-powered artificial sunlight around the
clock. Dutch greenhouses produce lettuce at ten times the yield57 and tomatoes at fifteen times the yield outdoors in the United
States58 while using less than one-thirteenth the amount of water,59 very little in the way of synthetic pesticides and, of course,
very little fertilizer given its advanced composting techniques. Sustained
shortages in a climate-changed future
might require that a capitalist take hold of greenhouse growing and expand production to feed
the masses that might otherwise revolt.

2.9 CHOOSE CAPITALISM

Clearly, the job in front of humankind is enormous, complex, and many-faceted . The best hope is to be able to
identify certain human impacts that are clearly harmful to the global environment, and to disincentivize them. Getting back to
notions of institutions in capitalism, what
is crucial is aligning the right incentives with profit-making
activity. What capitalism does so well — beyond human comprehension — is coordinate activity and send
broad signals about scarcity. Information about a wide variety of environmental phenomena is
extremely difficult to collect and process . If a set of environmental taxes can help establish a network of environ-mental
prices, then an unfathomably large and complex machinery will have been set in motion in the right direction.

Also, because of the need for new scientific solutions to this daunting list of problems, new
science and technology is desperately needed. Capitalism is tried and true in terms of
producing innovation. Again drawing upon the study of institutions, it is not so much that individuals need a profit-motive in
order to tinker, but the prospect of profit-making has to be present in order for institutions, including
corporations, to devote resources, attention, and energy towards the development of solutions to
environmental problems. Corporations can and should demonstrate social responsibility by attempting to mitigate their impacts on
the global environment, but a much more conscious push for new knowledge, new techniques, and new solutions are needed.
Finally, the scale of needed change is profound. Huge networks of infrastructure centered upon a fossil
fuel-centered economy must somehow be replaced or adapted to new ways of generating, transmitting, consuming, and
storing energy. A global system of feeding seven billion humans (and counting), unsustainable on its face, must
be morphed into something else that can fill that huge role. About a billion and a half cars and trucks in
the world must, over time, be swapped out for vehicles that must be dramatically different.

This is a daunting to-do list, but look a bit more carefully among the gloomy news. Elon Musk, a freewheeling,
pot-smoking entrepreneur shows signs of breaking into not one, but two industries dominated by behemoths
with political power. Thanks to California emissions standards, automobile manufacturers have developed cars
that emit a fraction of what they did less than a generation ago. Hybrid electric vehicles have thoroughly
penetrated an American market that powerful American politicians had tried to cordon off for
American manufacturers only. At least two companies have developed meat substitutes that are now
widely judged to be indistinguishable from meat, and have established product outposts in the ancient power centers of
fast food, McDonald's and Burger King. The tiny country of the Netherlands, about half the size of West Virginia, exports
almost as much food as the United States, able to ship fresh produce all the way to Africa. At bottom, all of these
accomplishments and thousands more are and were capitalist in nature. While they collectively repre-sent a trifle of
what still needs to be accomplished, they were also undertaken without the correct incentives in place,
and thus also represent the tremendous promise of capitalism.

4---Perm do both.
Mikko Laamanen and Stefan Wahlen 19, Mikko Laamanen is Lecturer in Marketing at Royal
Holloway, University of London, Stefan Wahlen is Professor in Food Sociology at the University
of Giessen, “The sharing economy and lifestyle movements,” Chapter 5 in Handbook of the
Sharing Economy, 2019.
INTRODUCTION

The sharing economy emerged in the late 2000s with the promise of an emancipatory and
participatory sustainable economy, which started to unfold in the aftermath of the Great Recession and in the context
of the devastating pace of increasing overconsumption. Collaborative consumption in the sharing economy
rests on alternative modes of resource allocation, exchange, and social relations (e.g., Bardhi and
Eckhardt 2012; Belk 2010; Botsman and Rogers 2010; Cruz et al. 2018; Felson and Spaeth 1978). The functional core of the
sharing economy is the material and immaterial assets brought out of disuse into mutual access
and recirculation through physical and digital platforms, and communal interaction (e.g., Acquier et
al. 2017; Cheng 2016; Frenken and Schor 2017).

Current observers of the sharing economy oscillate between seeing the phenomenon as, on the one
hand, a creation of a liberatory space by socially oriented and environmentally aware
collectives, and on the other hand, a new form of turbocharged, rent-seeking capitalism backed
by venture-capital financed platforms (see, e.g., Cruz et al. 2018; Frenken and Schor 2017; Heinrichs 2013; Laamanen
et al. 2018a; Laamanen et al. 2018b; Martin 2016; Slee 2015; Wahlen and Laamanen 2017). Our interpretation of the
sharing economy follows the former view: we see it as a utopian economic model that provides
a means of resilience to localities, strengthening the social grid by creating reciprocal and equal
relations as well as collective identification in economic activity. In this chapter, we approach the
sharing economy from a social movement perspective to account for how collective lifestyle
and identity play out in resistance to the exploitative and profit-maximizing tendencies of
neoliberalism seeping into the sharing economy.
With our approach, weengage in the ongoing dispute on the sharing economy with regard to its
relationship with capitalism. The aim of this chapter is to elaborate on resistance by lifestyle
movements towards the neoliberalization of the sharing economy. For the most part, the sharing
economy may well stand for neoliberal cooptation of collaboration and pacification of
radicalism through which people come to accept the individualization and commercialization of their participation on platforms
and communities. The social movement character in the sharing economy nevertheless becomes
evident when we pose the question when and how communities become mobilized in collective
action to address problems of the mainstream economy. Collective identities and lifestyles
support practices with which these communities resist neoliberalism. We thus ask: how do collective
lifestyles and identity enable resistance practice in the sharing economy? In more specific terms, we
examine sharing economy movements by building upon existing research on theories of new social movements (Buechler 2011;
Melucci 1989, 1996), lifestyle movements (Haenfler et al. 2012), and their enactments within consumption (Wahlen and Laamanen
2015).

We contribute to research on consumption and the sharing economy by emphasizing the

everyday as a locus for social change (see Wahlen 2011; Yates 2015), and in identifying and elaborating
collective resistance practices that challenge neoliberalism and its causatum (della Porta 2015). This
chapter begins with positioning the sharing economy in the contemporary neoliberal political organization of the economy. Of
particular interest to this story are economic counter-movements. We then elaborate on the conceptual
understanding of lifestyles in movement collective action to further consider the various forms of resistance practice in the sharing
economy communities. We close with a discussion on how lifestyle movements of the sharing economy build from everyday
resistance, with suggestions as to what relevance this carries to general understanding of the sharing economy and future research.

THE SHARING ECONOMY, NEOLIBERALISM, AND COUNTER-MOVEMENTS

Originally, the sharing economy advocated relocalization, rehumanization, and

recommunalization of economic activity. Subsequently, the sharing economy is increasingly considered as a conceptual
misnomer—a floating signifier—while in practice, rather than being a liberating force, it brings individual responsibility, the
commercialization of everyday life, and unfettered competition as part of the daily experience of people. Through these
moralities of neoliberalism (see Amable 2011), the sharing economy has become dubbed
“neoliberalism on steroids” (e.g., Martin 2016; Murillo et al. 2017). This chapter considers the sharing
economy in its more radical parts as a response to neoliberalization as its counter-movement
with its own practice and morality (see also Kornberger et al. 2018; Laamanen et al. 2018b).

This perspective connects with Polanyi’s original idea of double-movement, representing the
“action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional
aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods” (Polanyi
1947/2001, 138‒9). During the first great transformation, the reaction to the liberal economic movement was followed by a social
protectionist countermovement, which opposed the marketization of societal and economic relationships (Polanyi 1947/2001).
Tensions between conflicting economic interests in the first great transformation were pacified when the Fordist settlement
provided social protections and higher wages for workers in exchange for increased ability to consume (which ultimately benefited
businesses; Glickman 2009; Lichtenstein 2002).

Della Porta (2015) considers the rise of neoliberalism as the second great transformation, marking the beginning of the post-Fordist
period of flexibilization and precarization of the workforce and, ultimately, the consumer. When
neoliberalism produces
an individualistic consumer, the collective foundations of morality embedded in family,
community, and class are abandoned (Binkley 2004; Laamanen et al. 2018b). Given the manner in which
neoliberal assumptions became woven into the fabric of society, the economic relations and
institutions neoliberalism promotes became viewed as the universal, normal state of affairs, and void of
human agency. The perception that neoliberalism provides prosperity is challenged by various authors who instead see it as the
agentic endeavor of business and politics to undermine democracy with unaccountable organizations and undemocratic, secretive
decision-making (see, e.g., Springer et al. 2016). Beyond such democratic deficits, we are witnessing a dominance of market logic
taking over the private and public sphere, and rather than invariably increasing prosperity, gains that are distributed unevenly.

Under neoliberalism, flourishing forms of resistance in popular counter-movements “emerged as independent from states and with
more of a focus on the forms of protest on collective consumption than on labour . . . [reacting] to the disruption of everyday life”
(della Porta 2015, 46). These disruptions of the quotidian represent problematizations in the routines and habitudes that govern
everyday lives (Borland 2013). What mobilizes participants is the perceived or expected loss of a previous condition and its moral
implications, such as alterations of subsistence routines and changes in social organization and control (Germann Molz 2013; Snow
and Soule 2010). The ongoing economic crises, the disappearance of social protection provided by the state and its failing social
support systems, and the deterioration of other forms of the common good are ailing the already deprived, pauperized working class
and the proletarianized middle class (see Calhoun 2013; della Porta 2015).

Disruption not only causes distress, but also agentic possibilities for rearranging social structures in order to denaturalize the
dominant structure effectively. Here is where collective action comes in. Collective action constitute deliberate, continuous efforts
outside of established political, economic, and social institutions in order to change (or maintain) a particular dominant social order
(della Porta and Diani 2006; Snow 2004; Snow and Soule 2010). The
sharing economy developed to revitalize and
reinstitute forms of social solidarity and cooperation reminiscent of communities pre-dating the
first great transformation (e.g., Eckhardt and Bardhi 2016; Frenken and Schor 2017; Laamanen et al. 2018a; Pais and
Provasi 2015; Wahlen and Laamanen 2017). Then, lifestyle-based movements are located in the everyday,
aiming for social change through aggregated individual action. Here, the targets of mobilized collective action
have shifted from political to cultural and economic actors and change goals (Dubuisson-Quellier 2018; Haenfler et al. 2012; Snow
2004). As such, collectiveaction in the sharing economy encompasses a significant number of
individuals aiming at the disruption of the dominant economic system and the creation of a new
one. These communities attempt to generate new forms of economic interaction and community sustenance in shared lifestyles
and identities of collective action.

LIFESTYLES, COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES, AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

Collective action is rooted in issues or conditions with emotional and moral associations, shared among a sufficient number of
people, and serious enough to call for action (Snow and Soule 2010). To be able to mobilize individuals, grievances
need to be interpreted and communicated, that is, framed in connection to a larger set of values, beliefs, and
cultural markers that challenge the dominant institutions. Collective action frames provide the interpretive
schema for grievances: they “assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to
mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists” (Snow and Benford
1988, 198). Frames clarify and substantiate identities in collective action as the “individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional
connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution” (Polletta and Jasper 2001, 285) needed for recruitment and
maintaining solidarity (Jasper 2014).

Beyond ideas, various resources need to be mobilized . Classical social movements secured resources through
formal, hierarchical organizations typically based on understanding of Marxist class politics (e.g., Calhoun 1993). In contrast, new
social movements emerged within capitalist welfare states as direct reactions to “postindustrialism, late modernity, advanced
capitalism, or postmodernity” and the institutionalized “capitalist markets, bureaucratic states, scientized relationships, and
instrumental rationality” (Buechler 2011, 159). In new
social movements, the key mobilizing dimension is
located in everyday life, lifestyles, and social reproduction , and identifications with race and ethnicity, sexual
identities, environmental concerns, and countercultural beliefs. Socially and politically constructed collective identity coincides with
the “fluidity and multiplicity of identities in late modernity” (Buechler 2011, 160), bridging between heterogeneous participation and
the various personal needs of the participants (Melucci 1989).

A lifestyle is thus both material and symbolic, addressing the basic requirements of the individuals as well as signaling distinction and
group membership. In this way, lifestyle
connects agency and social structure. A lifestyle bridges
between the private and public as well as the individual and collective; in the context of
consumption, “building bonds of solidarity and cooperation among people, bonds which are a
fundamental resource for collective action” (Forno and Graziano 2014, 145). Collective features of lifestyles denote
both personal preferences (for example, taste, identity) as well as group-level institutions (such as beliefs, norms, and values).
Participation in lifestyle movements is: “(1) relatively individualized and private, (2) on-going rather than episodic, and (3) aimed at
changing cultural and economic practices rather than targeting the state” (Haenfler et al. 2012, 6). Given these characteristics,
collective identity in lifestyle movements is a “resource and reference point for individuals as they craft morally coherent and
meaningful personal identities” (Haenfler et al. 2012, 8). Lifestyle
becomes political participation, and
consumption an area of activism, resistance, and civic participation (Buechler 2011; de Moor 2017;
Dobernig and Stagl 2015; Forno 2015; Halkier and Holm 2008; Portwood-Stacer 2013); personal identities, behaviors, and choices
are harmonized towards a transformed ideal state, providing solutions to social problems to be enacted in private, public, and
institutional settings.

The sharing economy is typically analyzed in individualized and commercialized terms.

For instance, beyond a homophilic identification (Ladegaard 2018), any feelings of community or solidarity are excluded; typically
distinction building creates rifts between participants and varieties of exchange (Schor et al. 2016). Indeed, the we-ness in the
sharing economy, while central to its assumptions, has not been central to its practice or analysis. Some recent studies have
elaborated on collective identity and a shared moral fundament in the sharing economy context (Kornberger et al. 2018; Laamanen
et al. 2018b). Using a lifestyle movements lens, we can further particularize on the we-ness of everyday resistance practices, which is
what we turn to next.

RESISTANCE IN THE EVERYDAY AND THE SHARING ECONOMY

In the sharing economy, participants allow others to have access to (that is, share) physical space,
mobility and transport, commodities, time and skills, as well as money to solve immediate problems. At
their core, ridesharing to get from A to B, or communal trading of scarce resources, are satisfying needs
and necessities rather than aiming at broader social change . Practices of sharing relate to the improvement of
immediate daily lives of consumers. Practices and routines provide the space and time for everyday
consumption (Wahlen 2011; Warde 2005). Routines consist of mundane “objects and actions where there are no alternatives
(for example, infrastructure), where there is no social distinction to harvest (for example, washing powder), where actions are
heavily habituated and conventionalized” (Jacobsen and Dulsrud 2007, 477). Intentionality embedded in routines may focus on the
satisfaction of needs and necessities whereby collaborative consumption may remain individualized without the aim of political
change (cf. Halkier and Holm 2008).

Nevertheless, political change needs to be rooted in everyday life. To Lefebvre (2014), the everyday
is an expression of, and a place in, politics and the economy. Resistance comes across in
opposition to a hegemonic and individualistic lifestyle; and in a praxeological understanding of the everyday,
sharing becomes resistance when consumers on a broader scale try to “withstand and
respond to undesired market discourses and practices ” (Moraes et al. 2010, 274). This resistance has “on the
one hand spatial, temporal and praxeological relevance and . . . on the other hand . . . [a] collective, contentious and ideological
nature” (Wahlen and Laamanen 2015, 398). The way in which lifestyle movement becomes manifested in the practices of the
sharing economy requires considering what makes the resistance practice collective. In what follows, we illustrate three general
themes in collective resistance practices in the everyday sharing economy context, namely: (1) localization; (2) ideology and meaning
creation; and (3) forms of organizing. As we discuss these in detail below, it is worth bearing in mind that these practices are
interdependent and overlapping.

Sharing as enacted resistance is bound to spaces and temporalities of the everyday life. Collective
resistance practices in the sharing economy are connected to particular localities. The economization of social
relations ingrained in neoliberalism turns a blind eye to private, collaborative relations among
family, neighborhoods, and the community . Recent research drawing on the Polanyian concept of householding
elaborates on communities creating self-sufficiency and autonomy from the mainstream economy by providing for themselves in
reciprocal relations (Sahakian 2017; Laamanen et al. 2018b). Where historically householding was considered to relate only to closed
communities in agrarian and semi-industrialized settings, digital networked and platform-aided social interaction in the sharing
economy can extend the spatial reach of the concept beyond physical spaces. For
instance, sharing food in urban
food commons (Morrow 2019) exemplifies how localities are of specific relevance for how the
movement unfolds and connects its various participants. The places of exchange and the types of
physical and digital networks in the sharing economy can be understood as social movement
spaces (Nicholls 2009) that combine kin and stranger.
Communities are also institutional domains that create and carry ideologies and meaning upon
which collective identities are built. Values, beliefs, and norms in lifestyles question normative
ideologies (Laamanen et al. 2018b; Parker and Morrow 2017) and, in turn, generate their own alternatives.
For instance, communities of sustainability in consumer lifestyles engender activism in
opposition to the economic growth paradigm and social injustice associated with the prevailing
capitalist economic system (Morrow 2019). Mobilization further draws on meaning in everyday
experiences. For instance, mobilizing collective action frames illustrate problems that connect the participants and incite action
to challenge status quo, that is, the structuring of exchanges and the economy in the everyday. Martin (2016) explains how various
frames, both for and against, are mobilized in the sharing economy. These draw on either the opportunities for sustainability in and
around the economy and consumption, or against the fortification neoliberalism through unregulated marketplaces. Frames make
sense of and mobilize participants to join and maintain their supply of resources to the sharing economy as a whole and various
initiatives in particular.

Laamanen et al. (2015) elaborate how mobilizing collective action frames are used by community
exchange networks of timebanks. These lifestyle movement initiatives problematize the
monetized market system and the transmuting power between the state and the market as the root causes for
needing new forms of everyday sustenanc e. Subsequently, timebanks offer remedial strategies through which
community co-production creates pools of transferable skills and resources in a democratic process that ultimately generates lasting
institutions in the new economy (Laamanen et al. 2015). The
ultimate motivation is to bring about “a paradigm
change for a democratic society” with “personal lifestyles . . . transformed and enhanced” in
communal exchange (Laamanen et al. 2015, 465). Similarly, the sharing of food to avoid food waste promotes alternative
action frames that shifts the perspective away from the market in support of a communal production, consumption, and ownership
perspective (Morrow 2019).

Yet, lifestyle identity politics are challenging as they may simultaneously dictate community obligations as well as delineate
subgroup distinctions. Participants may identify with a global movement rather than any particular group, or they may feel strongly
about their community but ignore the larger field of these organizations (Flesher Fominaya 2010). To exemplify, Lichterman (1996)
recounts how green political groups advocated strongly for certain diets as the moral obligation of community members. Bertella
(2018) demonstrates this with the empirical example of vegetarianism which, understood as a lifestyle (movement), opposes the
mainstream food system, while the lifestyle movement also involves various subgroups such as flexitarians (Bertella 2018). Related
to the sharing economy, consumers may not necessarily prefer Uber over a taxi because of the system behind it, but rather because
of convenience and fit within their daily practices. Yet, use of certain types of sharing economy platforms can carry moral obligations
to the community, which ultimately render certain choices unavailable.

If a lifestyle connects and mobilizes individuals in and beyond their individual actions, then
resistance is not only a reaction to “the market,” to consume or not to consume, but also
includes pre-emptive ways of gaining power and/or emancipation from neoliberal corporate
and political authorities. Here the key challenges relate to how mobilization actually becomes organized. Lifestyles are
enacted mainly in private, and related to the continuity of identity and action, with potential ephemeral bursts of protest or other
demonstrative forms of visible collective action. As such, similar to new social movements, in general, lifestyle mobilization is
founded on the periodicity of latency and resistance. In social movement studies, Melucci (1996) claimed that during latency (that is,
lack of visible activity), movements
construct views on a new utopian reality , which become visible
when they are confronted directly by the dominant ideologies , such as the beliefs and practices of the
neoliberal politico-economic system. Latency and the visibility of a lifestyle movement mobilization is the visible collective
expression of the movement divorced from the everyday individual practice. Haenfler et al. (2013, 13) see lifestyle movements as:

collective action reservoirs, pools of potential participants whose collective value identities make them an ideal “reserve guard”
ready to periodically support particular protest events and mobilizations . . . LM [lifestyle movement] participants may be
occasional/temporary activists . . . oriented toward individual efforts at cultural change, driven especially by a desire to live out a
moral identity or code.

Individually performed everyday resistance coincides with the collective organizing of collaboration and mobilization drawing on the
everyday as an enabling condition (Melucci 1996).
In the commercial sharing economy, platforms organize and govern both the people and
processes taking place on them: proprietorship extends beyond the exchangemediating function
of the platform, to governing people’s behaviors (even without formal contracts, such as for employment) and
processes (for example, access with regard to place, time, and availability; see Purnhagen and Wahlen 2017). Arvidsson (2018)
has argued that social movement activism in the sharing economy is extending political impact via
entrepreneurial means. This assertion mirrors the classical professionalization argument of McCarthy and Zald (1977). They
state that successful movements depend on the availability of resources, formal organization, and
movement entrepreneurs to maintain and manipulate action. Thus, maintaining political
pressure in consumption relies on “signalling activities of SMOs [social movement
organizations] that let individual consumption choices appear as a form of collective action [while]
political consumerism remains based on a myriad of individual decisions that observers in and of the market can understand as some
kind of collective statement of purpose” (Holzer 2006, 413).

To Slee (2015), the manipulation of meaning starts with the businesses that frame themselves as social movements: he illustrates
how social movement framing was utilized by corporate platforms to present themselves as harbingers of progress, while actually
building in “a movement for deregulation” of the market (Slee 2015, 51). Similarly, Dubuisson-Quellier (2013) has demonstrated how
corporations revamped social movement tactics to market devices: for instance, companies take up claims promoted by the
environmental movement to create new business ventures. Indeed, individual consumers may be recruited to participate in sharing
economy activism to oppose the persistent growth (pro-sustainability) and injustice (pro-social justice) associated with the prevailing
capitalist economic system but become pawns as resources for capitalistic renewal (see Dubuisson-Quellier 2015).

As illustrated above, lifestyle movements share the traditions of new social movements (e.g., Haenfler 2013). They search for ways
to organize communities and ultimately society in a more inclusive and democratic manner by reclaiming and nurturing common
resources, building forms of joint ownership and governance, and reclaiming power from oppressive technologies and ownership
structures. Drawing on ideological practice renders everyday action prefigurative, both in terms of creating interdependencies
between the organization of production, consumption, and disposal, as well as in relation to community governance (de Bakker et al.
2017; della Porta 2015; Haenfler et al. 2012; Laamanen et al. 2019; Yates 2015). To counter the problems pertaining to
representation, slow-moving structures, and the elitist governance of old social movements, contemporary movements highlight
democratic participation, organizational experimentation, and autonomy in their activities (e.g., de Bakker et al. 2017; Buechler
2011).

The prefigurative ideal asserts a moral conviction of democracy, whereby individual and collective actions are inherently part of the
change and future of the movement: there is no separation between means and ends, whereby the future of democratic
participation and resource-sharing cannot be achieved by force or oligarchic decision-making mechanisms. Moralities delineate
community boundaries through communicative and connective technologies in conjunction with strategies and mechanisms for self-
organizing and collective governance of resources (e.g., Laamanen et al. 2019; Laamanen et al. 2018b; Morrow 2019; Rowe 2017).
This is necessary, as in the sharing economy, older forms of collective representation through mechanisms similar to trade unionism
or consumer associations that democratize questions of ownership, distribution, and governance have proven highly problematic
(see Schor 2014; Laamanen et al. 2018a).

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The way in which lifestyle movements challenge particular hegemonic ways of the mainstream
economy is not unavoidably grounded in the idea of opposing neoliberalism, but a reaction to the
changing immediate contexts and consequences caused by it. This chapter started with the question of how
collective lifestyles and identity enable resistance practice in the sharing economy. By anchoring our perspective with lifestyle
movements, we scrutinize the extent to which lifestyle
movements in the sharing economy may engender
collective action for an emancipatory, participatory, and more sustainable sharing economy.
This stands in stark contrast to the dominant neoliberal sharing economy on commercial
platforms.

The current literature emphasizes the nature of the sharing economy as individualized and
commercialized. While this is certainly one part of the story, accepting this as the full picture of
the phenomenon would denote turning a blind eye to the variety of radical interaction within
the sharing economy. Similarly, though communality and non-commercialized relationships were central to the origins of the
sharing economy literature, we-ness in the sharing economy has not been central to its analysis.

From this perspective, what relocalization, rehumanization, and recommunalization requires is a focus
on everyday collective actions in the sharing economy. This is where the contribution of this chapter and
our focus on everyday collective lifestyles and identity in resisting neoliberalization comes in. The lifestyle
movement approach holds that consumers’ collective action enables resistance in the sharing
economy (Wahlen and Laamanen 2015), while taking note that action is contained mainly within the private context. Lifestyle is a
basis to understanding the ongoing conflicts between traditional and newer forms of community as well as a building block of
collective identity. Similarly, instead of demonstrations and street protest, the
“banality” of everyday lifestyles
becomes central to the politics enacted and imagined by those activists and participants
constructing utopian futures in the sharing economy beyond profit maximization.
As we have elaborated, neoliberalism exists in a dialectic relationship with sharing economy lifestyle movements. The collective
resistance practices build on localizing, identities and meaning, and forms of organizing. These may render the communities and
their practices low-visibility in comparison to the commercial sharing economy; yet, it does allow what the commercial sharing
economy clearly fails to do, namely, propagate democratic participation on a local level for the collective good. Low visibility also
stands testament to the assumptions of lifestyle politics in new social movements of the sharing economy. The submerged networks
of exchange of individually performed everyday resistance and community organizing—through the generation of values and frames
—are easy to dismiss as non-existent and tangential as they only emerge from latency when confronted with dominant ideologies.
When the lifestyle politics of the sharing economy movements challenge the current legal systems by blurring the traditional
distinctions between producer and consumer roles (Purnhagen and Wahlen 2017), or in other ways challenge the neoliberal political
economy, a reaction from dominant institutions becomes eminent (see also Laamanen et al. 2019).

Beyond contesting, consumer activity may reproduce normative practices. The debate on the impact of local communities to well-
being and on the sharing economy is still unresolved. The sharing economy may indeed work for the benefit of the dominant market
actors in continuing oppression when the social movement initiatives of the sharing economy are “doomed” to latent activity.
Whether working within and parallel to the dominant system subverts energy from actual
systemic change remains to be shown in an empirical examination of the systemic collective
action of lifestyle movements. However, moving on from individualist accounts and the
acceptance of the sharing economy as only a reification of commercial interest is the initial
step towards a consideration of the sharing economy as a locus where social and economic
experimentation advances local sufficiency, autonomy, and thriving. Collective lifestyles and identity can
serve as an entry point to future investigation of the “misnomer” of the sharing economy. As such, resistance to dominant systems is
not to be found in the overt protest, but in the very specificity of the ordinary and its various practices advancing societal,
sustainable transformations.

Past the tipping point and the alt is dictatorship and genocide---only tech can
solve and renewables are good.
Eric Levitz 5/17/21. Senior Writer at New York Magazine. MA Johns Hopkins. "We’ll Innovate
Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying". Intelligencer. 5-17-2021.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/climate-biden-green-tech-innovation.html

Today’s best-case ecological scenario was a horror story just three decades ago. In 1993, Bill Clinton
declared that global warming presented such a profound threat to civilization that the U.S. would have to bring its “emissions of
greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000.” Instead, we waited until 2020 to do so; in the interim, humanity
burned more carbon than it had since the advent of agriculture. Now, it will take a historically
unprecedented, worldwide economic transformation to freeze warming at “only” 2 degrees — a
level of temperature rise that will turn “once in a century” storms into annual events, drown entire
island nations, and render major cities in the Middle East uninhabitable in summertime (at least for those
whose lifestyles involve “walking outdoors without dying of heatstroke”). This is what passes for a utopian vision in
2021. If we confine ourselves to mere optimism — and assume that every Paris Agreement signatory meets its current pledged
target for decarbonization — then warming will hit 2.4 degrees by century’s end .

The reality of our ecological predicament invites denial of our political one. Put simply, it
is hard to reconcile the scale of
the climate crisis with the limits of contemporary American politics. Delusions rush in to fill the gap.
Among these is the fantasy of national autonomy; the notion that the United States can save the planet or destroy it, depending on
the precise timeline of its domestic decarbonization. A rapid energy transition in the U.S. is a vital cause, not least for its potential to
expedite similar transformations abroad. But the battle for a sustainable planet will be won or lost in the developing world. Although
American consumption played a central role in the history of the climate crisis, it is peripheral to the planet’s future: Over the
coming century, U.S. emissions are expected to account for only 5 percent of the global total.

There is also the delusion of “de-growth’s” viability. The fact that there is no plausible path for
global economic expansion that won’t entail climate-induced death and displacement has led some
environmentalists to insist on global stagnation . Yet there is neither a mass constituency for this
project, nor any reason to believe that there will be any time soon. Freeze the status-quo
economy in amber, and you’ll condemn nearly half of humanity to permanent poverty . Divide
existing GDP into perfectly even slices, and every person on the planet will live on about $5,500
a year. American voters may express a generalized concern about the climate in surveys, but they don’t seem willing to
accept even a modest rise in gas prices — let alone a total collapse in living standards — to address
the issue. Meanwhile, any Chinese or Indian leader who attempted to stymy income growth in the name
of sustainability would be ousted in short order. It’s conceivable that one could radically reorder advanced economies in a
manner that enabled living standards to rise even as GDP fell; Americans might well find themselves happier and more secure in an
ultra-low-carbon communal economy in which individual car ownership is heavily restricted, and housing, healthcare, and myriad
low-carbon leisure activities are social rights. But nothing short of an absolute dictatorship could affect such a
transformation at the necessary speed. And the specter of eco-Bolshevism does not haunt the Global North.
Humanity is going to find a way to get rich sustainably, or die trying.

Thus, the chasm between the ecologically necessary and the politically possible can only be
bridged by technological advance. And on that front, the U.S. actually has the resources to make a decisive
contribution to global decarbonization — and some political will to leverage those resources. Unfortunately, due to some
combination of fiscal superstitions and misplaced priorities, the Biden administration’s proposed investments in green
innovation remain paltry. An American Jobs Plan with much higher funding for green R&D is both imminently winnable and
environmentally imperative. U.S. climate hawks should make securing such legislation a top priority.

The choice before us is techno-optimism or barbarism.

If governments are forced to choose between increasing income growth in the present, and mitigating
temperature rise in the future, they are going to pick the former. We’ll get cheap, lab-grown Kobe beef
before we get a U.S. Senate willing to tax meat, and steel plants powered by “ green hydrogen” before we get
anarcho-primitivism with Chinese characteristics.

The question is whether we’ll get such breakthroughs before it’s too late.

Techno-optimism has its hazards, but the progress we’ve made toward decarbonization has come largely through
technological innovation. When India canceled plans to construct 14 gigawatts of new coal-fired power
stations in 2019, it did not do so in deference to international pressure or domestic environmental
movements, but rather to the cost-competitiveness of solar energy. The same story holds across
Asia’s developing countries: Thanks to a ninefold reduction in the cost of solar energy over the past decade, the number of
new coal plants slated for construction in the region has fallen by 80 percent. Meanwhile, the road to an electric-car revolution was
cleared by a collapse in the cost of lithium batteries, the challenge of powering cities with solar energy on cloudy days was eased by
a 70 percent drop in the price of utility-scale batteries, and wind power grew 40 percent cheaper. Our
species remains
lackluster at solidarity and self-government, but we’ve got a real knack for building cool shit.
The technological progress of the past decade was not sufficient to compensate for tepid climate policy. But real techno-utopianism
has never been tried: As of 2019, global spending on clean energy R&D totaled $22 billion a year, or 3 percent of the Pentagon’s
annual budget. Increasing spending on such research — while expediting cost-reductions in existing technologies by deploying them
en masse — should be twin priorities of American climate policy.

The preconditions for green industrialization can be made in America.

The United States has more fiscal capacity and better-financed research universities than any nation on the planet. And, for all the
pathologies of our politics, public investment in green tech inspires far weaker opposition than many
less-indispensable climate policies. In fact, late last year, with Republicans controlling the Senate and Donald Trump in
the White House, the U.S. increased funding for zero-emission technology R&D by $35 billion. America does not have
sovereignty over enough humans to save the planet by slashing our domestic emissions . But
we just might have the resources and political economy necessary to help the developing
world save us all.

Although progress on renewables has exceeded optimistic expectations, the technical obstacles to global decarbonization
remain immense. In the most optimistic scenario, scaling up existing, cost-competitive technologies can get us about 16 percent of
the emissions reductions necessary for achieving net-zero by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Driving down the
price of tech we already have will get us another 39 percent. The rest must
come from technologies that have yet
to be fully developed. We need electrified cement, hydrogen-powered steel plants, and
evaporative cooling. We need utility-scale energy storage, electric airplanes, and ultra-high
voltage transmission lines. And we’d be remiss to not toss a bit of our collective wealth at game-changing hail marys like
nuclear fusion.

Capitalism is inevitable—their answers are influenced by cognitive distortions

Boldizzoni 21 (Francesco Boldizzoni is Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology; 02-26-21; Economic Sociology and Political Economy;
“How Capitalism Survives: Social Theory and Structural Change”;
https://economicsociology.org/2021/02/26/how-capitalism-survives-social-theory-and-
structural-change/)//ZW
For as long as neoliberalism – the face that capitalism has assumed since the 1980s – has been showing signs of aging, there has been a tendency to
view every crisis as a harbinger of impending epochal change. This is true even for crises that do not originate in the economy or finance, as shown by
current debates about the world after Covid-19. The interesting fact is that the sense of doom that surrounds these critical events fuels not only the
hope of overcoming the disastrous social model that has dominated these last decades, but capitalism as such, which is hastily defined
as “unsustainable” for the inequalities it undeniably produces, the racial injustice it perpetuates, the harm it does to the environment, and so
on. the ruling classes to justify their privileges. If capitalism is an ideology, it will be enough to

demystify it; once the deception is unveiled, people will see the light, is the reasoning of Thomas Piketty. More often, expectations
grow in the wake of fantasies of radical change that are harbored independent of any social
theory. In this theoretical vacuum, anything becomes possible: human agency is thought to be
all powerful. Capitalism can be overthrown, activists tell us. You just have to want it and persuade other people to
want it. In any case, as soon as each crisis is over, these hopeful people are faced with the inertia of

history that invariably frustrates their desires. This problem prompted me to write Foretelling the End of Capitalism:
Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx. The book seeks to explain the persistence of capitalism in the Western world by building a more rigorous
theory of its dynamics. To
understand how capitalism is still around, despite all the troubles it has
caused, I perform two related operations. The first is to examine the unfulfilled forecasts of its
death that have followed one another since the mid-nineteenth century . Contrary to a widespread perception,
these did not emerge from left-wing intellectual circles only but from conservative ones too. It is,
of course, important to contextualize social forecasting historically, but also to identify its errors. Using this information, I then get to the second
step, which is to outline a theory of capitalism. The
theory I am going after should clarify what capitalism is made
of, what forces have kept it alive, and possibly give us some clue as to where it is or isn’t headed .
We can classify forecasts into four types based on the causal chain they assume. First, there are the implosion theories typical of orthodox Marxism,
according to which capitalism would implode because of its economic contradictions. A second group includes the exhaustion theories of the likes of
John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. For these thinkers, capital accumulation would stop at some point due to environmental limits, saturation
of material needs, moral or civilizational progress. Next come the theories of convergence that were particularly in vogue in the interwar period and the
following years of the “end of ideology.” These stressed how technological development and the trend toward state planning were making capitalism
and socialism increasingly resemble each other. Finally, mention should be made of the cultural involution theories associated with Joseph Schumpeter,
Daniel Bell, and to some extent Jürgen Habermas. These pointed to the self-defeating character of bourgeois society, emphasizing how capitalism, by
breeding its parasites and critics, was undermining its own values while even the political superstructure erected to save the system from itself was
prey to disintegrative tendencies. Equally varied is the repertoire of forecasting mistakes . They range from
cognitive distortions, or biases in thinking due to well-known limitations of human cognition,
to more fundamental theoretical flaws that reflect a misapprehension of the relationships
between social realms or involve the use of inappropriate explanatory models . However, there is a
factor that seems to have operated at a deeper level and this is the irrational faith in progress

that has characterized much of modern social science . In fact, many forecasters shared two
attitudes that were both legacies of the Enlightenment: an unshakable belief that the future would bring good
things and an equally strong confidence in the capacity of reason to detect laws of historical
development. Such laws would enable one to anticipate not only what was or wasn’t reasonable to expect from the future but actually how
the future would look like. If the flaws that plague capitalism have not proved decisive for its demise, then

should we conclude that its persistence is due to its virtues? The typical explanation of
mainstream economics is that capitalism is sustained by its supposed efficiency , thanks to which it also
tends to prevail over other systems. I don’t buy this “efficiency view ” either. My thesis is that the reasons why capitalism

persists have nothing to do with the quality of its fabric but are to be found in the social
structure in which it is embedded and that two elements, combined, are involved in its reproduction: hierarchy and
individualism. All complex societies are to some extent hierarchical, but capitalist society has inherited from the
feudal society out of which it grew some highly asymmetrical power relations. The same dependence created by need that used to bind serfs to their
lords now binds food delivery riders to their billionaire exploiters. Capitalism replaced old hierarchies with new
hierarchies. It brought about a new category, namely, class, that is still very central to our societies. While social distinctions in the old world
reflected status at birth, in the new world they are based on the ability to accumulate money. In this sense, capital led to a

reconfiguration of social stratification. Yet, the true element of novelty that accompanied the rise of capitalism, and the one that
distinguishes it most, is individualism. People today feel motivated by their preferences, needs, and rights, rather than by the norms and duties that
come from belonging to a community. They have relationships mediated by contracts and mainly resort to the market to meet their needs .
Over
time, this market logic and the underlying profit motive have become increasingly generalized,
even extending to sensitive spheres of human life such as work and health care. These
hierarchical social structures and individualistic values have taken shape over many centuries
and can’t suddenly disappear. If hierarchy has been with us for almost all time, individualism is intertwined with
the particular form taken by modernization in this part of the world. In a way, it was the price to pay to be free from
oppressive forms of social control and able to make decisions for oneself. Fortunately, however, not all Western societies are

hierarchical and individualistic to the same degree, which explains the existence of more or
less tolerable varieties of capitalism. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not think that capitalism will go on forever. All social
systems in human history have had a beginning and, after undergoing a slow yet relentless evolution, they are eventually turned into something else.
There is no reason to believe that capitalism will be an exception. But
it won’t die because of any internal contradictions
nor just because we want it to. Moreover, if we try to imagine what kind of system could evolve
from capitalism in a few centuries, we might not like it either. As Ralf Dahrendorf once observed, the oppressed of one epoch
have never become the rulers of the next. Elites have always been superseded by competing elites. That’s why, I think, achieving greater social justice
under capitalism should be the highest priority for progressives. As I mentioned at the outset, I wrote this book with an eye for those who dream about
big system change. History shows how difficult it is to achieve even small, incremental changes. While it is always good to aim high, one must put their
best energies into battles that can be won. Ending neoliberalism, which is only forty years old after all, looks like a more reasonable bet.

Alternative causes mass death---only capitalism enables a peaceful solution to

poverty.
Rainer Zitelmann 21. German historian and author of “The Rich in Public Opinion.” "Violence
Is History’s Great Economic Leveler." National Interest. 6-30-2021.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/violence-history%E2%80%99s-great-economic-leveler-
188974

Another question that is all too rarely asked is: What would be the price of eliminating inequality? In
2017, the renowned
Stanford historian and scholar of ancient history Walter Scheidel presented an impressive
historical analysis of this question: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the
Twenty-First Century. He concludes that societies that have been spared mass violence and catastrophes have never experienced
substantial reductions in inequality.

Substantial reductions in inequality have only ever been achieved as the result of violent shocks, primarily consisting of war,
revolution, state failure and systems collapse, and plague.

According to Scheidel, the

greatest levelers of the twentieth century did not include peaceful social
reforms, they were the two world wars and the communist revolutions. More than 100 million
people died in each of the two world wars and in the communist social experiments .
Total War as a Great Leveler

World War II serves as Scheidel’s strongest example of “total war” leveling . Take Japan: In 1938,
the wealthiest 1 percent of the population received 19.9 percent of all reported income before
taxes and transfers. Within the next seven years, their share dropped by two-thirds, all the way
down to 6.4 percent. More than half of this loss was incurred by the richest tenth of that top
bracket: their income share collapsed from 9.2 percent to 1.9 percent in the same period, a decline by almost four-fifths. The
declared real value of the income of the largest 1 percent of estates in Japan’s population fell by 90 percent between 1936 and 1945
and by almost 97 percent between 1936 to 1949. The top 0.1 percent of all estates lost even more during this period, 93 and 98
percent, respectively. During this period, the Japanese economic system was transformed as state intervention gradually created a
planned economy that preserved only a facade of free-market capitalism. Executive bonuses were capped, rental income was fixed
by the authorities, and between 1935 and 1943 the top income tax rate in Japan doubled.

Significant leveling also took place in other countries during wartime. Accordingto Scheidel’s analysis, the two
world wars were among the greatest levelers in history. The average percentage drop of top
income shares in countries that actively fought in World War II as frontline states was 31
percent of the prewar level. This is a robust finding because the sample consists of a dozen
countries. The only two countries in which inequality increased during this period were also those farthest from the major
theaters of war (Argentina and South Africa).

Low savings rates and depressed asset prices, physical destruction and the loss of foreign assets, inflation and progressive taxation,
rent and price controls, and nationalization all contributed in varying degrees to equalization. The wealth of the rich was
dramatically reduced in the two world wars, whether countries lost or won, suffered occupation during or after the war, were
democracies or run by autocratic regimes.

The economic consequences of the two world wars were, therefore, devastating for the rich —a fact
that stands in direct opposition to the thesis that it was capitalists that instigated the wars in pursuit of their own economic
interests. Contrary to the popular perception that the lower classes suffered most in the wars, in economic terms it was the
capitalists who were the biggest losers.

Incidentally, the left-wing economist Thomas Piketty comes to a similar conclusion. In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
he argues that progressive taxation in the twentieth century was primarily a product of the two world wars and not of democracy.
Poverty is Eliminated Peacefully

The priceof reducing inequality has thus usually involved violent shocks and catastrophes, whose
victims have been not only the rich but millions and millions of people. Neither nonviolent
land reforms nor economic crises nor democratization has had as great a leveling effect
throughout recorded history as these violent upheavals . If the goal is to distribute income and wealth more
equally, says historian Scheidel, then we simply cannot close our eyes to the violent ruptures that have so often proved necessary to
achieve that goal. We
must ask ourselves whether humanity has ever succeeded in equalizing the
distribution of wealth without considerable violence . Analyzing thousands of years of human
history, Scheidel’s answer is no. This may be a depressing finding for many adherents of egalitarian ideas.

However, if we shift perspective, and ask not “How do we reduce inequality?” but “How do we reduce
poverty?” then we can provide an optimistic answer: Not violent ruptures of the kind that led to
reductions of inequality, but very peaceful mechanisms, namely innovations and growth,
brought about by the forces of capitalism, have led to the greatest declines in poverty. Or, to put it
another way: The greatest “levelers” in history have been violent events such as wars, revolutions,
state and systems collapses, and pandemics, but the greatest poverty reducer in history has
been capitalism. Before capitalism came into being, most of the world’s population was living in
extreme poverty—in 1820, the rate stood at 90 percent. Today, it’s down to less than 10
percent. And the most remarkable aspect of all this progress is that, in the recent decades since the end of
communism in China and other countries , the decline in poverty has accelerated to a pace
unmatched in any previous period of human history. In 1981, the rate was still 42.7 percent ; by
2000, it had fallen to 27.8 percent, and in 2021 it was only 9.3 percent.

The transition would be so politically disastrous that it’d irreversibly set back
political progress against climate change. Speed is key, so only existing
dematerialization and renewables can solve in time.
Klein 8/31/21, Opinion Writer at the New York Times, former Founder of Vox, and author of
“Why We’re Polarized” (Ezra, “Transcript: Ezra Klein Answers Listener Questions” from ‘The Ezra
Klein Show’ podcast, The New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-ask-me-anything.html,
Accessed 09-1-2021)
But now let me talk about degrowth more in the terms of it is a direct political project, which is as an answer to climate change. I
would cut this into a few pieces. Is degrowth necessary for addressing climate change? Is it the fastest way to
address climate change? And is it desirable? It has to be at least one of those things to be the strategy you’d want to take.

And I don’t think it is. Let’s start with necessary. Many countries in Europe, even the United States, are
growing while reducing their carbon footprint. Now, you could say they’re not doing so fast enough depending on
the country. But they could all do so much faster if there was enough political will to deploy more
renewable technology, to tax carbon, to do a bunch of things that we have not been able to pass. So it is clearly
true that we can decouple growth and energy usage.
Hickel, to be fair, will say that that may be true. But given the speed at which we need to act, we can’t just be deploying renewable
energy technology. It would also help the situation if we stopped using as much through material consumption. That is, I think,
conceptually true and politically false.
I mean, let’s just state that speed is, first and foremost, a political problem. There is a delta between where
we are right now in terms of what we are doing on climate change and where we could be . That
delta is big, and that delta gets bigger every year because it gets harder every year. And the time we have to act before
we start getting some of the really truly catastrophic feedback loops in play is shortening. So you’re
now talking here about the speed at which you can move politics.

So for something to be faster, it doesn’t just need to be faster if you implemented it . It needs to
be something you can implement such it accelerates the politics of radical climate action. And
that’s where I think degrowth completely falls apart. And I have tried to look for the answer people give on this, and
I’ve never found one that is convincing.

Technological innovation successfully dematerializes growth.

McAfee 19, *Andrew Paul McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, is cofounder and
codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management;
(2019, “More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer
Resources and What Happens Next”, https://b-ok.cc/book/5327561/8acdbe)

There is no shortage of examples of dematerialization. I chose the ones in this chapter because they illustrate a
set of fundamental principles at the intersection of business, economics, innovation, and our impact on our planet. They are:

We do want more all the time, but not more resources. Alfred Marshall was right, but William Jevons was
wrong. Our wants and desires keep growing , evidently without end, and therefore so do our economies. But our use
of the earth’s resources does not. We do want more beverage options, but we don’t want to keep using more
aluminum in drink cans. We want to communicate and compute and listen to music, but we don’t want an arsenal of gadgets; we’re
happy with a single smartphone. As our population increases, we want more food, but we don’t have any desire to consume more
fertilizer or use more land for crops.

Jevons was correct at the time he wrote that total British demand for coal was increasing even though steam engines were
becoming much more efficient. He was right, in other words, that the price elasticity of demand for coal-supplied power was greater
than one in the 1860s. But he was wrong to conclude that this would be permanent. Elasticities
of demand can change
over time for several reasons, the most fundamental of which is technological change. Coal provides
a clear example of this. When fracking made natural gas much cheaper, total demand for coal in the United
States went down even though its price decreased.

With the help of innovation and new technologies, economic growth in America and other rich countries
—growth in all of the wants and needs that we spend money on—has become decoupled from resource
consumption. This is a recent development and a profound one.

Materials cost money that companies locked in competition would rather not spend. The root of
Jevons’s mistake is simple and boring: resources cost money. He realized this, of course. What he didn’t
sufficiently realize was how strong the incentive is for a company in a contested market to
reduce its spending on resources
(or anything else) and so eke out a bit more profit. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned.

Monopolists can just pass costs on to their customers, but companies with a lot of competitors can’t. So American farmers
who battle with each other (and increasingly with tough rivals in other countries) are eager to cut their spending on land,
water, and fertilizer. Beer and soda companies want to minimize their aluminum purchases. Producers of
magnets and high-tech gear run away from REE as soon as prices start to spike. In the United States, the 1980 Staggers Act
removed government subsidies for freight-hauling railroads , forcing them into competition and cost
cutting and making them all the more eager to not have expensive railcars sit idle. Again and again, we see that
competition spurs dematerialization.

There are multiple paths to dematerialization. As profit-hungry

companies seek to use fewer resources, they can go down
four main paths. First, they can simply find ways to use less of a given material. This is what happened as
beverage companies and the companies that supply them with cans teamed up to use less aluminum. It’s also the story with
American farmers, who keep getting bigger harvests while using less land, water, and fertilizer . Magnet
makers found ways to use fewer rare earth metals when it looked as if China might cut off their supply.

Second, it often becomes possible to substitute one resource for another. Total US coal consumption
started to decrease after 2007 because fracking made natural gas more attractive to electricity generators. If nuclear power
becomes more popular in the United States (a topic we’ll take up in chapter 15), we could use both less coal and less gas and
generate our electricity from a small amount of material indeed. A kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains approximately 2–3 million
times as much energy as the same mass of coal or oil. According to one estimate, the total amount of energy that humans consume
each year could be supplied by just seven thousand tons of uranium fuel.

Third, companies can use fewer molecules overall by making better use of the materials they
already own. Improving CNW’s railcar utilization from 5 percent to 10 percent would mean that the company could cut its stock
of these thirty-ton behemoths in half. Companies that own expensive physical assets tend to be fanatics about getting as much use
as possible out of them, for clear and compelling financial reasons. For example, the world’s commercial airlines have improved their
load factors—essentially the percentage of seats occupied on flights—from 56 percent in 1971 to more than 81 percent in 2018.

Finally, some materials get replaced by nothing at all. When a telephone, camcorder, and tape recorder are
separate devices, three total microphones are needed. When they all collapse into a smartphone, only one microphone is necessary.
That smartphone also uses no audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, or camera film. The iPhone and its descendants are among the
world champions of dematerialization. They use vastly less metal, plastic, glass, and silicon than did the devices they have replaced
and don’t need media such as paper, discs, tape, or film.

If we use more renewable energy, we’ll be replacing coal, gas, oil, and uranium with photons
from the sun (solar power) and the movement of air (wind power) and water (hydroelectric power) on the earth. All
three of these types of power are also among dematerialization’s champions, since they use up
essentially no resources once they’re up and running.
I call these four paths to dematerialization slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate. They’re not mutually exclusive. Companies can and
do pursue all four at the same time, and all four are going on all the time in ways both obvious and subtle.

Innovation is hard to foresee. Neither the fracking revolution nor the world-changing impact of the iPhone’s introduction
were well understood in advance. Both continued to be underestimated even after they occurred. The iPhone was introduced in
June of 2007, with no shortage of fanfare from Apple and Steve Jobs. Yet several months later the cover of Forbes was still asking if
anyone could catch Nokia.

Innovation is not steady and predictable like the orbit of the Moon or the accumulation of
interest on a certificate of deposit. It’s instead inherently jumpy, uneven, and random. It’s also
combinatorial, as Erik Brynjolfsson and I discussed in our book The Second Machine Age. Most new technologies and
other innovations, we argued, are combinations or recombinations of preexisting elements .

The iPhone was “just” a cellular telephone plus a bunch of sensors plus a touch screen plus an operating system and population of
programs, or apps. All these elements had been around for a while before 2007. It took the vision of Steve Jobs to see what they
could become when combined. Fracking was the combination of multiple abilities: to “see” where hydrocarbons were to be found in
rock formations deep underground; to pump down pressurized liquid to fracture the rock; to pump up the oil and gas once they
were released by the fracturing; and so on. Again, none of these was new. Their effective combination was what changed the
world’s energy situation.

Erik and I described the set of innovations and technologies available at any time as building blocks that
ingenious people could combine and recombine into useful new configurations. These new configurations
then serve as more blocks that later innovators can use. Combinatorial innovation is exciting because it’s unpredictable. It’s not easy
to foresee when or where powerful new combinations are going to appear, or who’s going to come up with them. But as the
number of both building blocks and innovators increases, we
should have confidence that more breakthroughs
such as fracking and smartphones are ahead. Innovation is highly decentralized and largely uncoordinated,
occurring as the result of interactions among complex and interlocking social, technological, and
economic systems. So it’s going to keep surprising us.

As the Second Machine Age progresses, dematerialization accelerates. Erik and I coined the phrase Second
Machine Age to draw a contrast with the Industrial Era, which as we’ve seen transformed the planet by allowing us to overcome the
limitations of muscle power. Our
current time of great progress with all things related to computing is
allowing us to overcome the limitations of our mental power and is transformative in a
different way: it’s allowing us to reverse the Industrial Era’s bad habit of taking more and more
from the earth every year.

Computer-aided design tools help engineers at packaging companies design generations of aluminum
cans that keep getting lighter. Fracking took off in part because oil and gas exploration companies learned
how to build accurate computer models of the rock formations that lay deep underground—models that
predicted where hydrocarbons were to be found.
Smartphones took the place of many separate pieces of gear. Because they serve as GPS devices, they’ve also led us to print out
many fewer maps and so contributed to our current trend of using less paper. It’s easy to look at generations of computer paper,
from 1960s punch cards to the eleven-by-seventeen-inch fanfold paper of the 1980s, and conclude that the Second Machine Age has
caused us to chop down ever more trees. The year of peak paper consumption in the United States, however, was 1990. As our
devices have become more capable and interconnected, always on and always with us, we’ve sharply turned away from paper.
Humanity as a whole probably hit peak paper in 2013.

As these examples indicate, computers

and their kin help us with all four paths to dematerialization.
Hardware, software, and networks let us slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate. I contend that they’re
the best tools we’ve
ever invented for letting us tread more lightly on our planet.

All of these principles are about the combination of technological progress and capitalism,
which are the first of the two pairs of forces causing dematerialization.

Cap’s sustainable thanks to dematerialization and the alt’s transition fails.

McAfee, 20—cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT
Sloan School of Management, former professor at Harvard Business School and fellow at
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Andrew, “Why Degrowth Is the Worst Idea
on the Planet,” https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-why-degrowth-is-the-worst-idea-on-the-
planet/, dml)

Over that same span, an unexpected and encouraging

pattern has emerged: The world's richest countries
have learned how to reduce their footprint on Earth. They're polluting less, using less land and
water, consuming smaller amounts of important natural resources, and doing better in many
other ways. Some of these trends are also now visible in less affluent countries .

However, many in the degrowth movement seem to have trouble taking yes for an answer . The claims I just made
are widely resisted or ignored. Some say they’ve been debunked. Of course, debate over empirical claims like these is normal and
healthy. Our impact on our planet is hugely important. But something less healthy is at work here. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is
difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some voices in the
conversation about the environment seem
wedded to the idea that degrowth is necessary , and they are
unwilling or unable to walk away from it, no matter the evidence.
But evidence remains a powerful way to persuade the persuadable. The one thing everyone agrees on is that the last 50 years have
been a period of growth, not degrowth. In fact, growth has never been faster, except for the 25-year rebuilding period
after World War II. The population and economic growth rates of the past half-century are remarkably fast by historical standards.
Between 1800 and 1945, for example, the world’s economy grew less than 1.5 percent per year, on average. Between 1970 and
2019, that average increased to almost 3.5 percent.

It's natural to assume that, as this growth continued, every nation’s planetary footprint would
only increase. After all, as people become more numerous and prosperous they consume more , and
producing all the goods and services they consume uses up resources, takes over ecosystems, and generates pollution. The logic
seems ironclad that our gains have to be the environment’s losses .
Easing Pollution, Not Exporting It

In some important areas, however, a very different pattern emerged after 1970: Growth continued, but
environmental harm decreased. This decoupling occurred first with pollution, and first in the rich
world. In the US, for example, aggregate levels of six common air pollutants have declined by 77
percent, even as gross domestic product increased by 285 percent and population by 60 percent. In the
UK, annual tonnage of particulate emissions dropped by more than 75 percent between 1970 and 2016, and of the main polluting
chemicals by about 85 percent. Similar gains are common across the highest-income countries.
How were these reductions achieved? The two possibilities are cleanup and offshoring. Either rich countries figured out how to
reduce their “air pollution per dollar” so much that overall pollution went down even as their economies grew, or they sent so much
of their dirty production overseas that the air at home got cleaner. The first of these paths reduces the total burden of human-
caused pollution; the second just rearranges it.

The evidence is overwhelming that rich countries cleaned up their air pollution much more than
they outsourced it. For one, a great deal of air pollution comes from highway vehicles and power
plants, and rich countries haven’t outsourced driving and generating electricity to low-income
ones. In fact, high-income countries haven't even offshored most of their industry. The US and UK both
manufacture more than they did 50 years ago (at least until the Covid-19 pandemic sharply reduced output), and Germany has been
a net exporter since 2000 while continuing to drive down air pollution. The rest of the world has been exporting its manufacturing
pollution to Germany (to use degrowthers’ phrasing), yet Germans are breathing cleaner air than they were 20 years ago.

Rich countries have reduced their air pollution not by embracing degrowth or offshoring, but instead by
enacting and enforcing smart regulation. As economists Joseph Shapiro and Reed Walker concluded in a 2018 study
about the US, “changes in environmental regulation, rather than changes in productivity and trade, account for most of the
emissions reductions.” Research
about the cleanup of US waters also concludes that well-designed
and enforced regulations have successfully reduced pollution.
It is true that the US and other rich countries now import lots of products from China and other nations with higher pollution levels.
But if
there were no international trade at all, and rich countries had to rely exclusively on their
domestic industries to make everything they consume, they’d still have much cleaner air and water than
they did 50 years ago. As a 2004 Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy study summarized: “We find no evidence
that domestic production of pollution-intensive goods in the US is being replaced by imports from
overseas.”

The rich world’s success at decoupling growth from pollution is an inconvenient fact for degrowthers. Even more inconvenient is
China's recent success at doing the same. China’s
export-led, manufacturing-heavy economy has been
growing at meteoric rates, but between 2013 and 2017 air pollution in densely populated areas declined by
more than 30 percent. Here again the government mandated and monitored pollution declines and so decoupled growth
from an important category of environmental harm.

Prosperity Bends the Curve

China's progress with air pollution is heartening, but it's not surprising to most economists. It's a clear example of the
environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in action. Named for the economist Simon Kuznets, EKC posits a relationship between a
country's affluence and the condition of its environment. As GDP per capita rises from an initial low level, so too does environmental
damage; but as affluence continues to increase , the harms level off and then start to decline. The EKC
is clearly visible in the pollution histories of today's rich countries, and it's now taking shape in China and elsewhere.

Also consider air pollution death rates around the world. As the invaluable website Our World in Data puts it, “Rates have typically
fallen across high-income countries: almost everywhere in Europe, but also in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand,
Japan, Israel and South Korea and other countries. But rates have also fallen across upper-middle income countries too, including
China and Brazil. In low and lower-middle income countries, rates have increased over this period.”

The EKC is a direct refutation of a core idea of degrowth: that environmental harms must always
rise as populations and economies do. It's not surprising that today's degrowth advocates rarely discuss the large
reductions in air and water pollution that have accompanied higher prosperity in so many places around the world. Instead,
degrowthers now focus heavily on one kind of pollution: greenhouse gas emissions.

The claims made are familiar ones: that any apparent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in rich
countries are due to offshoring rather than actual decarbonization. Thanks to the Global Carbon Project, we
can see if this is the case. GCP has calculated “consumption-based emissions” for many countries going back to 1990, taking
into account imports and exports, yielding the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in all the goods and services consumed in each
country each year.

For several of the world's richest countries, including Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and the US, graphs of consumption-
based carbon emissions follow the familiar EKC. The US, for example, has 22reduced its total (not per capita) consumption-
based CO2 emissions by more than 13 percent since 2007.

These reductions are not mainly due to enhanced regulation. Instead, they've come about because of a
combination of tech progress and market forces. Solar and wind power have become much
cheaper in recent years and have displaced coal for electricity generation. Natural gas, which when burned emits
fewer greenhouse gases per unit of energy than does coal (even after taking methane leakage into account), has also become
much cheaper and more abundant in the US as a result of the fracking revolution.
To ensure that these greenhouse gas declines continue to spread and accelerate, we should apply the lessons we've learned from
previous pollution reduction success. In particular, we should make it expensive to emit carbon, then watch the emitters work hard
to reduce this expense. The best way to do this is with a carbon dividend, which is a tax on carbon emissions where the revenues are
not kept by the government but instead are rebated to people as a dividend. William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Prize in
economics in part for his work on the carbon dividend, and an open letter advocating its implementation in the US has been signed
by more than 3,500 economists. It's an idea whose time has come.

How We Learned to Lighten Up

Tech progress and price pressure aren't just leading to the demise of coal. They're also causing us to exploit
the planet less in many other important ways, even as growth continues. In other words, EKCs are not
just about pollution any more.
A good place to start examining this broad phenomenon of getting more from less is US agriculture, where we have
decades of data on both outputs—crop tonnage—and the key inputs of cropland, water, and fertilizer. Domestic crop tonnage
has risen steadily over the years and in 2015 was more than 55 percent higher than in 1980. Over that same period, though,
total water used for irrigation declined by 18 percent, total cropland by more than 7 percent. That is,
over that 35-year period, US crop agriculture increased its output by more than half while giving an area
of land larger than Indiana back to nature and eventually using a Lake Champlain less water
each year. This was not accomplished by increasing fertilizer use ; total US fertilizer consumption in 2014 (the
most recent year for which data are available) was within 2 percent of its 1980 level.

The three main fertilizers of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus ( NKP) are an interesting case study. Their total US
consumption (once other uses in addition to agriculture are taken into account) has declined by 23 percent since
1980, according to the United States Geological Survey. Yet some within the degrowth movement find ways to argue that these
declines are also an illusion. These materials thus serve to clearly illustrate the differences in methodology, evidence, and worldview
between ecomodernists like myself and degrowthers.

The USGS tracks annual domestic production, imports, and exports of NKP and uses these figures to calculate “apparent
consumption” each year. Consumption of each of the three resources has declined by 16 percent or more from their peaks, which
occurred no later than 1998. This
seems like a clear and convincing example of dematerialization—
getting more output from fewer material inputs.

As I argue in my book More From Less, dematerialization doesn’t happen for any complicated or idiosyncratic reason. It
happens because resources cost money that companies would rather not spend, and tech
progress keeps opening up new ways to produce more output (like crops) while spending less on
material inputs (like fertilizers). Modern digital technologies are so good at helping producers get more
from less that they're now allowing the US and other technologically sophisticated countries to
use less in total of important materials like NKP .

Forest products provide another clear example of dematerialization in the US. Total annual domestic
consumption of paper and paperboard peaked in 1999, and of timber in 2002. Both totals have since declined by
more than 20 percent. Could these be mirages caused by offshoring that’s not properly captured? That’s
highly unlikely, as the country is now onshoring more than it’s offshoring. The US has been a net exporter
of forest products since 2009 and is now the world’s largest exporter of these materials.

Is the US economy also dematerializing its use of metals? Probably, but it’s hard to say for sure. The USGS tallies do show
dematerialization in steel, aluminum, copper, and other important metals. But these figures don’t include the metals contained in
imports of finished goods like cars and computers. America is a net importer of manufactured goods, so it couldbe that we’re
using more metal year after year, but that much of this consumption is “hidden” from official statistics because of imports of
heavy, complex products. However, my estimates indicate that this is extremely unlikely and that the
country is in fact now reducing its overall consumption of metals.
Constructing a Weak Argument

Degrowth exponent Jason Hickel responds to this broad evidence of dematerialization by making once again the shopworn argument that there are no real environmental gains; there’s only globalization of harms.
Hickel has argued repeatedly that once offshoring is properly taken into account, dematerialization vanishes. How can this be, when tallies take into account imports and exports of raw materials like NKP, timber,
and paper? Because, he contends, they don't take into account the true “material footprint” of production around the world.

At this point the degrowth argument departs from reality. I mean literally. As “The Material Footprint of Nations” (the main paper Hickel cites) states, material footprint measures do “not record the actual physical
movement of materials within and among countries.” Instead, they’re derived from a “calculation framework [that] … enumerates the link between the beginning of a production chain (where raw materials are
extracted from the natural environment) and its end.”

Material footprint models estimate the total weight of all the materials disturbed by humans around the world as they produce the goods they eventually consume. All of the ores mined to make metal, the rock
quarried to make gravel, the sand scooped up to make glass and microchips—all of these are estimated by country by year in the material footprint calculation framework.

A nation’s material footprint, then, is always higher than its direct material consumption (DMC). This is straightforward enough. What’s puzzling is that according to “The Material Footprint of Nations,” some rich
countries are seeing their footprint go up even as their consumption goes down. The paper shows that many countries are now dematerializing. DMC has been trending downward for some time in the US, UK, and
Japan and may recently have peaked for the European Union and OECD as a whole. Yet in all these cases, the material footprint continues to rise.

How can this be? It’s not because the material footprint models do a better job than the USGS of accounting for the metals and other materials in finished goods imports. The technical annex for the global
material flows database notes that, as is the case with the USGS tallies, “complex manufactured items are largely excluded.” Instead, the paper notes, “the main reason in most cases was increased indirect use of
(dependency on) construction materials.”
This is problematic, because those materials are so poorly tracked. As the appendix states, “Many countries have no data on extraction of non-metallic minerals primarily used for construction … When they are
available, they are often unreliable, partial, and underreported.” It’s a poor strategy to use sparse, low-quality data to overturn conclusions based on uniform, high-quality data, yet this is what Hickel is doing when
he argues that material footprint calculations show dematerialization is an illusion.

There’s one other serious problem with this argument. It’s based largely on the estimated “raw material equivalents” of Chinese exports of construction minerals, yet China is not at all a big exporter of these
minerals. Instead, China’s main exports are electrical and mechanical machinery, plastics, furniture, apparel, and vehicles. None of these contain a lot of sand, gravel, stone, or clay.

So then how do such huge quantities of these and other construction minerals end up somehow being counted among China’s exports? Because China is building a lot of factories, railroads, highways, and other
industrial infrastructure each year. The materials footprint calculation framework estimates how much tonnage of construction minerals all this building requires, then allocates about one third of this tonnage to
exports. So by this logic, the smartphones and solar panels the US imported from China in, say, 2018 “contain” some of the stone and gravel used to build up China that year. By that same logic, if my neighbors
bring me a cake the same year they renovate their house, then my consumption of lumber, drywall, and copper pipe goes up as soon as I have a slice.

Hickel doesn’t stand on any firmer ground when he moves from conclusions to recommendations. He has often claimed that 50 billion tons is the maximum weight of global resource extraction that Earth can
sustainably handle and that we’re already well past this limit. In the face of this alleged crisis, he maintains that “the only fail-safe strategy is to impose legally binding caps on resource use and gradually ratchet it
back down to safe levels.” However, the paper he cites to support his views contains a frank admission: “There is still no hard scientific evidence of causal relationship between human-induced resource flows and
the possible breakdown of life-supporting functions at continental or global scale from which … targets [like a 50 billion ton limit] could directly be derived.” Before taking the unprecedented step of setting up a
central resource planning bureaucracy, it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for hard scientific evidence that it’s actually necessary.

Let’s Keep Climbing

Throughout our history, we humans have been climbing a difficult path toward longer, healthier, more prosperous lives. As we climbed that path, we turned the environment around it brown and gray. Our mania
for growth was in many ways bad news for the planet we all live on.

Recently, however, we
have figured out how to make our path a green one, how to continue to grow while
reducing our impact on Earth. The world’s richest countries are also putting more land and water
under conservation, reintroducing native species into ecosystems from which they had been hunted into
oblivion, and improving Earth in many other ways.

For reasons that I don't understand well, and that I understand less the more evidence I look at, degrowthers want to make us
turn around and start walking back down the path, away from higher prosperity. Their vision
seems to be one of a centrally
planned, ever-deepening recession throughout the rich world for the sake of the environment .

Thanks to Covid-19, we have an inkling of how this would feel. A “degrowth recession” wouldn't have the
virus’ deaths and sickness, and it wouldn't require us to practice social distancing. But it would have all the economic
contractions’ job losses, business closures, mortgage defaults, and other hardships and
uncertainties. And it would have them without end—after all, growth can't be allowed to restart. Corporate
and government revenue would decrease permanently , and therefore so would innovation and R&D.

How many of us would be willing to accept all of this in exchange for somewhat less pollution and
resource use? To sharpen the question, how many of us would be willing to accept this recession if it wasn’t
necessary—if it were clear that we could get environmental improvements while continuing to grow and prosper?

The ecomodernist argument is that that is in fact clear. Unlike the degrowth argument, it's supported by a great deal of
evidence. What's at least important is that it will be supported by a great deal of the world's people, who will
eagerly sign up to climb our new green path to prosperity.

Decoupling makes growth sustainable—empirics, efficiency, substitution,

consumption decline, innovation, financial oversight, and new reserves.
McAfee 19—(principal research scientist and codirector of the Initiative on the Digital
Economy at MIT, PHD in business administration from Harvard, MS in mechanical engineering
from MIT, unrelated to the crazy McAfee). McAfee, Andrew. 2019. More from Less: The
Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens
Next. Scribner.

What’s behind the broad and deep dematerialization of the American economy? Why are we now post-peak in our consumption of so many resources? In the next chapters I’ll present my explanation of the causes of dematerialization. First, though, I want to give a
short explanation of what the causes are not. In particular, I want to show that the CRIB strategies born around Earth Day and promoted since then for reducing our planetary footprint—consume less, recycle, impose limits, and go back to the land—have not been
important contributors to the dematerialization we’ve seen. Since Earth Day, we have demonstrably not consumed much less or gone back to the land in large numbers. We have recycled a lot, but this fact is irrelevant because recycling is a separate phenomenon
from dematerialization. Much more relevant than recycling are the limits we’ve imposed in a couple of areas. The history of these limits is instructive because it helps us separate great ideas (limits on pollution and hunting animals) from truly terrible ones (limits on

family size). All, Consuming The C part of the CRIB strategy— a plea for us to consume less for the planet’s sake has largely fallen on —

deaf ears . To see this, let’s look at change in the real GDP of the United States. It grew by an average of 3.2 percent per year between the end of World War II and Earth Day. From 1971 to 2017, it grew by an annual average of 2.8 percent. Population
growth also slowed down after the postwar baby boom, but it remained positive. America’s population increased by an average of 1.5 percent a year from 1946 to 1970, and by 1 percent annually from 1971 to 2016. So while we have slowed down some, we
certainly haven’t come close to embracing degrowth in our population or consumption. But the American economy has changed significantly since Earth Day and has become relatively less oriented around making and building things. Services, ranging from haircuts
to insurance policies to concerts, now make up a much larger share of the economy than they did in 1970. US personal consumption of services has risen from 30 percent of GDP in 1970 to 47 percent in 2017. So, has the decline in resource use come about because
we don’t make or consume as many products as we used to? No. While it’s true that products have been declining in relative terms (in other words, as a percentage of total GDP) compared to services, our total consumption of products has still been increasing in
absolute terms. So has our industrial production—the total amount of things made in America. What’s more, the United States has not recently shifted away from “heavy” manufacturing. We still make lots of vehicles, machinery, and other big-ticket items, just as we
used to. But we don’t make them the same way we used to. We now make them using fewer resources. To see this, let’s add a line showing US industrial production to our graph from the previous chapter of GDP and total metal consumption. This updated chart

makes clear that the country hasn’t stopped producing things. Instead, America’s manufacturers have learned to produce more things from less metal. So to summarize, growth of consumption has in some cases

slowed down in recent years. But growth in resource use has reversed course and is
has done much more than slow down—it

now generally negative. We have not as a society embraced degrowth. Instead , we’ve done something far stranger

and more profound: we’ve decoupled growth in consumption, prosperity, and our economy—from —

resource use. Early in the Industrial Era, the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville published his 1835 book, Democracy in America. One of the first major investigations into the character of the then-young country, it remains one of the best.I
De Tocqueville observed almost two centuries ago that the people of the United States liked their things: “In America, the passion for material well-being… is general.… Minds are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s

little comforts.” What’s new is that providing for our needs and comforts now requires fewer materials, not more. Recycling: Big, and Beside the Point Recycling is big business: 47 percent, 33 percent,
68 percent, and 49 percent of all the tonnage of aluminum, copper, lead, and iron and steel (respectively) consumed in the United States in 2015 came from scrap metal rather than ore taken from the earth. Similarly, almost 65 percent of paper products came from
recycled newspapers, pizza boxes, and so on rather than from felled trees. Yet recycling is irrelevant for dematerialization. Why? Because recycling is about where resource-producing factories get their inputs, while dematerialization is about what’s happened to
total demand for their outputs. Paper mills, for example, get their raw material from two main sources: recycling centers and forests. American consumption of output from all paper mills combined has been declining since 1990, the year of peak paper in the United
States. This decline is purely a matter of how much total demand there is for paper; it has no direct relationship to the amount of recycling taking place. But is there any indirect relationship? How much would our total consumption of resources such as paper or
steel change without recycling? It’s impossible to answer with certainty, but my intuition is that if recycling didn’t exist, our total consumption of resources such as aluminum, copper, iron, and steel would be declining even more quickly. This seems counterintuitive;
the conclusion is supported by a simple chain of reasoning. Recycling metals makes economic sense exactly because it’s cheaper to melt down and reuse scrap than it is to dig out and process ore. Without this scrap, a ton of metal would probably cost more, all other
things being equal. And as a general rule, we use less of a thing when it costs more. So it seems most likely to me that we’d use less metal overall in a hypothetical zero-recycling economy than we do in our actual enthusiastic-about-scrap-metal-recycling economy.
This does not mean that I think metal recycling is bad. I think it’s great, since it gives us cheaper metal products and reduces total greenhouse gas emissions (since it takes much less energy to obtain metal from scrap than from ore). But recycling, whatever its merits,

is not part of the dematerialization story. It’s a different story. Back to the Land Is Bad for the Land The back-to-the-land movement is a fascinating chapter in the history of American
environmentalism, but a largely insignificant one. There were simply never enough homesteaders and others who turned away from modern, technologically sophisticated life to make much of a difference. Which is a good thing for the environment. As Jeffrey Jacob
documents in his book New Pioneers, the back-to-the-land movement in the United States began in the mid-1960s and continued into the next decade. According to one estimate, as many as 1 million North American back-to-the-landers were living on small farms
by the end of the 1970s. This, though, was a weak current against the strong tide of urban growth; the number of American city dwellers increased by more than 17 million between 1970 and 1980. Going back to the land might have been widely discussed, but it was
comparatively rarely practiced. We should be thankful for this because homesteading is not great for the environment, for two reasons. First, small-scale farming is less efficient in its use of resources than massive, industrialized, mechanized agriculture. To get the
same harvest, homesteaders use more land, water, and fertilizer than do “factory farmers.” Farms of less than one hundred acres, for example, grow 15 percent less corn per acre than farms with more than a thousand acres. And bigger farms get better faster.
Between 1982 and 2012 farms under one hundred acres grew their total factor productivity by 15 percent, whereas farms over a thousand acres grew theirs by 51 percent. So more homesteaders would have meant more land under cultivation, more water and
fertilizer used, and so on. Second, rural life is less environmentally friendly than urban or suburban dwelling. City folk live in high-density, energy-efficient apartments and condos, travel only short distances for work and errands, and frequently use public
transportation. None of these things is true of country living. As economist Edward Glaeser summarizes, “If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete.… Living in the country is not the
right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.” And if homesteaders decide not only to ignore Glaeser’s advice but also to leave modernity further behind and heat their homes with coal or wood, they do still
more environmental harm. Coal home furnaces create lots of atmospheric pollution, much more than comes from other kinds of fuel. Poland, for example, today has 80 percent of all homes in Europe that burn coal, and thirty-three of the Continent’s fifty most
polluted cities. And burning wood means chopping down trees. A lot of them. It’s almost certainly the case that the English turned to coal for home heating in the middle of the sixteenth century because they’d cut down such a huge percentage of their trees that the
price of wood skyrocketed. So if we care about the environment, we should probably be glad that the back-to-the-land movement stalled out, and that industrial-scale, high-yield agriculture has become the norm. A comprehensive review published in Nature
Sustainability in 2018 concluded, “The data… do not suggest that environmental costs are generally larger for [high-yield] farming systems.… If anything, positive associations—in which high-yield, land-efficient systems also have lower costs in other dimensions—

Imposing Limits: The Worst Idea, and the Best One

appear more common.” Of the four elements of the CRIB strategy, the drive to impose limits has by far the most

The Population Implosion People’s Republic of

checkered history. It yielded both the most harmful strategies, and the most helpful ones. In 1979 the government of the

China announced its new family planning policy , which soon became known as the one-child policy. It was enacted despite the steady decline in the country’s birth rate throughout

missile scientist Song Jian came to

the 1970s. But after reading Limits to Growth, A Blueprint for Survival, and other books limning the looming dangers of unchecked population expansion, the

believe that even faster birth rate reductions were required. He became the architect of the new policy, the main effect of which was to limit ethnic Han

the one-child policy soon became a central

Chinese families to a single child. Exceptions to this restriction included giving some couples the right to a second child if their first was a girl, but

fact of Chinese family life. It is hard to see it in a positive light. After the policy was officially abandoned in late 2015, journalist Barbara Demick wrote its unflattering obituary: “Family planning became a powerful

officials terrorized parents.

bureaucracy, with who They beat and burned down the houses of people who violated the family-planning limits. They snatched over-quota baby girls from the arms of their mothers and gave
them to orphanages, which in turn put them up for adoption, earning a three-thousand-dollar ‘donation’ for each baby.” The Chinese government maintains that approximately 400 million births were prevented by the one-child policy, but this is probably a large
overestimate. As the economist Amartya Sen points out, “The additional contribution of coercion to reducing fertility in China is by no means clear, since compulsion was superimposed on a society that was already reducing its birth rate.” In their 2013 essay “How
Will History Judge China’s One-Child Policy?” the demographers Wang Feng, Yong Cai, and Baochang Gu compared the policy unfavorably to two of their country’s great twentieth-century convulsions: the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. They wrote,
“While those grave mistakes both cost tens of millions of lives, the harms done were relatively short-lived and were corrected quickly afterward. The one-child policy, in contrast, will surpass them in impact by its role in creating a society with a seriously undermined

Rational
family and kin structure, and a whole generation of future elderly and their children whose well-being will be seriously jeopardized.” History, in short, will judge this government-imposed limit on family size harshly.II

Restrictions Imposing limits on family size is a terrible . But it’s an excellent idea idea for reasons both practical and moral

to impose limits on pollution . Such restrictions have yielded the

, and on hunting some animals and selling products that come from their bodies

great triumphs of environmental movements in America and other countries.

the conservation and In 1970, the same year as
the original Earth Day festival, the United States established the federal Environmental Protection Agency and made major amendments to 1963’s Clean Air Act. This was the start of a cascade of laws and regulations aimed at reducing pollution and other

levels of sulfur dioxide in the United States have dropped to

environmental harms. These have worked amazingly well. For example, atmospheric

levels not seen since the twentieth century . From 1980 to 2015,
first years of the , and other kinds of air pollution have also dropped sharply

total emissions of six principal air pollutants decreased by 65 percent. As lead was banned from paint and

concentration
gasoline, the in the blood of young children dropped
of that element 80 percent between 1976 by more than

and 1999. Because lead retards brain development during youth, these declines are tremendously important. According to one study, American children in 1999 had IQs that were on average 2.2 to 4.7 points higher than they would have been had
lead concentrations remained at their 1970 levels. More work certainly remains, but thanks to the limits imposed on pollutants, America’s soil, air, and water are all much cleaner than they were on Earth Day. The conservationists who grew concerned in the early
years of the twentieth century about what hunting was doing to the populations of many animals were the predecessors of Earth Day’s environmentalists. Conservationists were spurred to action by the shocking extinction of the passenger pigeon. That such an
abundant bird could be eradicated stunned many and spurred new laws restricting trade in animal products. The first of these was the Lacey Act, passed by Congress in 1900 and named for John Lacey, a Republican representative from Iowa. As he said during debate
on the bill, “The wild pigeon, formerly in flocks of millions, has entirely disappeared from the face of the earth. We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction, which may serve as a warning to all mankind. Let us now give an example of wise
conservation of what remains of the gifts of nature.” The Lacey Act and its successors imposed three kinds of limits on taking and consuming animals. First, hunting of some animals was fully banned. Protected species include the sea otter, which was protected by a
1911 international moratorium; the snowy egret, which was ruthlessly hunted for its gorgeous plumes until passage of the Weeks-McLean Law Act in 1913; and dolphins and manatees, which were sheltered by 1972’s Marine Mammal Protection Act. Second, many
limits have been imposed on when and where animals can be hunted. Sport and food hunting are illegal in most national parks, for example, and duck, bear, deer, and many other animals have well-defined hunting seasons. Third, bans have been imposed on the
commercial trade in many animal products. The most sweeping of these is probably the nationwide ban on the sale of hunted meat. You may see venison or bison meat at a butcher’s counter or on a menu in America, but it always comes from a ranch, not a hunt.
These imposed limits have brought many iconic American animals back from the brink of extinction. North America now has more than half a million bison, for example, and over three thousand sea otters live off the coast of Northern California. Some previously
threatened animals have come back so well that they’re now widely considered pests. People in many American neighborhoods today feel that there are too many white-tailed deer, Canada geese, and beaver. The story of dematerialization is not the story of
following the CRIB strategies. Except for the excellent idea of imposing limits on polluting and pursuing animals, these strategies were ignored (we didn’t embrace degrowth and stop consuming), abandoned (we stopping going back to the land), irrelevant
(dematerialization has nothing to do with recycling), or deeply misguided (China’s attempt to limit family size was a huge mistake). So how did we finally start getting more from less? How did we become post-peak in our use of so many resources? The next three

chapters will take up this critical question. CHAPTER 7 What Causes Dematerialization? Markets and Marvels The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped. —
Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England, 1851 If CRIB strategies aren’t responsible for the large-scale dematerialization of the American economy that has taken place since Earth Day, then what

is? How have we got more from less? I believe that four main forces are responsible, and that it’s helpful to think of them as two pairs. In this chapter we’ll look at the first pair, then take up the second in

Capitalism and technological progress

chapter 9. are the first pair of force s driving dematerialization. This statement will come as a surprise to many, and
for good reason. After all, it’s exactly this combination that caused us to massively increase our resource consumption throughout the Industrial Era. As we saw in chapter 3, the ideas of William Jevons and Alfred Marshall point to the distressing conclusion that
capitalism and tech progress always lead to more from more: more economic growth, but also more resource consumption. So what changed? How are capitalism and tech progress now getting us more from less? To get answers to these important questions,

let’s start by look at a few recent examples

ing of dematerialization. Fertile Farms America has long been an agricultural juggernaut. In 1982, after

cropland
more than a decade of steady expansion due in part to rising grain prices, total reversed.
in the country stood at approximately 380 million acres. Over the next ten years, however, almost all of this increase was So much
acreage was abandoned by farmers and given back to nature that cropland in 1992 was almost back to where it had been almost twenty-five years before. This decline had several causes, including falling grain prices, a severe recession, over-indebted farmers, and

increased international competition. A final factor, though, was the ability to get ever-more corn, wheat, soybeans, and other crops from the same acre of land, pound of fertilizer and pesticide, and gallon of water. The material
productivity of agriculture in the United States improved dramatically has in recent decades, as we saw in chapter 5. Between 1982 and 2015
over 45 million acres—an amount of cropland equal in size to the state of Washington—was returned to nature. Over the same time potassium, phosphate, and nitrogen (the three main fertilizers) all saw declines in absolute use. Meanwhile, the total tonnage of
crops produced in the country increased by more than 35 percent. As impressive as this is, it’s dwarfed by the productivity improvements of American dairy cows. In 1950 we got 117 billion pounds of milk from 22 million cows. In 2015 we got 209 billion pounds from

just 9 million animals. The average milk cow’s productivity thus improved by over 330 percent during that time. Thin Cans Tin cans are actually made of steel coated with a thin layer of tin to improve corrosion resistance. They’ve been used since

In 1959
the nineteenth century to store food. Starting in the 1930s, they began also to be used to hold beer and soft drinks.I Coors pioneered beer cans made of aluminum, which is much lighter and more corrosion resistant than steel. Royal Crown Cola

followed suit for soda five years later. As Vaclav Smil relates, “A decade later steel cans were on the way out, and none of them have been used for beer since 1994 and for soft drinks since 1996.… At 85 g the first
aluminum cans were surprisingly heavy; by 2011 it was
by 1972 the weight of a two-piece can dropped to just below 21 g, by 1988 it was less than 16 g, a decade later it averaged 13.6 g, and

reduced to 12.75 g .” Manufacturers accomplished these reductions by making aluminum cans’ walls thinner, and by making the sides and bottom from a single sheet of metal so that only one comparatively heavy seam was needed
(to join the top to the rest of the can). Smil points out that if all beverage cans used in 2010 weighed what they did in 1980, they would have required an extra 580,000 tons of aluminum. And aluminum cans kept getting lighter. In 2012 Ball packaging introduced into

the European market a 330 ml can that held 7.5 percent less than the US standard, yet at 9.5 g weighed 25 percent less. Gone Gizmos In 2014 Steve Cichon, a “writer, historian, and retired radio newsman in Buffalo, NY,” paid $3 for a large
stack of front sections of the Buffalo News newspaper from the early months of 1991. On the back page of the Saturday, February 16, issue was an ad from the electronics retailer Radio Shack. Cichon noticed something striking about the ad: “There are 15 electronic
gimzo type items on this page.… 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.” The “gizmo type items” that had vanished into the iPhone Cichon kept in his pocket included a calculator, camcorder, clock radio, mobile telephone, and tape recorder. While the ad
didn’t include a compass, camera, barometer, altimeter, accelerometer, or GPS device, these, too, have vanished into the iPhone and other smartphones, as have countless atlases and compact discs. The success of the iPhone was almost totally unanticipated. A
November 2007 cover story in Forbes magazine touted that the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia had over a billion customers around the world and asked, “Can anyone catch the cell phone king?” Yes. Apple sold more than a billion iPhones within a decade of its
June 2007 launch and became the most valuable publicly traded company in history. Nokia, meanwhile, sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2013 for $7.2 billion to get “more combined muscle to truly break through with consumers,” as the Finnish
company’s CEO Stephen Elop said at the time of the deal. It didn’t work. Microsoft sold what remained of Nokia’s mobile phone business and brand to a subsidiary of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn for $350 million in May of 2016. Radio Shack filed

for bankruptcy in 2015, and again in 2017. From Peak Oil to… Peak Oil In 2007 US coal consumption reached a new high of 1,128 million short tons, over 90 percent of which was burned to generate electricity. Total
coal use had increased by more than 35 percent since 1990, and the US Energy Information Administration (the official energy statisticians of the US government) forecast further growth of up to 65 percent by 2030. Also in 2007 the US Government Accountability
Office (GAO), a federal agency known as “the congressional watchdog,” published a report with an admirably explanatory title: “Crude Oil: Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil
Production.” It took seriously the idea of “peak oil,” a phrase coined in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, a geologist working for Shell Oil. As originally conceived, peak oil referred to the maximum amount of oil that we could annually produce for all of humanity’s needs. The
first oil wells pumped out the crude oil that was closest to the earth’s surface or otherwise easiest to access. As those wells dried up, we had to drill deeper ones, both on land and at sea. As the world’s economies kept growing, so did total demand for oil, which kept
getting harder and harder to obtain. Peak oil captured the idea that despite our best efforts and ample incentive, we would come to a time after which we would only be able to extract less and less oil year after year from the earth. Most of the estimates
summarized in the GAO report found that peak oil would occur no later than 2040. The report did not mention fracking, which in retrospect looks like a serious omission. Fracking is short for “hydraulic fracturing” and is a means of obtaining oil and natural gas from
rock formations lying deep underground. It uses a high-pressure fluid to cause fractures in the rock, through which oil and gas can flow and be extracted. The United States and other countries have long been known to have huge reserves of hydrocarbons in deep
rock formations, which are often called shales. Companies had been experimenting with fracking to get at them since the middle of the twentieth century, but had made little progress. In 2000 fracking accounted for just 2 percent of US oil production. That figure
began to increase quickly right around the time of the GAO report. Not because of any single breakthrough, but instead because the suite of tools and techniques needed for profitable fracking had all improved enough. A gusher of shale oil and gas ensued. Thanks to
fracking, US crude oil production almost doubled between 2007 and 2017, when it approached the benchmark of 10 million barrels per day. By September of 2018 America had surpassed Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of oil. American natural
gas production, which had been essentially flat since the mid-1970s, jumped by nearly 43 percent between 2007 and 2017. As a result of the fracking boom the United States has experienced peak coal rather than peak oil. And the peak in coal is not in total annual
supply, but instead in demand. Fracking made natural gas cheap enough that it became preferred over coal for much electricity generation. By 2017 total US coal consumption was down 36 percent from its 2007 high point. The phrase peak oil is still around, but, as is

Remember Peak Oil? Demand May Top Out Before Supply

the case with coal, it usually no longer refers to supply. As a 2017 Bloomberg headline put it, “

Does. energy from the sun, wind, and the nuclei

” Even though the extra supply from fracking has helped push down oil and gas prices, many observers now believe that other sources—

of uranium atoms is getting cheaper faster and becoming much more widely available.
— So much so that, as a
2018 article in Fortune about the future of oil hypothesized, “This wouldn’t be just another oil-price cycle, a familiar roller coaster in which every down is followed by an up. It would be the start of a decades-long decline of the Oil Age itself—an uncharted world in

oil prices might be ‘lower forever.

which… ’ ” Analysts at Shell, the company from which the phrase peak oil originated, now estimate that global peak oil demand might come as soon as 2028.

Taking Stock of Rolling Stock My friend Bo Cutter started his career in 1968 working for Northwest Industries, a conglomerate that owned the Chicago and North Western Railway. One of his first assignments was
to help a team tasked with solving a problem that sounds odd to modern ears: figuring out where CNW’s railcars were. These cars are massive metal assemblies, each weighing thirty tons or more. In the late 1960s CNW owned thousands of them, representing a
huge commitment of both material and money. Across the railroad industry, the rule of thumb then was that about 5 percent of a company’s railcars moved on any given day. This was not because the other 95 percent needed to rest. It was because their owners
didn’t know where they were. CNW owned thousands of miles of track in places as far from Chicago as North Dakota and Wyoming. Its rolling stock (as locomotives and railcars are called) could also travel outside the company’s network on tracks owned by other
railroads. So these assets could be almost anywhere in the country. When the railcars weren’t moving, they sat in freight yards. At the time Cutter started his job, freight yards didn’t keep up-to-date records of the idle rolling stock they contained because, in the days
before widespread digital computers, sensors, and networks, there was no way to cost-effectively know or communicate the location of each car. So it was impossible for CNW or any other railroad to systematically track its most important inventory, even though
doing so would be hugely beneficial to the company’s bottom line. For example, Cutter’s team knew that if they could increase the percentage of cars moving each day from 5 percent to 10 percent, they would need only half as many of them. Even a single
percentage point increase in freight-car use would yield major financial benefits. When Cutter started his assignment, CNW and all other railroads employed spotters, who visited yards and watched trains pass, then telegraphed their findings to the head office. Other
railroads passed on similar information to collect the demurrage charges they were owed for each CNW car on their tracks and in their yards. Cutter’s team improved on these methods by making them more systematic and efficient. They put in place a better
baseline audit of where railcars were, employed more spotters, painted CNW cars differently so they were easier to see, and explored how to make more use of a new tool for businesses: the digital computer. That tool and its kin are now pervasive in the railroad
industry. In the early 1990s, for example, companies started putting radio-frequency identification tags on each piece of rolling stock. These tags would be read by trackside sensors, thus automating the work of spotting. At present over 5 million messages about

railcar status and location are generated and sent throughout the American railway system every day, and the country’s more than 450 railroads have nearly real-time visibility over all their rolling stock. The Rare Earth Scare In
September of 2010 the Japanese government took into custody the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that had collided with Japanese patrol vessels near a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea claimed by both countries. China responded by imposing an
embargo on shipments of rare earth elements (REE) to the Land of the Rising Sun. Even though Japan relented almost immediately and released the captain, a global panic began. This is because rare earths are “vitamins of chemistry,” as USGS scientist Daniel
Cordier puts it. “They help everything perform better, and they have their own unique characteristics, particularly in terms of magnetism, temperature resistance, and resistance to corrosion.” By 2010 China produced well over 90 percent of the world’s REE. Its
actions in the wake of the maritime incident convinced many that it could and would take unilateral action to control the flow of these important materials, and panicked buying soon followed (along with its close cousin rampant speculation). A bundle of REE that
would have sold for less than $10,000 in early 2010 soared to more than $42,000 by April of 2011. In September of that year the US House of Representatives held a hearing called “China’s Monopoly on Rare Earths: Implications for US Foreign and Security Policy.”
China didn’t attain its near monopoly because it possessed anything close to 90 percent of global reserves of REE. In fact, rare earths aren’t rare at all (one, cerium, is about as common in the earth’s crust as copper). However, they’re difficult to extract from ore.
Obtaining them requires a great deal of acid and generates tons of salt and crushed rock as by-products. Most other countries didn’t want to bear the environmental burden of this heavy processing and so left the market to China. In the wake of the embargo, this
seemed like a bad idea. As Representative Brad Sherman put it during the congressional hearing, “Chinese control over rare earth elements gives them one more argument as to why we should kowtow to China.” But there was never much kowtowing. By the time of
the hearing, prices for REE were already in free fall. Why? What happened to the apparently tight Chinese stranglehold over REE? Several factors caused it to ease, including the availability of other supply sources and incomplete maintenance of the embargo. But as
public affairs professor Eugene Gholz noted in a 2014 report on the “crisis,” many users of REE simply innovated their way out of the problem. “Companies such as Hitachi Metals [and its subsidiary in North Carolina] that make rare earth magnets found ways to make
equivalent magnets using smaller amounts of rare earths in the alloys.… Meanwhile, some users remembered that they did not need the high performance of specialized rare earth magnets; they were merely using them because, at least until the 2010 episode, they

were relatively inexpensive and convenient.” Overall, the companies using REE found many inexpensive and convenient alternatives. By the end of 2017 the same bundle of rare earths that had been trading above $42,000 in 2011 was available for about $1,000.

What’s Going On? There is no shortage of examples of dematerialization . I chose the ones in
this chapter because they illustrate a set of fundamental principles at the intersection of
business, economics, innovation, and our impact on our planet. They are: We do want more all
the time, but not more resources. Jevons was wrong. desires grow Alfred Marshall was right, but William Our wants and keep ing, evidently

without end But use of resources does not. We want more beverage options,
, and therefore so do our economies. our the earth’s do

but don’t want to keep using more aluminum

we . We want to communicate compute and in drink cans and

listen to music, but we don’t want an arsenal of gadgets we’re happy with a smartphone. ; single As our

we want more food, but don’t desire to consume more fertilizer

population increases, Jevons
we have any or use more land for crops.

was correct that price elasticity of

at the time he wrote that total British demand for coal was increasing even though steam engines were becoming much more efficient. He was right, in other words, the

demand for coal-supplied power was greater than one in the 1860s. But he was wrong to
conclude that this would be permanent. Elasticities of demand change over time for can several reasons, the most

technological change.
fundamental of which is When fracking made gas cheaper, demand Coal provides a clear example of this. natural much total

for coal in the United States went down even though its price decreased. With the help of innovation and new technologies, economic

Materials cost
growth in America and other rich countries—growth in all of the wants and needs that we spend money on—has become decoupled from resource consumption. This is a recent development and a profound one.

money that companies locked in competition would rather not spend. The root of Jevons’s mistake is simple and boring:

resources cost money. He realized this, of course. What he didn’t sufficiently realize was how strong the incentive is for a company in a contested market to reduce its spending on resources (or anything else) and so eke out a
bit more profit. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned. Monopolists can just pass costs on to their customers, but companies with a lot of competitors can’t. So American farmers who battle with each other (and increasingly with tough rivals in other countries)
are eager to cut their spending on land, water, and fertilizer. Beer and soda companies want to minimize their aluminum purchases. Producers of magnets and high-tech gear run away from REE as soon as prices start to spike. In the United States, the 1980 Staggers

competition
Act removed government subsidies for freight-hauling railroads, forcing them into competition and cost cutting and making them all the more eager to not have expensive railcars sit idle. Again and again, we see that

spurs dematerialization. There are multiple paths to dematerialization As profit-hungry .

companies seek to use fewer resources First they use less of a given , they can go down four main paths. , can simply find ways to

material. This happened as beverage companies

is what with teamed up to use less and the companies that supply them cans

aluminum. American farmers keep getting bigger harvests while using less land, water,
It’s also the story with , who

and fertilizer. Second it becomes possible to

Magnet makers found ways to use fewer rare earth metals when it looked as if China might cut off their supply. , often

substitute one resource for another. coal started to decrease because fracking made Total US consumption after 2007

natural gas attractive .

more to electricity generators If nuclear power becomes more popular in the United States (a topic we’ll take up in chapter 15), we could use both less coal and less gas and generate our electricity from a

uranium contains
small amount of material indeed. A kilogram of2 million times as much energy as the same mass of
-235 fuel approximately –3

coal or oil. the total amount of energy humans consume each year could be supplied
According to one estimate, that

by just seven thousand tons of uranium . Third companies can mak better use of fuel , use fewer molecules overall by ing

the materials they already own. Improving CNW’s railcar utilization from 5 percent to 10 percent would mean that the company could cut its stock of these thirty-ton behemoths in half.

Companies that own expensive physical assets tend to be fanatics about getting as much use as
possible out of them commercial airlines improved
, for clear and compelling financial reasons. For example, the world’s have their load factors—essentially the

percentage of seats occupied from 56 percent to 81 percent in 2018. Finally some

on flights— in 1971 more than ,

materials get replaced by nothing at all. a When a telephone, camcorder, and tape recorder are separate devices, three total microphones are needed. When they all collapse into

smartphone . , only one microphone is necessary are champions of

That smartphone also uses no audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, or camera film. The iPhone and its descendants among the world

dematerialization. They use vastly less metal, plastic, glass, and silicon than the devices they did have

replaced . renewable energy replac coal, gas, oil, and uranium

and don’t need media such as paper, discs, tape, or film If we use more , we’ll be ing

with solar power

photons from the sun ( wind power and hydroelectric power . these
) and the movement of air ( ) water ( ) on the earth All three of types of

are also dematerialization’s champions, since they use

power among no resources once up essentially they’re up and

running. I call these paths to dematerialization slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate.
four They’re not mutually

Innovation is hard to foresee

exclusive. Companies can and do pursue all four at the same time, and all four are going on all the time in ways both obvious and subtle. . Neither the fracking revolution nor the world-
changing impact of the iPhone’s introduction were well understood in advance. Both continued to be underestimated even after they occurred. The iPhone was introduced in June of 2007, with no shortage of fanfare from Apple and Steve Jobs. Yet several months
later the cover of Forbes was still asking if anyone could catch Nokia. Innovation is not steady and predictable like the orbit of the Moon or the accumulation of interest on a certificate of deposit. It’s instead inherently jumpy, uneven, and random. It’s also

combinatorial, as Erik Brynjolfsson and I discussed in our book The Second Machine Age. Most new technologies and other innovations, we argued, are combinations or recombinations of preexisting elements. The iPhone was
“just” a cellular telephone plus a bunch of sensors plus a touch screen plus an operating system and population of programs, or apps . All these elements had been around for a
while before 2007. It took the vision of Steve Jobs to see what they could become when combined. Fracking was the combination of multiple abilities: to “see” where hydrocarbons were to be found in rock formations deep underground; to pump down pressurized
liquid to fracture the rock; to pump up the oil and gas once they were released by the fracturing; and so on. Again, none of these was new. Their effective combination was what changed the world’s energy situation. Erik and I described the set of innovations and

technologies available at any time as building blocks that ingenious people could combine and recombine into useful new configurations. These new configurations then serve as more blocks that later innovators can use. Combinatorial
innovation is exciting because it’s unpredictable. It’s not easy to foresee when or where powerful new combinations are going to appear, or who’s going to come up with them. But

as the number of building blocks and innovators increases, we should have confidence more
both that

breakthroughs such as fracking and smartphones are ahead. Innovation is highly decentralized
and largely uncoordinated, occurring as the result of interactions among complex social, and interlocking

technological, and economic systems. it’s going to keep surprising us. As the Second Machine So

Age progresses, dematerialization accelerates. Erik and I coined the phrase Second Machine Age to draw a contrast with the Industrial Era, which as we’ve seen transformed the
planet by allowing us to overcome the limitations of muscle power. Our current time of great progress with all things related to computing is allowing us to overcome the limitations of our mental power and is transformative in a different way: it’s allowing us to

Computer-aided design tools help

reverse the Industrial Era’s bad habit of taking more and more from the earth every year. engineers at packaging companies design generations of

aluminum cans that keep getting lighter. Fracking took off in part because oil and gas exploration companies learned how to build accurate computer models of the rock formations that lay deep
underground—models that predicted where hydrocarbons were to be found. Smartphones took the place of many separate pieces of gear. Because they serve as GPS devices, they’ve also led us to print out many fewer maps and so contributed to our current trend
of using less paper. It’s easy to look at generations of computer paper, from 1960s punch cards to the eleven-by-seventeen-inch fanfold paper of the 1980s, and conclude that the Second Machine Age has caused us to chop down ever more trees. The year of peak
paper consumption in the United States, however, was 1990. As our devices have become more capable and interconnected, always on and always with us, we’ve sharply turned away from paper. Humanity as a whole probably hit peak paper in 2013. As these
examples indicate, computers and their kin help us with all four paths to dematerialization. Hardware, software, and networks let us slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate. I contend that they’re the best tools we’ve ever invented for letting us tread more lightly on our
planet. All of these principles are about the combination of technological progress and capitalism, which are the first of the two pairs of forces causing dematerialization. Technology: The Human Interface
with the Material World One of my favorite definitions of technology comes from the philosopher Emmanuel Mesthene, who called it “the organization of knowledge for the achievement of practical purposes.”

technologies
Sometimes that knowledge is crystallized into products such as hammers and iPhones, and sometimes it exists as techniques such as those for fracking or precision agriculture. Like knowledge itself,

accumulate. We haven’t forgotten about the lever, the plow, or the steam engine and in the Second Machine Age,

we haven’t had to give them up . technologies are combinatorial; to use cloud computing or drones Like innovation itself, most of them are

recombinations of existing things.

combinations or the number of powerful new technologies This implies that potentially

increases over time because the number of building blocks does. These help me available facts

understand why we didn’t start to dematerialize sooner. we didn’t have the tech It could simply be that right nologies, or

building blocks to allow large-scale dematerialization.

enough , We had technologies that made it feasible and profitable for us to grow by taking more and more from the
earth—more and more metals, fuels, water, fertilizers, and so on—but not ones that made it possible to profitably grow while taking less and less. In the Second Machine Age, that has changed. My other preferred definition of technology comes from the great
science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote, “Technology is the active human interface with the material world. Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their
power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?), what they build with and what they build, their medicine—and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them.” So
am I, because these “mundane matters” have twice reshaped the world—first during the Industrial Era, when technological progress allowed us to prosper by taking more from the planet, and now in the Second Machine Age, when we’ve finally figured out how to

prosper while taking less. Capitalism: Means of Production Capitalism and religion are the two subjects that leave the fewest people on the sidelines. People have very firmly held opinions on both topics,
and few change their minds no matter what evidence and arguments are presented to them. Yet despite this clear history of intransigence, many thinkers and writers have tried to bring others around to their point of view on both topics. Most have failed. I’m going
to join this long sad parade by arguing in favor of capitalism. Before I do that, though, I want to define what I’m talking about. Even more than is the case with technology, clear definitions are important with capitalism because it’s such a triggering word. As the
psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, some hear it as a synonym for liberation, others for exploitation. But let me put the dictionary before the thesaurus and offer a definition of what capitalism is before suggesting what it’s like. For our purposes, capitalism

is a way to come up with goods and services and get them to people. Every society that doesn’t want its people to starve or die of exposure has to accomplish this task; capitalism is simply one approach to doing it. The important
features of this approach are: Profit-seeking companies . Under capitalism, most goods and services are produced by for-profit companies rather than nonprofits, the
government, or individuals. Companies can be owned by only a few people (such as the partners in a law firm) or a great many (publicly traded companies have shareholders all over the world) and are assumed to last over time; they don’t have a predefined end

date. Free market entry and competition . Companies can go after one another’s markets and customers; there are few if any protected monopolies. It might not be legal to completely copy a rival’s

patented product, but it’s perfectly legal to try to come up with something better. In economist-speak, markets are contested. Similarly, people can take their skills from one market to another; they’re not tied to a single geography or job. Strong
property rights and contract enforcement . Patents are a form of intellectual property. They can be bought and sold just as other kinds of property—from land to houses to cars—can. Laws
and courts ensure that none of these kinds of property can be stolen or destroyed, even by large, powerful entities such as billionaires, giant corporations, or the government. Similarly, if a small company and a big one sign a contract to work together, neither party

gets to unilaterally walk away from the agreement without fear of getting sued. Absence of central planning , control, and price setting. The government does not decide what goods and services are needed by
people, or which companies should be allowed to produce them. No central body decides if there is “enough” volume and variety in smartphones, caffeinated beverages, steel girders, and so on. The prices of these and most other goods and services are allowed to

vary based on the balance of supply and demand, rather than being set in advance or adjusted by any central authority. Private ownership of most things. Smartphones, cups of coffee, steel girders, and most other products are
owned by the people or companies that bought them. The companies that produced these things are also owned by people. Many shares of Apple, Starbucks, US Steel, and other public companies are held by mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, but all

these funds are themselves ultimately owned by people. Most houses, cars, land, gold, Bitcoin, and other assets are also owned by people rather than the government. Voluntary exchange . The phrase most closely associated with
capitalism is voluntary exchange. People can’t be forced to buy specific products, take a certain job, or move across the country. Companies don’t have to sell themselves if they don’t want to. They also don’t have to make some products and not others, or stay
within specific markets. The Waffle House chain doesn’t have any of its breakfast restaurants in my state of Massachusetts, but that’s not because lawmakers there are keeping it out. The legislature in Boston doesn’t have that power. I want to highlight a couple of

capitalism is not without oversight. The government has clear roles to play in
things about this definition. First,

establishing laws settling disputes (to say nothing of setting tax rates, controlling the money
and

supply, and doing other things of critical economic importance). every sane As we’ll see in the next two chapters,

advocate of capitalism recognizes also “market failures” need that while voluntary exchange and free market entry are great, they don’t create utopia. Some important

to be corrected by government action. The second thing I want to point out is that all of today’s rich countries are capitalist, by this definition. This is not to say that all capitalist countries are alike.
Denmark, South Korea, and the United States are very different places. They have dissimilar trade policies, tax systems, social safety nets, industrial structures, and so on. But they all have all of the things listed above; they are all inherently capitalist. Denmark’s
economy is not planned and controlled out of Copenhagen, people in Korea own their own houses and furniture,III and contracts in America are generally respected and enforced. Today’s poorer countries, in sharp contrast, reliably do not have all of the things listed
above. Their governments tend to run such things as airlines and telephone networks that are run by private companies in rich countries. It’s generally much harder to start a company in less affluent countries, so free market entry and competition are constrained.
According to the World Bank, in 2017 it took less than six days to start a business in America, Denmark, Singapore, Australia, and Canada, and seventy days or more in Somalia, Brazil, and Cambodia. The world champion of entrepreneurial sclerosis was Venezuela (a
country we’ll talk more about in the next chapter), at two hundred and thirty days. In poorer countries, it’s also often not clear who owns what. Things that are taken for granted in the rich world, such as unambiguous land registries and clear title to houses and
other property, are problematic in many developing countries. The biggest difference between rich and poor countries might be whether laws are clearly and consistently enforced. Poorer countries don’t lack laws; they often have extensive legal codes. What’s in
short supply is justice for all. Officials are corrupt; the elite get special treatment and rarely lose in court; police, regulators, and inspectors can expect bribes; and contested markets, property rights, and voluntary exchange suffer in countless other ways. It’s not that
these abuses don’t occur in rich countries, but they occur much, much less often. I’ll make some more points about capitalism in the next chapter. To wrap up this one, I want to emphasize how well technological progress and capitalism work together.

Overcoming the Limits A great way to see what happens when capitalism and tech progress combine is to look back at 1972’s The Limits to Growth, which we first came across in chapter 4. It’s a fascinating document for two
reasons. First, it’s one of the most Malthusian books written since Malthus. It’s far gloomier than anything Jevons came up with. The team behind The Limits to Growth tried to model the future of the exponentially growing world economy and concluded, “We can
thus say with some confidence that, under the assumption of no major change in the present system, population and industrial growth will certainly stop within the [twenty-first] century, at the latest. The system… collapses because of a resource crisis.” Second, The
Limits to Growth provided an invaluable service by recording what the known global reserves of important resources were in 1972. “Known global reserves” are the deposits of a resource that can be profitably extracted given the prevailing knowledge and state of
technology. The authors of The Limits to Growth included the known reserves of many resources to show how inadequate they were in the face of exponential growth of both output and resource consumption. The authors had little reason to suppose in the early
1970s that either kind of growth would stop on its own. As we saw in chapter 4, resource consumption went up in lockstep with overall economic output all throughout the twentieth century up to Earth Day. Few people expected that to change. The team behind

The Limits to Growth

The Limits to Growth certainly didn’t. The most generous estimate of future resource availability included in assumed that exponential consumption would continue, and that proven reserves were actually

computer models showed the planet would run out of gold within
five times greater than commonly assumed. Under these conditions, the team’s that

twenty-nine years ; silver within forty-two years; copper and petroleum within fifty; and
of 1972

aluminum within fifty-five. These weren’t accurate predictions. we still have large We still have gold and silver, and

reserves of them. In fact, the reserves of both are actually much bigger than in 1972, despite almost half a century of additional consumption. Known global reserves of gold are almost 400 percent larger today than in 1972, and silver
reserves are more than 200 percent larger. And it’s probably not too early to say that we’re not going to run out of copper, aluminum, and petroleum as quickly as estimated in The Limits to Growth. Known reserves of all are much larger than they were when the
book was published. Known aluminum reserves are almost twenty-five times what they were in the early 1970s. How could these predictions about resource availability, which were taken seriously when they were released, have been so wrong? Because the

Limits to Growth underestimated dematerialization and

team pretty clearly new reserves. both the endless search for

Capitalism and tech progress combine to drive both of these trends—the use of fewer resources
and the hunt for more of them—and neither of these two drivers is about to become less
powerful. resource scarcity isn’t
So we’ll continue to innovate our way to greater dematerialization while we keep finding more reserves. The counterintuitive conclusion from this line of reasoning is that

something we need to worry about. The earth is finite, so the total quantity of resources such as gold and petroleum is limited. But the earth is also very, very big—big enough to contain all
we need of these and other resources, for as long as we’ll need them. The image of a thinly supplied Spaceship Earth hurtling through the cosmos with us aboard is compelling, but deeply misleading. Our planet has amply supplied us for our journey. Especially since
we’re quickly slimming, swapping, optimizing, and evaporating our way to dematerialization. The Second Enlightenment Abraham Lincoln, the only US president to hold a patent,IV had a deep insight about capitalism.
He wrote that the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.” “The fire of genius” is a wonderful label for technological progress. “The fuel of interest” is equally good as a summary of

capitalism. They interact in a self-reinforcing and ever-expanding cycle, and they’re now creating a dematerializing world. Innovators come up with new and useful
technologies. They then partner with entrepreneurs or become entrepreneurs themselves as James Watt did. A new company is the result. Investors such as steam-engine backer Matthew Boulton often join in to provide the capital needed for
growth in its early days. The start-up enters a market and takes on incumbents like the Newcomen steam engine. Customers like the new technology better and are free to choose it. Rivals can’t just copy the new technology because it’s protected by patents. So they
either have to license it or come up with innovations themselves. The start-up grows and prospers and eventually becomes the new incumbent. Its success inspires the next round of innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors, who once again take aim at the

Because of free market entry, the next innovators and start-ups can come
incumbent by offering something better to their customers.

from anywhere. It’s not necessary to plan this

And because innovation is such a distributed, dynamic, and unpredictable activity, it often comes from an unexpected place.

process. it’s a terrible idea to try to do so. Any central planner will miss
In fact, actual many of the

innovators or squelch them to protect the status quo of which planners

actively try to are a part. the themselves
This cycle of capitalist, technology-rich “creative destruction” was beautifully described in the middle of the twentieth century by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. But since the late nineteenth century and the work of Alfred Marshall and William Jevons,
we’ve believed that this cycle would cause us to use up more and more of our planet’s resources. This was true throughout the Industrial Era, and especially in the years around Earth Day and the birth of the modern environmental movement. Environmentalists’

Tech
urgent cautions about resource use and planetary depletion were born out of an awareness of how powerfully technological progress and capitalism interacted. But then, for the reasons described in this chapter, that interaction changed.

progress and capitalism reinforce each other, and to cause economies to get bigger and
continued to

people to become more prosperous. But instead of also causing greater use of natural
resources, they spark dematerialization, something truly new under the sun.
instead ed The fuel of interest in eliminating costs
was added to the fire of the computer revolution, and the world began to dematerialize. The economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that the Industrial Era was made possible by the values of the Enlightenment. This intellectual movement began in the second half of
the eighteenth century with many societies in the West embracing what Steven Pinker characterizes as four values: reason, science, humanism, and progress. According to Mokyr, the Enlightenment created a “culture of growth” that let both capitalism and
technological progress flourish. I see an interesting inversion taking place now. If the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Era, then the Second Machine Age has led to a Second Enlightenment—a more literal one. We are now lightening our total consumption and
treading more lightly on our planet. In America, the United Kingdom, and other rich countries, we are past “peak stuff” and are now using fewer total resources year after year. We’re accomplishing this because of the combination of technological progress and
capitalism, which now let us get more from less.

Capitalism solves the environment and makes growth sustainable—it’s too late
for degrowth, but not too late for the free market. Try or die for capitalism.
Fred Krupp et al. 19. Nathaniel Keohane, and Eric Pooley. *President of Environmental Defense
Fund, a United States-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group. **Vice president for
international climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. He used to be in academia at Yale
University and served in the White House as special assistant to President Barack Obama.
***Senior Vice President, Strategy & Communications at the Environmental Defense Fund. 4-1-
2019. "Less Than Zero: Can Carbon-Removal Technologies Curb Climate Change?" Foreign
Affairs.
https://search-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/2186099162/594BA6C689D844ABPQ/
13?accountid=14749/. accessed 4-16-2019//JDi

*GHGs = greenhouse gases

*NET = negative emissions technology

When it comes to generating support for climate policy, a warranted sense of alarm is only half the battle. And the other half-a shared belief that the problem is solvable-is
lagging far behind. The newfound sense of urgency is at risk of being swamped by collective despair. A scant six percent of Americans, according to the Yale study, believe that

carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels having risen by an estimated

the world "can and will" effectively address climate change. With

2.7 percent in 2018 and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide , which will determine the ultimate extent of warming,
at their highest level in some three million years, such pessimism may seem justified-especially with a climate change denier in the White House. But it

is not too late to solve the global climate crisis. A decade of extraordinary innovation has made the
greening of the global economy not only feasible but also likely. The market now favors clean
energy: in many U.S. states, it is cheaper to build new renewable energy plants than to run existing coal-fired
power plants. By combining solar power with new, efficient batteries, Arizona and other sunny states will soon be able to provide electricity at a lower cost per

megawatthour than new, efficient natural gas plants. Local, regional, and federal governments, as well as corporations,
are making measurable progress on reducing carbon pollution. Since 2000, 21 countries have reduced their
annual greenhouse gas emissions while growing their economies ; China is expected to see emissions peak by 2025, five years
earlier than it promised as part of the negotiations for the Paris climate agreement in 2015. At the UN climate talks held late last year in Poland, countries agreed on rules for
how to report progress on meeting emission-reduction commitments, an important step in implementing the Paris accord. What's more, an entirely new arsenal is emerging in

negative emission technologies, or nets. Nets are different from conventional

the fight against climate change:

approaches to climate mitigation in that they seek not to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere but to
remove carbon dioxide that's already there. These technologies range from the old-fashioned practice of reforestation to high-tech machines
that suck carbon out of the sky and store it underground. The window of opportunity to combat climate change has not closed-and with a push from policymakers, nets can

keep it propped open for longer. THE HEAT IS ON How much time is left to avoid climate catastrophe? The truth is that it is impossible to
answer the question with precision. Scientists know that human activity is warming the planet but still don't
fully understand the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gases. Nor do they fully comprehend the link between average global
warming and local repercussions. So far, however, most effects of climate change have been faster and more severe than the climate models predicted. The downside

risks are enormous; the most recent predictions, ever more dire. The Paris agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperatures above
preindustrial levels to well below two degrees Celsius, and ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Going above those levels of warming would mean more disastrous
impacts. Global average temperatures have already risen by about one degree Celsius since 1880, with two-thirds of that increase occurring after 1975. An October 2018 special
report by the un's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of leading scientists and policymakers from around the world, found that unless the world implements
"rapid and far-reaching" changes to its energy and industrial systems, the earth is likely to reach temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels sometime
between 2030 and 2052. Limiting warming to that level, the ipcc found, would require immediate and dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide: roughly a 45 percent reduction in the next
dozen years. Even meeting the less ambitious target of two degrees would require deep cuts in emissions by 2030 and sustained aggressive action far beyond then. The ipcc
report also warns that seemingly small global temperature increases can have enormous consequences. For example, the half-degree difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius
and two degrees Celsius of total warming could consign twice as many people to water scarcity, put ten million more at risk from rising sea levels, and plunge several hundred
million more people into poverty as lower yields of key crops drive hunger across much of the developing world. At two degrees of warming, nearly all of the planet's coral reefs

are expected to be lost; at 1.5 degrees, ten to 30 percent could survive. The deeper message of the IPCC report is that there is no risk-free level of
climate change. Targets such as 1.5 degrees Celsius or two degrees Celsius are important political markers, but they shouldn't fool anyone into thinking that nature
works so precisely. Just as the risks are lower at 1.5 degrees Celsius than at two degrees Celsius, so are they lower at two degrees Celsius than at 2.5 degrees Celsius. Indeed, the

To manage the enormous risks of

latter difference would be far more destructive, since the damages mount exponentially as temperatures rise.

climate change, global emissions of greenhouse gases need to be cut sharply, and as soon as possible. That
will require transforming energy, land, transport, and industrial systems so they emit less carbon
dioxide. It will also require reducing short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, which stay in the
atmosphere for only a fraction of the time that carbon dioxide does but have a disproportionate
effect on near-term warming. Yet even that will not be enough. To stabilize the total atmospheric
concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases [GHGs], the world will have to
reach net negative emissions-that is, taking more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than are being pumped into it. Achieving that
through emission reductions alone will be extremely difficult, since some emissions, such as of methane and nitrous oxide from
agriculture, are nearly impossible to eliminate . Countering the emissions that are hardest to abate, and bring concentrations down to

safer levels, requires technologies that actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere . That's where nets come

in-not as a substitute for aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but as a complement. By deploying technology that

removes existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while accelerating cuts in emissions, the world can boost its chances
of keeping warming below two degrees and reduce the risk of catastrophe . Scientists and activists have tended to regard these
technologies as a fallback option, to be held in reserve in case other efforts fail. Many fear that jumping ahead to carbon dioxide removal will distract
from the critical need to cut pollution. But the
world no longer has the luxury of waiting for emission-
reduction strategies to do the job alone. Far from being a Plan B, nets must be a critical part of Plan A. What's more, embracing
nets sooner rather than later makes economic sense. Because the marginal costs of emission
reductions rise as more emissions are cut, it will be cheaper to deploy nets at the same time as
emission-reduction technologies rather than waiting to exhaust those options first. The wider the solution set, the lower
the costs. And the lower the costs, the easier it is to raise ambitions and garner the necessary political support. THE FUTURE IS NOW Even though
removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere may sound like the stuff of science fiction, there
are already nets that could be
deployed at scale today, according to a seminal report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in October
2018. One category involves taking advantage of carbon sinks-the earth's forests and agricultural soils, which have soaked up more carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution
than has been released from burning petroleum. To date, the growth of carbon sinks has been inadvertent: in the United States, for example, as agriculture shifted from the
rocky soils of the Northeast to the fertile Midwest, forests reclaimed abandoned farmland, breathing in carbon dioxide in the process. But this natural process can be improved
through better forest management-letting trees grow longer before they are harvested and helping degraded forests grow back more quickly. The large-scale planting of trees in
suitable locations around the world could increase carbon sinks further, a process that must go hand in hand with efforts to curb tropical deforestation and thereby continue to
contain the vast amounts of carbon already stored in the earth's rainforests. Farmland provides additional potential for negative emissions. Around the world, conventional
agricultural practices have reduced the amount of carbon in soils, decreasing their fertility in the process. Smarter approaches can reverse the process. Small and large
landholders alike could add agricultural waste to soil, maximize the time that the soil is covered by living plants or mulch, and reduce tilling, which releases carbon dioxide. All

The most technologically

these steps would decrease the amount of carbon that is lost from soil and increase the amount of carbon that is stored in it.

sophisticated net available in the near term is known as "bioenergy with carbon capture and storage," or BECCS. It is also the
riskiest. Broadly defined, beccs involves burning or fermenting biomass, such as trees or crops, to generate electricity or make liquid fuel; capturing the carbon dioxide produced

It is considered a negative emission technology, and not a zero emission technology,

in the process; and sequestering it underground.

because growing the biomass used in the process removes carbon from the atmosphere. What makes
BECCS so exciting is its potential to remove significantly more carbon from the atmosphere than other
approaches do. But it also brings challenges. For one, it is expensive: electricity generated from beccs could cost twice as much as that generated with natural gas,
because biomass is an inefficient fuel source and capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide is costly. The technology would also require careful monitoring to ensure that the

the fact that private companies have

carbon dioxide pumped underground stays there and clear rules for legal liability in the event of leaks. But

been successfully injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil and gas reservoirs for decades offers good
evidence that permanent storage is possible on a large scale. More worrying are the additional climate risks that BECCS poses. If
BECCS drives demand for biomass and more of the carbon that is stored in the forest ecosystem is released as a result, it could end up raising the level of carbon in the
atmosphere rather than reducing it. Another concern is competition for land: converting farms or forests to grow energy crops, something that the large-scale use of BEccs might
require, could drive up the cost of food, reduce agricultural production, and threaten scarce habitats. These problems could be mitigated by using only biomass waste, such as
residues from logging and agriculture, but that would reduce the potential scale. Although BEccs deserves consideration as part of the arsenal, these risks mean that its
contribution will likely end up being smaller than some proponents claim. Taking all these land-based nets together, and factoring in the considerable economic, practical, and

by midcentury, nets could remove as much as five

behavioral hurdles to bringing them to scale, the National Academies report concludes that

billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. Given the significant risks involved, that estimate is probably too bullish. Even if it
were not, that's still only half of the ten billion tons of carbon dioxide that will likely need to be removed each year to zero out the remaining greenhouse gas emissions, even

with aggressive cuts. CLOSING THE GAP Removing from the atmosphere the balance of the carbon dioxide necessary will require
perfecting technologies currently in development. Two deserve particular mention; both are full of promise, although neither is ready
for widespread use. The first is called " direct air capture"- essentially, sucking carbon from the sky. The technology is already being tested in Canada,
Iceland, Italy, and Switzerland at pilot plants where massive arrays of fans direct a stream of air toward a special substance that binds with the passing carbon dioxide. The
substance is then either heated or forced into a vacuum to release the carbon dioxide, which is compressed and either stored or used as feedstocks for chemicals, fuels, or

cement. These technologies are real-albeit prohibitively expensive in their current form. As a recent study led by David Sandalow of Columbia
taking them to scale means solving a variety of technological challenges
University's Center on Global Energy Policy concludes,
to bring down the costs. Above all, these processes are highly energy intensive, so scaling them would require enormous amounts of low-carbon electricity. (A direct-air-capture
facility powered by coal-fired electricity, for example, would generate more new carbon dioxide than it would capture.) These obstacles are serious, but the surprising

progress of the past decade suggests that they can be overcome in the next one. The second technology, enhanced carbon
mineralization, is even further from being realized, but it is full of even more possibility. Geologists have long known that when rock
from the earth's mantle (the layer of the earth between its crust and its core) is exposed to the air, it binds with carbon
dioxide to form carbon-containing minerals. The massive tectonic collisions that formed the Appalachian Mountains around 460 million years ago, for example, exposed
subsurface rock to weathering that resulted in the absorption of substantial amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That took tens of millions of years; enhanced
carbon mineralization seeks to fast-forward the process. Scientists are exploring two ways to do this. In one approach, rocks would be brought to the surface to bind with carbon
from the air. Such natural weathering already occurs in mine tailings, the waste left over from certain mining operations. But mimicking this process on a large scale-by grinding
up large quantities of rock containing reactive minerals and bringing it to the earth's surface-would be highly energy intensive and thus costly, roughly on par with direct air

capture. Another potential approach is pumping the carbon dioxide underground to meet the rock. As the National Academies report
explains, carbon-dioxide-rich fluids injected into basalt or peridotite formations (two kinds of igneous rock that make up much of the

earth's mantle) react with the rock, converting the dissolved carbon dioxide into solid carbon-containing

minerals. Pilot projects in Iceland and the United States have demonstrated that this is possible. There is also evidence for how this
could work in the natural world. Peridotite usually lies deep inside the earth, but some rock formations around the globe contain pockets of it on the surface. For example,
scientists are studying how the surface-level peridotite in Oman's rock formations reacts with the air and absorbs large amounts of carbon. In theory, this approach offers nearly
unlimited scale, because suitable rock formations are widespread and readily accessible. It would also be cheap, because it takes advantage of chemical potential energy in the

since the carbon dioxide is converted to solid rock, the effect is

rock instead of costly energy sources. And

permanent, and it carries few of the side effects that other nets could bring. GETTING TO LESS These technologies do not come cheap. The National
Academy of Sciences recommends as much as $1 billion annually in U.S. government funding for research on nets. And indeed, such funding should be
an urgent priority. But to
make these technologies economically viable and scale them rapidly,
policymakers will also have to tap into a much more powerful force: the profit motive. Putting a price on
carbon emissions creates an economic incentive for entrepreneurs to find cheaper, faster ways to cut
pollution. Valuing negative emissions-for example, through an emission-trading system that awards credits for carbon removal or a carbon tax that
provides rebates for them-would create an incentive for them to join the hunt for nets. Forty-five countries, along with ten U.S. states, have put in
place some mechanism to price carbon. But only a handful of them offer rewards for converting land into forest, managing existing forests better, or
increasing the amount of carbon stored in agricultural soils, and none offers incentives for other nets. What's needed is a carbon pricing system that
not only charges those who emit carbon but also pays those who remove it. Such a system would provide new revenue
streams for landowners who restored forest cover to their land and for farmers and ranchers who
increased the amount of carbon stored in their soils. It would also reward the inventors and
entrepreneurs who developed new, better technologies to capture carbon from the air and the investors and
businesses that took them to scale. Without these incentives, those players will stay on the sidelines. By spurring innovation in lower-cost

nets, incentives would also ease the way politically for an ambitious pollution limit-which, ultimately, is necessary for

ensuring that the world meets it climate goals. Simply put, humanity's best hope is to promise that the next crop of billionaires
will be those who figure out low-cost ways to remove carbon from the sky. The biggest hurdle for such incentives is the lack of a global market for
carbon credits. Hope on that front, however, is emerging from an unlikely place: aviation. Currently responsible for roughly two percent of global
greenhouse gases, aviation's emissions are expected to triple or quadruple by midcentury in the absence of effective policies to limit them. But in 2016,
faced with the prospect that the eu would start capping the emissions of flights landing in and taking off from member states, the un body that governs
worldwide air travel, the International Civil Aviation Organization, agreed to cap emissions from international flights at 2020 levels. The airline industry
supported the agreement, hoping to avoid the messy regulatory patchwork that might result if the eu went ahead and states beyond the eu followed
suit with their own approaches. The resulting program, called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (corsia), requires
all airlines to start reporting emissions this year, and it will begin enforcing a cap in 2021. Once in full swing, at least 100 countries are expected to
participate, covering at least three-quarters of the forecast increase in international aviation emissions. Airlines flying between participating countries
will have two ways to comply: they can lower their emissions (for example, by burning less fuel or switching to alternative fuels), or they can buy
emission-reduction credits from companies. Because the technologies for reducing airline emissions at scale are still a long way off, the industry will
mostly choose the second option, relying on carbon credits from reductions in other sectors. It is estimated that over the first 15 years of corsia,
demand for these credits will reach between 2.5 billion and 3.0 billion tons-roughly equal to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power
and manufacturing sectors. With this new option to sell emission-reduction credits to airlines, there is a good possibility that a pot of gold will await
companies that cut or offset their carbon emissions. In short, corsia could catalyze a global carbon market that drives investment in low-carbon fuels
and technologies-including nets. To realize its promise, corsia must be implemented properly, and there are powerful forces working to see that it is not. Some countries,
including ones negotiating on behalf of their state-owned companies, are trying to rig the system by allowing credits from projects that do not produce legitimate carbon
reductions, such as Brazil's effort to allow the sale of credits from huge hydroelectric dams in the Amazon that have already been built and paid for (and thus do not represent
new reductions). Allowing such credits into the system could crowd out potential rewards for genuine reductions. But there are also powerful, sometimes unexpected allies who
stand to gain from a global carbon market that works. For example, some airlines are motivated to act out of a fear that millennials, concerned about their carbon footprint, may
eventually begin to shun air travel. The new regulations, by creating demand for emission reductions and spurring investment in nets to produce jet fuel, could be the industry's
best hope of protecting its reputation-and a critical step toward a broader global carbon market that moves nets from promising pilot projects to a gamechanging reality.
Skeptics say that nets are too speculative and a possibility only, perhaps, in the distant future. It is true that these innovations are not fully understood and that not all of them
will pan out. But no group of scholars and practitioners, no matter how expert, can determine exactly which technologies should be deployed and when. It is impossible to

nets
predict what future innovations will look like, but that shouldn't stop the world from pursuing them, especially when the threat is so grave. The fact remains that many

are ready to be deployed at scale today, and they might make the difference between limiting warming to two
degrees and failing to do so. Ultimately, climate change will be stopped by creating economic incentives
that unleash the innovation of the private sector-not by waiting for the perfect technology to arrive ready-made, maybe when it's already
too late. No one is saying that achieving all of this will be easy, but the road to climate stability has never been that. Hard does not mean impossible, however, and the

transformative power of human ingenuity offers an endless source of hope .

Capitalism and interdependence solves war—robust studies prove.

Dafoe & Kelsey 14 (Allan & Nina; assistant professor in political science at Yale & research
associate in international economics at Berkeley; Journal of Peace Research, “Observing the
capitalist peace: Examining market-mediated signaling and other mechanisms,”
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/51/5/619.full)

Countries with liberal political and economic systems rarely use military force against each
other. This anomalous peace has been most prominently attributed to the ‘democratic peace’ – the apparent
tendency for democratic countries to avoid militarized conflict with each other (Maoz & Russett,
1993; Ray, 1995; Dafoe, Oneal & Russett, 2013 ).More recently, however, scholars have proposed that the
liberal peace could be partly (Russett & Oneal, 2001) or primarily (Gartzke, 2007; but see Dafoe, 2011)
attributed to liberal economic factors, such as commercial and financial interdependence. In particular,
Erik Gartzke, Quan Li & Charles Boehmer (2001), henceforth referred to as GLB, have
demonstrated that measures of capital openness have a substantial and statistically significant
association with peaceful dyadic relations. Gartzke (2007) confirms that this association is robust to a
large variety of model specifications. To explain this correlation, GLB propose that countries with open capital markets are
more able to credibly signal their resolve through the bearing of greater economic costs prior
to the outbreak of militarized conflict. This explanation is novel and plausible, and resonates with the rationalist view of asymmetric information as a cause of
conflict (Fearon, 1995). Moreover, it implies clear testable predictions on evidential domains different from those examined by GLB. In this article we exploit this opportunity

by constructing a confirmatory test of GLB’s theory of market-mediated signaling. We first

develop an innovative quantitative case selection technique to identify crucial cases where
the mechanism of market-mediated signaling should be most easily observed . Specifically, we employ quantitative
data and the statistical models used to support the theory we are probing to create an impartial and transparentmeans of selecting cases in which the theory – as specified by the theory’s creators –makes its most
confident predictions.We implement three different case selection rules to select cases that optimize on two criteria: (1) maximizing the inferential leverage of our cases, and (2) minimizing selection bias. We
examine these cases for a necessary implication of market-mediated signaling: that key participants drew a connection between conflictual events and adverse market movements. Such an inference is a necessary
step in the process by which market-mediated costs can signal resolve. For evidence of this we examine news media, government documents, memoirs, historical works, and other sources. We additionally
examine other sources, such as market data, for evidence that economic costs were caused by escalatory events. Based on this analysis, we assess the evidence for GLB’s theory of market mediated costly
signaling. Our article then considers a more complex heterogeneous effects version of market-mediated signaling in which unspecified scope conditions are required for the mechanism to operate. Our design has
the feature of selecting cases in which scope conditions are most likely to be absent. This allows us to perform an exploratory analysis of these cases, looking for possible scope conditions. We also consider

our confirmatory test finds that while

alternative potential mechanisms. Our cases are reviewed in more detail in the online appendix.1 To summarize our results,

market-mediated signaling may be operative in the most serious disputes, it was largely
absent in the less serious disputes that characterize most of the sample of militarized
interstate disputes (MIDs). This suggests either that other mechanisms account for the correlation
between capital openness and peace, or that the scope conditions for market-mediated
signaling are restrictive. Of the signals that we observed, strategic market-mediated signals were relatively more
important than automatic market-mediated signals in the most serious conflicts. We identify a
number of potential scope conditions, such as that (1) the conflict must be driven by bargaining failure arising from

uncertainty and (2) the economic costs need to escalate gradually and need to be substantial,
but less than the expected military costs of conflict. Finally, there were a number of other explanations that seemed present in the cases we
examined and could account for the capitalist peace: capital openness is associated with greater anticipated economic costs

of conflict; capital openness leads third parties to have a greater stake in the conflict and
therefore be more willing to intervene; a dyadic acceptance of the status quo could promote both peace and capital openness; and countries seeking to
institutionalize a regional peace might instrumentally harness the pacifying effects of liberal markets. The correlation: Open capital markets and peace The empirical puzzle at the core of this article is the
significant and robust correlation noted by GLB between high levels of capital openness in both members of a dyad and the infrequent incidence of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars between the
members of this dyad (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). The index of capital openness (CAPOPEN) is intended to capture the ‘difficulty states face in seeking to impose restrictions on capital flows (the degree of lost
policy autonomy due to globalization)’ (Gartzke & Li, 2003: 575). CAPOPEN is constructed from data drawn from the widely used IMF’s Annual Reports on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Controls; it is a
combination of eight binary variables that measure different types of government restrictions on capital and currency flow (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 407). The measure of CAPOPEN starts in 1966 and is
defined for many countries (increasingly more over time). Most of the countries that do not have a measure of CAPOPEN are communist.2 GLB implement this variable in a dyadic framework by creating a new
variable, CAPOPENL, which is the smaller of the two dyadic values of CAPOPEN. This operationalization is sometimes referred to as the ‘weak-link’ specification since the functional form is consonant with a model
of war in which the ‘weakest link’ in a dyad determines the probability of war. CAPOPENL has a negative monotonic association with the incidence of MIDs, fatal MIDs, and wars (see Figure 1).3 The strength of the
estimated empirical association between peace and CAPOPENL, using a modified version of the dataset and model from Gartzke (2007), is comparable to that between peace and, respectively, joint democracy, log
of distance, or the GDP of a contiguous dyad (Gartzke, 2007: 179; Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 412). In summary, CAPOPENL seems to be an important and robust correlate of peace. The question of why
specifically this correlation exists, however, remains to be answered. The mechanism: Market-mediated signaling? Gartzke, Li & Boehmer (2001) argue that the classic liberal account for the pacific effect of
economic interdependence – that interdependence increases the expected costs of war – is not consistent with the bargaining theory of war (see also Morrow, 1999). GLB argue that ‘conventional descriptions of
interdependence see war as less likely because states face additional opportunity costs for fighting. The problem with such an account is that it ignores incentives to capitalize on an opponent’s reticence to fight’

that financial interdependence could promote

(Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 400.)4 Instead, GLB (see also Gartzke, 2003; Gartzke & Li, 2003) argue

peace by facilitating the sending of costly signals. As the probability of militarized conflict
increases, states incur a variety of automatic and strategically imposed economic costs as a
consequence of escalation toward conflict. Those states that persist in a dispute despite these
costs will reveal their willingness to tolerate them, and hence signal resolve. The greater the
degree of economic interdependence, the more a resolved country could demonstrate its
willingness to suffer costs ex ante to militarized conflict. Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s mechanism implies a commonly perceived costly signal
before militarized conflict breaks out or escalates: if market-mediated signaling is to account for the correlation between CAPOPENL and the absence of MIDs, then visible market-mediated costs should occur prior

This theory
to or during periods of real or potential conflict (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). Thus, the proposed mechanism should leave many visible footprints in the historical record.

predicts that these visible signals must arise in any escalating conflict, involving countries with
high capital openness, in which this mechanism is operative Clarifying the signaling mechanism Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s signaling
mechanism is mostly conceptualized on an abstract, game-theoretic level (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). In order to elucidate the types of observations that could inform this theory’s validity, we discuss with

A conceptual classification of costly signals The term signaling

greater specificity the possible ways in which such signaling might occur.

connotes an intentional communicative act by one party directed towards another . Because the term
signaling thus suggests a willful act, and a signal of resolve is only credible if it is costly , scholars have sometimes
concluded that states involved in bargaining under incomplete information could advance
their interests by imposing costs on themselves and thereby signaling their resolve (e.g. Lektzian & Sprecher,
2007). However, the game-theoretic concept of signaling refers more generally to any situation in which an actor’s behavior reveals information about her private information. In fact, states

frequently adopt sanctions with low costs to themselves and high costs to their rivals because
doing so is often a rational bargaining tactic on other grounds: they are trying to coerce their
rival to concede the issue. Bargaining encounters of this type can be conceptualized as a type
of war-of-attrition game in which each actor attempts to coerce the other through the
imposition of escalating costs. Such encounters also provide the opportunity for signaling:
when states resist the costs imposed by their rivals, they ‘signal’ their resolve. If at some point one party perceives
the conflict to have become too costly and steps back, that party ‘signals’ a lack of resolve. Thus, this kind of signaling arises as a by-product of

another’s coercive attempts. In other words, costly signals come in two forms: self-inflicted (information about a leader arising from a leader’s intentional or incidental infliction
of costs on himself) or imposed (information about a leader that arises from a leader’s response to a rival’s imposition of costs). Additionally, costs may arise as an automatic

byproduct of escalation towards military conflict or may be a tool of statecraft that is

strategically employed during a conflict. The automatic mechanism stipulates that as the probability of conflict increases, various economic
assets will lose value due to the risk of conflict and investor flight. However, the occurrence of these costs may also be intentional
outcomes of specific escalatory decisions of the states, as in the case of deliberate sanctions; in this case they are strategic. Finally, at a practical level, we identify

three different potential kinds of economic costs of militarized conflict that may be mediated by open capital markets:
capital costs from political risk, monetary coercion, and business sanctions.

Transition fails—growth bias, resource disparities, authoritarian fill-in, and 2008

proves.
Burch-Hansen 18—(Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School).
Hubert Buch-Hansen. “The Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from Critical
Political Economy,” Ecological Economics, Volume 146, April 2018, pp. 157-163.

Political projects do not become hegemonic just because they embody good ideas. For a project to become
hegemonic, (organic) intellectuals first need to develop the project and a constellation of social forces with sufficient power

and resources to implement it then needs to find it appealing and struggle for it. In this context, it is worth noting that degrowth, as a social
movement, has been gaining momentum for some time , not least in Southern Europe. Countless grassroots' initiatives

(e.g., D'Alisa et al., 2013) are the most visible manifestations that degrowth is on the rise . Intellectuals – including founders of ecological economics
such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly, and more recently degrowth scholars such as Serge Latouche and Giorgos Kallis – have played a major role in developing
and disseminating the ideas underpinning the project. A growing interest in degrowth in academia, as well as well-attended biennial international degrowth conferences, also

Still, the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and
indicate that an increasing number of people embrace such ideas.

type of support it needs if its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes . The number of political

parties, labour unions, business associations and international organisations that have so far
embraced degrowth is modest to say the least. Economic and political elites, including social democratic parties and most of
the trade union movement, are united in the belief that economic growth is necessary and desirable. This consensus finds
support in the prevailing type of economic theory and underpins the main contenders in the neoliberal project, such as centre-left and nationalist projects. In spite of the world's

pro-growth discourse in other words continues to be hegemonic: it is widely considered a

multidimensional crisis, a

matter of common sense that continued economic growth is required. It is also noteworthy that economic and
political elites, to a large extent, continue to support the neoliberal project , even in the face of its evident shortcomings . Indeed, the

2008 financial crisis did not result in the weakening of transnational financial capital that could have paved the way for a paradigm
shift. Instead of coming to an end, neoliberal capitalism has arguably entered a more authoritarian phase (Bruff, 2014).
The main reason the power of the pre-crisis coalition remains intact is that governments stepped in and saved the
dominant fraction by means of massive bailouts. It is a foregone conclusion that this fraction and the wider coalition
behind the neoliberal paradigm (transnational industrial capital, the middle classes and
segments of organized labour) will consider the degrowth paradigm unattractive and that such social
forces will vehemently oppose the implementation of degrowth policies (see also Rees, 2014: 97) . While degrowth

advocates envision a future in which market forces play a less prominent role than they do today,
degrowth is not an anti-market project. As such, it can attract support from certain types of market
actors. In particular, it is worth noting that social enterprises, such as cooperatives (Restakis, 2010), play a major role in the degrowth vision. Such enterprises are defined
by being ‘organisations involved at least to some extent in the market, with a clear social, cultural and/or environmental purpose, rooted in and serving primarily the local
community and ideally having a local and/or democratic ownership structure’ (Johanisova et al., 2013: 11). Social enterprises currently exist at the margins of a system, in which

The further dissemination of social enterprises,

the dominant type of business entity is profit-oriented, shareholder-owned corporations.

which is crucial to the transitions to degrowth societies, is – in many cases – blocked or delayed
as a result of the centrifugal forces of global competition (Wigger and Buch-Hansen, 2013). Overall, social enterprises thus (still)
constitute a social force with modest power. Ougaard (2016: 467) notes that one of the major dividing lines in the contemporary transnational capitalist class is between
capitalists who have a material interest in the carbon-based economy and capitalists who have a material interest in decarbonisation. The latter group, for instance, includes
manufacturers of equipment for the production of renewable energy (ibid.: 467). As mentioned above, degrowth advocates have singled out renewable energy as one of the
sectors that needs to grow in the future. As such, it seems likely that the owners of national and transnational companies operating in this sector would be more positively
inclined towards the degrowth project than would capitalists with a stake in the carbon-based economy. Still, the prospect of the “green sector” emerging as a driving force
behind degrowth currently appears meagre. Being under the control of transnational capital (Harris, 2010), such companies generally embrace the “green growth” discourse,
which ‘is deeply embedded in neoliberal capitalism’ and indeed serves to adjust this form of capitalism ‘to crises arising from contradictions within itself’ (Wanner, 2015: 23). In

a political project ‘also needs the political ability to

addition to support from the social forces engendered by the production process,

mobilize majorities in parliamentary democracies , and a sufficient measure of at least passive consent’ (van Apeldoorn
and Overbeek, 2012: 5–6) if it is to become hegemonic. As mentioned, degrowth enjoys little support in parliaments, and

certainly the pro-growth discourse is hegemonic among parties in government .5 With capital accumulation being the most important driving force in capitalist societies, political
decision-makers are generally eager to create conditions conducive to production and the accumulation of capital (Lindblom, 1977: 172). Capitalist states and international
organisations are thus “programmed” to facilitate capital accumulation, and do as such constitute a strategically selective terrain that works to the disadvantage of the degrowth

project. The mainadvocates of the degrowth project are grassroots, small fractions of left-wing parties and
labour unions as well as academics and other citizens who are concerned about social injustice and the
environmentally unsustainable nature of societies in the rich parts of the world . The project is thus ideationally driven in the sense that support for it is not so much rooted in
the material circumstances or short-term self-interests of specific groups or classes as it is rooted in the conviction that degrowth is necessary if current and future generations

degrowth movement, it has only modest

across the globe are to be able to lead a good life. While there is no shortage of enthusiasts and creative ideas in the

resources compared to other political projects. To put it bluntly, the advocates of degrowth do not
possess instruments that enable them to force political decision-makers to listen to – let alone comply
with – their views. As such, they are in a weaker position than the labour union movement was in its heyday, and they are in a far weaker
position than the owners and managers of large corporations are today (on the structural power of transnational
corporations, see Gill and Law, 1989) . 6. Consent It is also safe to say that degrowth enjoys no “passive consent” from the

majority of the population. For the time being, degrowth remains unknown to most people. Yet, if it were to become generally known, most
people would probably not find the vision of a smaller economic system appealing. This is not just a matter of
degrowth being ‘a missile word that backfires’ because it triggers negative feelings in people when they first hear it (Drews and Antal, 2016). It is also a matter of the actual

for many, the anti-capitalist sentiments

content of the degrowth project. Two issues in particular should be mentioned in this context. First,

embodied in the degrowth project will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow. Today, the vast majority of people find it
almost impossible to conceive of a world without capitalism. There is a ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism
the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2). As Jameson
(2003) famously observed, it is, in a sense, easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of

capitalism. However, not only is degrowth – like other anti-capitalist projects – up against the challenge that most people consider capitalism the only system that can
function; it is also up against the additional challenge that it speaks against economic growth in a world where the desirability of growth is considered common sense. Second,

degrowth is incompatible with the lifestyles to which many of us who live in rich countries have become
accustomed. Economic growth in the Western world is, to no small extent, premised on the existence of consumer societies and an associated consumer culture most
of us find it difficult to completely escape. In this culture, social status, happiness, well-being and identity are linked to

consumption (Jackson, 2009). Indeed, it is widely considered a natural right to lead an environmentally unsustainable lifestyle – a lifestyle
that includes car ownership, air travel, spacious accommodations, fashionable clothing, an omnivorous diet and all sorts of electronic gadgets . This Western norm of
consumption has increasingly been exported to other parts of the world, the result being that never before have so many
people taken part in consumption patterns that used to be reserved for elites (Koch, 2012) . If degrowth were to be institutionalised, many
citizens in the rich countries would have to adapt to a materially lower standard of living. That is, while the basic needs of the global population can be met in a non-growing

many people in the rich countries would experience various

economy, not all wants and preferences can be fulfilled (Koch et al., 2017). Undoubtedly,

limitations on their consumption opportunities as a violent encroachment on their personal freedom. Indeed, whereas
many recognize that contemporary consumer societies are environmentally unsustainable, fewer are prepared to actually change their own lifestyles to reverse/address this.

Transition causes an immediate spike in warming – only capitalism solves –

otherwise, exitinction
Crownshaw et al 18 (Timothy Crownshaw, Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill
University, Caitlin Morgan, Food Systems Graduate Program, University of Vermont, Alison
Adams, Rubenstein School of the Environment, University of Vermont, Martin Sers, Faculty of
Environmental Studies, York University, Natália Britto dos Santos, Faculty of Environmental
Studies, York University, Alice Damiano, Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill
University, Laura Gilbert, Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Gabriel
Yahya Haage, Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, and Daniel Horen
Greenford, Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, “Over
the horizon: Exploring the conditions of a post-growth world”, The Anthropocene Review) DB

Near-term impacts to the climate system originating from macroeconomic disruptions remains a
relatively unexplored topic, as the climate change research community typically assumes a
continuation of economic growth and stability in their scenarios (for example, IPCC, 2014b, and UNEP,
2014b). However, industrial emissions will be significantly diminished during a period of economic contraction following the end of
growth. This will bring local environmental benefits in the form of reduced air pollution but also a
partial loss of the aerosol-induced cooling effect.3 The IPCC’s best estimate of the magnitude of
aerosol cooling is approximately half that of the warming from carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere (IPCC, 2013); clearly a significant counterbalance to the warming potential of GHGs.
Contraction and deindustrialization of the global economy will curtail these cooling emissions,
and thus complicate climate change policy and mitigation efforts. Owing to the short residence time of
aerosols in the atmosphere (Textor et al., 2006), an increase in warming could manifest rapidly following a
decline in industrial activity. Changes in the rate and global distribution of industrial aerosol
emissions have already caused significant shifts in localized cooling effects (IPCC, 2013; Kühn et al.,
2014). Several studies have highlighted a potential increase in global warming as aerosol emissions are
gradually reduced via pollution control measures, finding that average temperatures will rise
approximately an additional 1°C by 2100 as a consequence (Smith and Bond, 2014; Westervelt et al., 2015).
While the magnitude is uncertain (Lewis and Curry, 2015; Rosenfeld et al., 2013), this additional warming may occur
earlier and at a much faster rate than expected due to falling emissions from industrial
activities resulting from the end of growth and subsequent economic contraction. This
outcome could enhance climate impacts non-linearly,
as human and natural systems would have little time to adapt to a rapid change in the rate of
warming (Smith et al., 2015). As such, a relatively sudden increase in the pace of climate change and associated impacts followed
by a gradual long-term reduction may be a more realistic prospect than current assumptions of a rising emissions trend in line with
economic growth, partially mitigated by technological innovation and declining emissions intensity of the global economy. Post-
growth climate mitigation and systemic feedbacks A
transient increase in warming following the end of
growth has the potential to affect multiple components of the climate system, including
albedo dynamics and natural GHG sources. Additional short-term warming will induce greater
albedo changes in the climate system due to melting of more ice and snow cover, reducing the
reflection of sunlight (IPCC, 2014c). This is significant as greater near-term warming increases risks
of runaway feedback between albedo reduction and increased warming (Curry et al., 1995; Hall, 2004).
An increase in short-term warming may also exacerbate the release of terrestrial and oceanic
sources of GHG emissions, such as the permafrost in high-latitude and high-altitude regions
around the world (IPCC, 2013; Schuur et al., 2015), and emissions from aquatic ecosystems and methane
clathrate deposits (Hamdan and Wickland, 2016). Consideration of these climate system feedbacks enhances
expectations of post-growth warming and invalidates prevailing estimations of the underlying
risks associated with self-reinforcing processes. As such, the near-term risks associated with
climate feedbacks in scenarios assuming continued economic growth, already underestimated as noted
by Bloch-Johnson et al. (2015), will be further exacerbated in a post-growth context . The climate system will
also be affected by changing patterns of economic activity and GHG emissions stemming from trade and transportation. Long-
distance transportation is a key emitter (Karl et al., 2009); a decline in international trade stemming from economic contraction will
diminish GHG emissions. Additionally, increased disruption of long-distance trade routes from weather-related climate change
impacts (WTO and UNEP, 2009) will further reduce GHG emissions from transportation (Heinberg and Fridley, 2016). This effectively
forms a stabilizing feedback loop as future warming and associated impacts on trade will partially limit future emissions. Climate
mitigation and adaptation presents an unwieldy problem for capital-constrained, contracting
societies, and may in fact be a major component of the contraction process because of the
redirection of investment away from productive capital, as mentioned in the introduction. The IPCC
(2014c) estimates that the necessary investments per year in low-carbon technology and
infrastructure will rise by several hundreds of billions of dollars each year before 2030. As the
assumptions used to calculate these investment estimates are not consistent with a scenario of
long-term economic contraction, they must be treated critically in the context of a post-growth
world. However, mitigation efforts will remain a prerequisite for remaining within acceptable
climate conditions. Current approaches to climate change mitigation relying on capital-
intensive technological solutions, including a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable
energy, continued development and deployment of carbon capture and storage ( CCS), and
geoengineering projects, may be untenable in this context. Climate change mitigation through
a large-scale switch to biofuels, or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)
technology, will be additionally constrained by a limited supply of agricultural land subject to
rising food demand in the near-term (Kraxner et al., 2013). Instead, feasible climate mitigation options may be
practically limited to low-capital, demand-side behavioral responses and lifestyle changes. A decrease in energy
demand, associated with a decline in aggregate demand, will be complicated both by declining
EROI of our major fuels (Hall, 2017; Lambert et al., 2014; Murphy, 2014) and the issue of capital constraints.
As energy demand falls, extraction of costly unconventional hydrocarbon resources with higher emissions intensities (NRDC, 2010)
will become increasingly uneconomic. However, declining
investment capacity implies that an ongoing
conversion to lowcarbon renewables may be similarly constrained due to the vast material,
energy and capital requirements involved, as described by Trainer (2010). As energy demand falls,
economies may be forced to return to conventional low-cost fuels with acceptable EROI, such
as remaining coal reserves (Hall et al., 2014), which are attractive because of compatibility with
existing energy infrastructure but have detrimental consequences for GHG emissions. The net
effect of the above factors on the climate system will depend on their relative magnitudes and the respective time lags involved.
Provided the effects of stabilizing feedbacks outweigh reinforcing feedbacks, the end of growth may ultimately reduce human
perturbance of the climate system. Conversely, if
stabilizing economy–climate feedbacks are insufficient to
counteract the consequences of a near-term spike in warming, the world may face
significantly worse climate stress than is currently anticipated.

Functional critiques of cap are wrong

Jaeggi 16 (Rahel Jaeggi is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Humboldt-University in Berlin,
and has been the visiting Theodor Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in
2015/16. She works primarily in the areas of social philosophy and critical theory, drawing
extensively on the traditions of German Idealism, as well as recent Anglo-American thought.
Jaeggi’s books to date include Alienation and Kritik von Lebensformen, which is forthcoming in
English translation as Critique of Forms of Life.) Rahel Jaeggi 2016. “What (if anything) is wrong
with Capitalism? Dysfunctionality, Exploitation and Alienation: Three Approaches to the Critique
of Capitalism” The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 54, Spindel Supplement. 2016. DOI:
10.1111/sjp.12188

By pointing out the “dysfunctional” and therefore even “contradictory” character of a certain social
formation, we might in fact conflate aspects that could equally be separated, so it may be claimed
that the functional “deficit” (of capitalism) only appears because we demand from it the
solution to problems that are not necessarily related to each other. (One such problem might be
the demand for not only dynamic economic growth and productivity but also the equal
distribution of its results, or the assumption that capitalism is to provide not only for the present
but also for the future, and so on.) Mind you, it is not my intention to cast doubt on the desirability of
a society that accords with all these requirements. I want to register doubt only as to whether we
can or should pursue this wish within the parameters of a functional critique. The crucial result
of my reflections up to this point is the following: by merging or conflating different regards, as
described above, functional critique inevitably engages in teleological and value-laden
judgments. This observation ties in with a general point that concerns the discussion of
functionality as a whole: functionality does something always only in relation to something—in
relation, that is, to a defined function. The knife also functions (or does not function) in relation to
the activity of cutting. We attribute this function to the knife virtually without question. What else—
besides cutting—is a knife supposed to do? Now, with capitalism, it is less clear what its function
should be. And, quite generally, at least in relation to social entities or features of social reality,
“function” and “functionality” are not uncontested givens—they are not immediately “given” or
inherent features of social reality apart from any interpretation . Now, if the apparent deficits of an
object always relate to functions that are assigned to that object, and if it is not possible at
minimum to derive the function of certain “objects” (that is, social entities) directly from their
“nature,” then the criterion of nonfunctionality relies on the assignment of functions—and thus
on criteria that are not inherently given. But, then, the criterion of functionality and nonfunctionality
is not “freestanding.” Hence, the undermining of future conditions of human life is a functional deficit
only if we also attribute to the present economy the task of facilitating future life (instead of saying,
“The Devil takes the hindmost.” 50 RAHEL JAEGGI And, in general, not only does capitalism seem
to resist utter collapse, it does not even fail to function smoothly. To the extent that it does not function,
it fails to function from the point of view of particular goals and associated value-judgments or norms.
The nonfunctionality thus is always already normatively stamped. The simultaneity of poverty and
prosperity becomes a contradiction only under specific conditions, and it is dysfunctional only
when its result is interpreted as a scandal in a normatively charged way. Insofar as the reaction
of affected parties is also a part of the nonfunctionality of a social system, this normative
component is indeed evident: the “rabble” produced by the dynamics of the bourgeois economy
is—as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the “oppressive problem of poverty in civil society”—not
simply impoverished; it is outraged. And it is this outrage and its consequences that pot
Capitalism solves poverty---economic freedom increases living standards and reduces poverty

Luka Ladan 19. Luka Ladan is the President and CEO of Zenica Public Relations and a Catalyst
Policy Fellow. Prior to founding Zenica, Ladan served as Communications Director at a leading
public affairs firm in Washington, D.C. "Capitalism Remains the Best Way to Combat Extreme
Poverty." Catalyst. 6-14-2019. https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/06/14/capitalism-remains-
the-best-way-to-combat-extreme-poverty/

More recent research paints a much rosier picture. According to a May 2019 study co-authored
by University of Chicago professors and Census Bureau researchers, the American experiment
may not be perfect, but extreme poverty remains a statistical anomaly . Specifically analyzing $2-
a-day poverty—that is, the number of Americans living on $2 or less per day—the study’s co-
authors found that only 0.11 percent of Americans live in extreme poverty. That comes out to
roughly 336,000 people—still too high, but nowhere near 18 million. Moreover, the study
concludes that the extreme poverty rate for parents—whether single or married—is virtually
zero. Again, America is not perfect. Poverty lingers, even here. But the status quo could be a
whole lot worse: It may be difficult to become a member of the top “one percent,” but it is even
harder to fall into extreme poverty. The good fortunes of most can be traced to the free exchange of goods and
services for mutual gain. While an imperfect system, capitalism remains our most effective weapon in
fighting extreme poverty. As we’ve seen across continents, the freer an economy becomes ,
the less likely its people are to become entrapped in extreme poverty. This can be
corroborated by tracking the rise of “economic freedom,” which is related to the openness of a
country’s markets and corresponding increases in living standards. Over the past 25 years, the
global average economic freedom score—as calculated by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation
—has increased by 3.2 percentage points, with many countries joining the ranks of at least the
“moderately free.” Indeed, global economic freedom has experienced a nearly six percent
increase since 1995—after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Capitalism is more commonplace now
than ever before. And how have extreme poverty rates fared in that time? Trending down—way
down. During the early 1980s, more than 42 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (earning less than $2 a
day). In the Soviet Union, for example, 20 percent of the population—over 43 million people—lived on less than 75 rubles a month
(roughly $120). Fast forward to the 21st century, and less than 10 percent of the world’s
population is extremely poor—a 33 percent decrease. The left-leaning Brookings Institution
estimates that someone escapes extreme poverty every 1.2 seconds. Consider it this way: Even
though the world’s population has increased by more than two billion people since 1990, the
net number of extremely poor people has been slashed by nearly 1.2 billion. In today’s era of
globalization, about 130,000 people rise out of poverty every single day. That’s like the entire
city of New Haven, Connecticut leaving extreme poverty in a day’s time. Or take China, which has
opened many sectors of its economy in recent decades. Since 1995 alone, the Asian country’s economic freedom score increased
from 52 to 58.4 points—outpacing the rest of the world. In roughly that same period of time, the Chinese economy lifted 800 million
people out of extreme poverty. That’s right: 800 million Chinese people—nearly three times the U.S. population. While still far from
a “free economy,” China’s newfound openness to free-market principles is correlated with the most substantial example of poverty
reduction in the history of the world. Even if correlation does not always equal causation, that accomplishment is difficult to ignore.
Granting people the freedom to voluntarily make mutually beneficial exchanges of goods and
services has been the most effective anti-poverty solution to date. As more of the world allows
the exercise of such freedom, expect poverty to decline even further. Capitalism boosts everyone’s quality
of life---less infant mortality, longer life expectancies, and greater wealth. James Pethokoukis 16. James Pethokoukis, a columnist
and an economic policy analyst, is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the
AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” He is also a columnist for The Week and an
official contributor to CNBC. "Don't tell Bernie Sanders, but capitalism has made human life fantastically better. Here's how."
American Enterprise Institute - AEI. 2-9-2016. https://www.aei.org/economics/political-economy/dont-tell-bernie-sanders-but-
capitalism-has-made-human-life-fantastically-better-heres-how/

Back in 1995, now-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, “I personally happen not to be a great believer in the free
enterprise system for many reasons.” And having watched Sanders during this primary season, it doesn’t
appear to me that the self-described democratic socialist has much changed his opinion of
capitalism. Which is both amazing and appalling. The single greatest story of human
achievement of the past 2,000 years is the dramatic rise in living standards of the past 200
years. It’s an astounding ascent — see above chart — driven by innovative, entrepreneurial
capitalism. Free enterprise. Economic freedom. Yes, workers in advanced economies today are
many multiples wealthier — almost incalculably so — than their counterparts in the early 19th
century. But here is another way of looking at, thanks to a new study by consultancy Deloitte
showing how technology-driving innovation has radically altered lives in Britain for the much
better: 1) Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years. 2) It has
been saving us from dull, repetitive, and dangerous work. Agriculture was the first major sector
to experience this change. In 1871 it employed 6.6% of the workforce of England and Wales.
Today that stands at 0.2%, a 95% decline. 3) Overall, technological innovation has resulted in
fewer humans being deployed as sources of muscle power and more engaged in jobs involving
the nursing and care of others . Just 1.1% of the workforce was employed in the caring
professions during the 1871 census. By 2011, these professions employed almost a quarter of
the England and Wales workforce. 4) Technology has boosted employment in knowledge-
intensive sectors such as medicine, accounting and professional services. 5) Finally technology
has lowered the cost of essentials, raising disposable incomes and creating new demand and
jobs. In 1871, there was one hairdresser for every 1,793 English and Welsh citizens; now there is
one for every 287. In 1948, a Freed-Eiseman 16-inch TV cost $795 in the US, roughly a quarter of
the average annual salary, or roughly $12,000 today. A top of the range TV can be bought today
for less than $1,000. On a quality-adjusted basis, the decline in prices is even more pronounced. US CPI data show that the
price of a TV has fallen by 98% since 1950. So thanks to the technology-driven innovation of entrepreneurial
capitalism, we live richer, fuller lives that would be unimaginable to workers in the early 1800s
or even later 1800s. Economist Robert Gordon describes the “special century” after 1870 in his new book, “The Rise and Fall
of American Growth” as “more important to economic progress than have been all other centuries.” Or as my colleague Michael
Strain has written: Over
the past two centuries, growth has increased living standards in the West
unimaginably quickly. Many more babies survive to adulthood. Many more adults survive to old
age. Many more people can be fed, clothed and housed. Much of the world enjoys significant
quantities of leisure time. Much of the world can carve out decades of their lives for education,
skill development and the moral formation and enlightenment that come with it. Growth has
enabled this. Let’s keep growing. Growth facilitates the flourishing life. By creating a dynamic
environment characterized by increasing opportunity, growth gives the young the opportunity
to dream and to strive. And it gives the rest of us the ability to apply our skills and talents as we
see fit, to contribute to society, to provide for our families. A growing economy allows
individuals to increase their living standards, facilitating economic and social mobility. How could
anyone not be a great believer in competitive, market-driven entially threaten the cohesion of society.

Capitalism is self-correcting – centuries of history prove

Matthew Wilburn King, 5/26/21,[Matthew Wilburn King is an international consultant and
conservationist based in Boulder, Colorado and the president and chairman of the Common
Foundation], BBC Future, "Why the next stage of capitalism is coming,"
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210525-why-the-next-stage-of-capitalism-is-coming,
mm
Nearly 250 years ago, the economist and philosopher Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, in which he described the birth of a
new form of human activity: industrial capitalism. It would lead to the accumulation of wealth beyond anything that he and his
contemporaries could have imagined. Capitalism has fuelled the industrial, technological and green revolutions, reshaped the
natural world and transformed the role of the state in relation to society. It has lifted
innumerable people out of
poverty over the last two centuries, significantly increased standards of living, and resulted in innovations
that have radically improved human well-being, as well as making it possible to go to the Moon and read this article on the internet.
However, the story is not universally positive . In recent years, capitalism's shortcomings have become ever-more
apparent. Prioritising short-term profits for individuals has sometimes meant that the long-term well-being of society and the
environment has lost out – especially as the world has faced the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. And as political unrest and
polarisation around the world have shown, there are growing signs of discontent with the status quo. In one 2020 survey by the
marketing and public relations firm Edelman, 57% of people worldwide said that "capitalism as it exists today does more harm than
good in the world". Indeed, if
you judge by measures such as inequality and environmental damage, "the
performance of Western capitalism in recent decades has been deeply problematic", the economists Michael Jacobs and
Mariana Mazzucato wrote recently in the book Rethinking Capitalism. However, that does not mean there are no solutions.
"Western capitalism is not irretrievably bound to fail; but it does need to be rethought," argue Jacobs and Mazzucato. So,
will capitalism as we know it continue in its current form – or might it have another future ahead? Capitalism has spawned
thousands of books and millions of words, and so it would be impossible to explore all its facets. That said, we can start to
understand where capitalism could be headed in the future by exploring where it began. This tells us that capitalism hasn't
always worked the way it does today – particularly in the West. Between the 9th and 15th Centuries, autocratic
monarchies and ecclesiastical hierarchies dominated Western society. These systems began to fall away as people increasingly
asserted their right to individual liberty. This push for a greater focus on the individual favoured capitalism as an economic system
because of the flexibility it allowed for private property rights, personal choice, entrepreneurship and innovation. It also favoured
democracy as a governing system for its focus on individual political freedom. The shift toward greater individual liberty changed the
social contract. Previously, many resources were provided by those in power (land, food and protection) in exchange for significant
contributions from citizens (for instance, from slave labour to hard labour with little pay, high taxes and unquestioning loyalty). With
capitalism, people expected less from governing authorities, in exchange for greater civil liberties, including individual, political and
economic freedom. But capitalism would evolve significantly over the following centuries – and particularly so
during the second half of the 20th Century. After World War Two, the Mont Pelerin Society, an economic policy think tank, was
founded with the goal of addressing the challenges confronting the West. Its specific focus was on defending the political values of
an open society, rule of law, freedom of expression and free market economic policies – central tenents of classical liberalism. Its
ideas eventually gave rise to "supply-side economics". This was the belief that lower taxes and minimal regulation of the free market
would lead to the most economic growth – and, therefore, better lives for all. In the 1980s, coupled with the emergence of political
neoliberalism, supply-side economics became a priority for the US and many European governments. This newer strain of capitalism
has led to increased economic growth worldwide, while lifting a substantive number of people out of absolute poverty. But at the
same time, critics argue that its tenets of lowering taxes and deregulating business has done little to support political investment in
public services, such as crumbling public infrastructure, improving education and mitigating health risks. Perhaps most significantly,
in many developed nations late-20th Century capitalism has contributed to a significant gap between the wealth of the richest and
poorest people, as measured by the Gini Index. And in some countries, that gap is growing ever-wider. It's particularly stark in the
US, where the poorest individuals have seen no real income growth since 1980, while the ultra-rich at the top have seen their
income grow by around 6% per year. The richest billionaires in the world are almost all based in the US, and have amassed
staggering fortunes, while at the same time the median US household income has risen only modestly since the turn of the century.
The inequality gap may matter more than some politicians and corporate leaders would like to believe. Capitalism may have lifted
millions of people around the world out of absolute poverty, but inequality can be corrosive within a society, says Denise Stanley, a
professor of economics at California State University-Fullerton. "Absolute poverty is basically folks are able to get… $4 per day per
person. It’s a threshold measure," she explains, but relative poverty can unbalance a society over the long-term. Even if the
economy is growing, income inequality and stagnant wages can make people feel less secure as their relative status in the economy
diminishes. Behavioural economists have shown that "our status compared to other people, our happiness, is derived more by
relative measures and distribution then by absolute measures. If that’s true then capitalism has a problem," says Stanley. As a result
of rising inequality, "people have less trust in institutions and experience a sense of injustice", according to the Edelman report. But
the impact on people's lives may go deeper. Capitalism in its current form is destroying the lives of many working-class people, argue
the economists Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton in their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Over "the past two
decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of
thousands of American lives each year", they write. The 2007-2008 financial crisis exacerbated these problems. The crisis was
brought on by excessive deregulation, and hit the working class in developed nations particularly hard. The subsequent bailouts of
big banks led to resentment and "helped fuel the rise of the… polarised politics we’ve seen over the last decade", according to
Richard Cordray, the first director of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and author of Watchdog: How Protecting
Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy. Liberal democracies may now be at an
inflection point, where citizens contest today’s capitalist norms with greater political intensity
worldwide. J Patrice McSherry, a professor of political science at Long Island University in New York, has observed this change in
Chile, for instance. "Social mobilisation began with a rise in subway fares in October 2019, sparking broad-based protests that
convoked more than one million people in demonstrations," she says. "The social movement has exposed the deep sources of
discontent in Chile: entrenched and growing inequality, the ever-rising cost of living, and extreme privatisation in one of the world’s
most neoliberal states." Those grievances can be traced back to the late 20th Century, when Chile's authoritarian government
introduced constitutional reforms that "institutionalised the economic and political domination of the dictatorship and enshrined a
neoliberal framework that erased the role of the state in social and economic areas. It restricted political participation, gave the
[political] right disproportionate power, and installed a tutelary role for the armed forces," writes McSherry in an article for the
North American Congress on Latin America, a non-profit organisation which tracks trends in the region. Similarly, the Yellow Vest
movement that started in France in 2018 was initially about the increased cost of fuel for commuters, but quickly broadened to
include grievances similar to those in Chile, the cost of living, growing inequality, and a demand for government to stop ignoring the
needs of ordinary citizens. And in the US, the political movement which spawned Trumpism is arguably fuelled by economic
inequality just as much as ideology. Among voters who have lost out due to globalisation, the Trump administration won widespread
political support for its more closed approaches to global trade, including withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and
retaliatory tariffs on Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Argentinian goods and services imported into the US. Even the US's allies were
targeted by this agenda, including Europe, Canada, and Mexico. While one response to the downsides of capitalism in its current
form is for nations to take a defensive posture, seeking to protect themselves by minimising external ties, protectionism "is short-
sighted, particularly when it comes to trade," according to Anahita Thoms, head of Baker McKenzie's International Trade Practice in
Germany and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. "While it may bring some temporary benefits, in the long-term it
endangers the global economy as a whole and threatens to undo decades of economic progress. It is crucial to maintain investment-
friendly, open markets," says Thoms. A central challenge for governments in the 21st Century will be to work out how to balance
these long-term benefits of global trade with the short-term harms that globalisation can bring to local communities affected by low
wages or unemployment. Economies cannot become completely divorced from the demands of democratic majorities who seek
jobs, affordable housing, education, healthcare and a clean environment. As the Chilean, Yellow Vest and Trumpist movements
show, many people are asking for change to the existing system so that it accounts for these needs, rather than only enriching
private interests. In sum, it may be time to reconsider the social contract for capitalism, so that it becomes more inclusive of a
broader set of interests beyond individual rights and liberties. This is not impossible. Capitalism
has evolved before, and
if it is to continue into the longer-term future, it can evolve again. In recent years, various ideas and
proposals have emerged that aim to rewrite capitalism's social contract. What they have in common is
the idea that businesses need more varied measures of success than simply profit and growth. In business, there's
"conscious capitalism", inspired by the practices of so-called "ethical" brands. In policy, there's "inclusive
capitalism", advocated by both the Bank of England and The Vatican, which advocates harnessing "capitalism for good". And in
sustainability, there's the idea of "doughnut economic s", a theory proposed by economist and author Kate
Raworth, which suggests that it's possible to thrive economically as a society while also staying within social and planetary
boundaries. Then there's the "Five Capitals" model articulated by Jonathan Porritt, the author of Capitalism As If The World Matters.
Porritt calls for the integration of five pillars of human capital – natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital – into
existing economic models. One tangible example of where companies are beginning to embrace the Five Capitals is the B-
Corporation movement. Certified companies sign up to a legal obligation to consider "the impact of their decisions on their workers,
customers, suppliers, community, and the environment". Their ranks now include major corporations such as Danone, Patagonia,
and Ben & Jerry's (which is owned by Unilever). This approach has become increasingly mainstream, reflected in a 2019 statement
released by over 180 corporate CEOs redefining "the purpose of a corporation". For the first time, CEOs representing Wal-Mart,
Apple, JP Morgan Chase, Pepsi, and others acknowledged that they must redefine the role of business in relation to society and the
environment. Their statement proposes that companies must do more than deliver profits to their shareholders. In addition, they
must invest in their employees and contribute to the improvement of the human, natural and social elements of capital that Porritt
refers to in his model, rather than the sole focus on financial capital. In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance on the future of
capitalism, the executive chairman of Best Buy, Hubert Joly, said that "what has happened is that for 30 years, from the 1980s to 10
years ago, we’ve had this singular focus on profits that has been excessive and has caused a lot of these issues. We need to unwind a
bit of these 30 years. If we have a refoundation of business, it can be a refoundation of capitalism as well... I think this can be done,
this has to be done." More than three decades ago, the United Nations Brundtland Commission wrote in "Our Common Future" that
there was ample evidence that social and environmental impacts are relevant and need to be incorporated into development
models. It is now obvious that these issues must also be considered within the social contract underpinning capitalism, so that it is
more inclusive, holistic and integrated with basic human values. Ultimately, it is worth remembering that citizens in a capitalist,
liberal democracy are not powerless. Collectively, they can support companies aligned with their beliefs, and continuously demand
new laws and policies which transform the competitive landscape of corporations so that they might improve their practices.
When Adam Smith was observing nascent industrial capitalism in 1776, he could not foresee just how
much it would transform our societies today. So it follows that we might be similarly blind to what
capitalism could look like in another two centuries . However, that does not mean we should not ask how it might
evolve into something better in the nearer term. The future of capitalism and our planet depend on it.

Spreading capitalism creates global prosperity and environmental

sustainability. Abandoning it is disastrous.
Rhonheimer, 20—teaching professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Martin,
“Capitalism is Good for the Poor – and for the Environment,”
https://austrian-institute.org/en/subjects-en/catholic-social-doctrine-2/capitalism-is-good-for-
the-poor-and-for-the-environment/, dml)

It is not social policy but capitalism that has created today’s prosperity.

What is important is that what made today’s mass prosperity possible – a phenomenon
unprecedented in history – was not social policy or social legislation, organised trade union pressure, or corrective
interventions in the capitalist economy, but rather market capitalism itself, due to its enormous potential for
innovation and the ever-increasing productivity of human labour that resulted from it.

Increasing prosperity and quality of life are always the result of increasing labour productivity.
Only increased productivity enabled higher social standards, better working conditions, the
overcoming of child labour, a higher level of education, and the emergence of human capital.
This process of increasing triumph over poverty and the constantly rising living standards of the general masses is taking
place on a global scale – but only where the market economy and capitalist entrepreneurship
are able to spread.
From industrial overexploitation of nature to ecological awareness
The first phase of industrialisation and capitalism was characterised by an enormous consumption of
resources and frequent overexploitation of nature, which soon gave the impression that this process
could not be sustainable. Since the end of the 19th century, disaster and doom scenarios have
repeatedly been put forward, but in retrospect they have proved to be wrong: The combination of
technological innovation, market competition, and entrepreneurial profit-seeking (with the
compulsion to constantly minimise costs) have meant that these scenarios never occurred. The
ever-increasing population has been increasingly better supplied thanks to innovative
technologies, ever-increasing output with lower consumption of resources less harmful to the
environment – e.g. less arable land in agriculture, or oil and electricity instead of coal for rapidly
increasing mobility. More recent disaster scenarios , such as those spread by reputable scientists since the
late 1960s and in the 1970s, have also proved to be inaccurate.

The reason things developed differently was the always underestimated innovative dynamism
of the capitalist market economy, a growing ecological awareness and, as a result, legislative
intervention that took advantage of the logic of market capitalism: As a result of the ecological movement
that had come out of the United States since 1970, wise legislation began to use the price mechanism to apply market incentives to
internalize negative externalities. Environmental pollution was given a price-tag.

This led to an enormous decrease in air pollution and other ecological consequences of growth,
which is only possible in free, market-based societies, because the production process here is
characterized by competition and constant pressure to reduce costs, i.e. to the most profitable
use of resources. On the other hand, all forms of socialism, i.e. a state-controlled economy, have proved to be
ecological disasters and have left behind destruction of gigantic proportions, without providing
the population with anything that is near comparable in prosperity, often even by destroying
existing prosperity, such as happened in Venezuela.
Capitalist profit motive combined with digitalization as a solution: Increasing decoupling of growth and resource consumption

Moreover, technological innovations combined with capitalist profit-seeking and market

competition have led to a new and surprising phenomenon over the past decades, which is still hardly
noticed in the public debate: the decoupling of growth and resource consumption
(“dematerialization”). In a wide variety of industrial sectors, the developed countries , above all the
U.S., are now achieving ever greater productive output with increasingly fewer resources. This has
a lot to do with technology, especially the digitalization of the economy and of our entire lives.

As the well-known MIT professor Andrew McAfee shows in his book More from Less, published in October 2019, this process also
follows the logic of capitalist profit maximization. To get it going, we do not need politics, even though wise,
properly incentivizing legislation can be helpful and sometimes necessary. Above all, however, it is the combination of
technological innovation, capitalist profit-seeking, and market-based entrepreneurial
competition that will also solve the problem of man-made global warming.

In addition, property rights and their protection are decisive for the careful use of natural
resources. And where this is not possible, legal support for collective self-governing structures, in accordance with the principle
of subsidiarity, are important—as is analysed by Nobel Economic Prize winner Elinor Ostrom. By contrast, the growing ideologically
motivated anti-capitalist
eco-activism, and the policies influenced by it, are leading in the wrong
direction, distracting precisely from what would be best for the climate and the environment—
and distracting us from what could help protect us against the inevitable consequences of
global warming.
The spread of capitalism causes world peace!
Mousseau, 19—Professor in the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the
University of Central Florida (Michael, “The End of War: How a Robust Marketplace and Liberal
Hegemony Are Leading to Perpetual World Peace,” International Security, Volume 44, Issue 1,
Summer 2019, p.160-196, dml)

Is war becoming obsolete? There is wide agreement among scholars that war has been in sharp decline
since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, even as there is little agreement as to its cause.1 Realists reject the idea
that this trend will continue, citing states' concerns with the “security dilemma”: that is, in anarchy states
must assume that any state that can attack will; therefore, power equals threat, and changes in relative power result in conflict and
war.2 Discussing the rise of China, Graham Allison calls this condition “Thucydides's Trap,” a reference to the ancient Greek's claim
that Sparta's fear of Athens' growing power led to the Peloponnesian War.3

This article argues that there is no Thucydides Trap in international politics. Rather, the world is moving
rapidly toward permanent peace, possibly in our lifetime. Drawing on economic norms theory,4 I show that
what sometimes appears to be a Thucydides Trap may instead be a function of factors strictly
internal to states and that these factors vary among them. In brief, leaders of states with advanced
market-oriented economies have foremost interests in the principle of self-determination for
all states, large and small, as the foundation for a robust global marketplace. War among these
states, even making preparations for war, is not possible, because they are in a natural alliance
to preserve and protect the global order. In contrast, leaders of states with weak internal markets
have little interest in the global marketplace; they pursue wealth not through commerce, but
through wars of expansion and demands for tribute. For these states, power equals threat, and therefore they
tend to balance against the power of all states. Fearing stronger states, however, minor powers with weak
internal markets tend to constrain their expansionist inclinations and, for security reasons,
bandwagon with the relatively benign market-oriented powers.

I argue that this liberal global hierarchy is unwittingly but systematically buttressing states'
embrace of market norms and values that, if left uninterrupted, is likely to culminate in
permanent world peace, perhaps even something close to harmony. My argument challenges the
realist assertion that great powers are engaged in a timeless competition over global
leadership, because hegemony cannot exist among great powers with weak markets; these inherently expansionist states live in
constant fear and therefore normally balance against the strongest state and its allies.5 Hegemony can exist only among
market-oriented powers, because only they care about global order. Yet, there can be no
competition for leadership among market powers, because they always agree with the goal of
their strongest member (currently the United States) to preserve and protect the global order based on
the principle of self-determination. If another commercial power, such as a rising China, were to
overtake the United States, the world would take little notice, because the new leading power
would largely agree with the global rules promoted and enforced by its predecessor . Vladimir Putin's
Russia, on the other hand, seeks to create chaos around the world. Most other powers, having market-oriented economies, continue
to abide by the hegemony of the United States despite its relative economic decline since the end of World War II.6

To support my theory that domestic factors determine states' alignment decisions, I analyze the voting preferences of members of
the United Nations General Assembly from 1946 to 2010. I find that states
with weak internal markets tend to
disagree with the foreign policy preferences of the largest market power (i.e., the United States), but
more so if they are major powers or have stronger rather than weaker military and economic
capabilities. The power of states with robust internal markets, in contrast, appears to have no
effect on their foreign policy preferences, as market-oriented states align with the market
leader regardless of their power status or capabilities. I corroborate that this pattern may be a
consequence of states' interest in the global market order by finding that states with higher
levels of exports per capita are more likely than other states to have preferences aligned with those of the
United States; those with lower levels of exports are more likely to have interests that do not align with the
United States, but again more so if they are stronger rather than weaker.

Liberal scholars of international politics have long offered explanations for why the incidence of war may decline, generally
beginning with the assumption that although the security dilemma exists, it can be overcome with
the help of factors external to states.7 Neoliberal institutionalists treat states as like units and international
organization as an external condition.8 Trade interdependence is dyadic and thus an external condition.9
Democracy is an internal factor, but theories of democratic peace have an external dimension: peace is the result of the
expectations of states' behavior informed by the images that leaders create of each other's regime types.10 In contrast, I show that
the security dilemma may not exist at all and how peace can emerge in anarchy with states
pursuing their interests determined entirely by internal factors.11

No mindset shift
Heinberg 15—Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute (Richard, “The
Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us”, http://www.postcarbon.org/the-anthropocene-its-not-all-
about-us/, dml)

It’s hard to convince people to voluntarily reduce consumption and curb reproduction. That’s not because
humans are unusually pushy, greedy creatures; all living organisms tend to maximize their population size
and rate of collective energy use. Inject a colony of bacteria into a suitable growth medium in a petri dish and watch
what happens. Hummingbirds, mice, leopards, oarfish, redwood trees, or giraffes: in each instance the principle
remains inviolate—every species maximizes population and energy consumption within
nature’s limits. Systems ecologist Howard T. Odum called this rule the Maximum Power Principle: throughout nature, “system
designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and
efficiency.”

In addition to our innate propensity to maximize population and consumption, wehumans also have difficulty making
sacrifices in the present in order to reduce future costs. We’re genetically hardwired to respond
to immediate threats with fight-or-flight responses, while distant hazards matter much less to
us. It’s not that we don’t think about the future at all; rather, we unconsciously apply a discount rate based on
the amount of time likely to elapse before a menace has to be faced.

True, there is some variation in future-anticipating behavior among individual humans. A

small percentage of the
population may change behavior now to reduce risks to forthcoming generations, while the
great majority is less likely to do so. If that small percentage could oversee our collective future
planning, we might have much less to worry about. But that’s tough to arrange in democracies,
where people, politicians, corporations, and even nonprofit organizations get ahead by promising immediate
rewards, usually in the form of more economic growth. If none of these can organize a proactive
response to long-range threats like climate change, the actions of a few individuals and communities may
not be so effective at mitigating the hazard.

This pessimistic expectation is borne out by experience. The general outlines of the 21st century
ecological crisis have been apparent since the 1970s. Yet not much has actually been
accomplished through efforts to avert that crisis. It is possible to point to hundreds, thousands,
perhaps even millions of imaginative, courageous programs to reduce, recycle, and reuse—yet the
overall trajectory of industrial civilization remains relatively unchanged.

Alt fails and causes transition wars/extinction.

Smith '19 [Noah; 4/5/19; Bloomberg Opinion columnist, former assistant professor of finance
at Stony Brook University; "Dumping Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet,"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-05/capitalism-is-more-likely-to-limit-
climate-change-than-socialism]

It has become fashionable on social media and in certain publications to argue that capitalism is
killing the planet. Even renowned investor Jeremy Grantham, hardly a radical, made that assertion last year. The basic
idea is that the profit motive drives the private sector to spew carbon into the air with reckless abandon.
Though many economists and some climate activists believe that the problem is best addressed by modifying market incentives with
a carbon tax, many
activists believe that the problem can’t be addressed without rebuilding the
economy along centrally planned lines.

The climate threat is certainly dire, and carbon taxes are unlikely to be enough to solve the problem. But eco-
socialism is probably not going to be an effective method of addressing that threat. Dismantling an
entire economic system is never easy, and probably would touch off armed conflict and major
asdasd upheaval. In the scramble to win those battles, even the socialists would almost
certainly abandon their limitation on fossil-fuel use — either to support military efforts, or to
keep the population from turning against them. The precedent here is the Soviet Union, whose
multidecade effort to reshape its economy by force amid confrontation with the West led to
profound environmental degradation. The world's climate does not have several decades to
spare.

Even without international conflict, there’s little guarantee that moving away from capitalism
would mitigate our impact on the environment. Since socialist leader Evo Morales took power in Bolivia,
living standards have improved substantially for the average Bolivian, which is great. But this has come at
the cost of higher emissions. Meanwhile, the capitalist U.S managed to decrease its per capita
emissions a bit during this same period (though since the U.S. is a rich country, its absolute level of emissions is much higher).

In other words, in
terms of economic growth and carbon emissions, Bolivia looks similar to more
capitalist developing countries. That suggests that faced with a choice of enriching their people or
helping to save the climate, even socialist leaders will often choose the former. And that same
political calculus will probably hold in China and the U.S., the world’s top carbon emitters — leaders who
demand draconian cuts in living standards in pursuit of environmental goals will have trouble
staying in power.

The best hope for the climate therefore lies in reducing the tradeoff between material
prosperity and carbon emissions. That requires technology — solar, wind and nuclear power,
energy storage, electric cars and other vehicles, carbon-free cement production and so on. The
best climate policy plans all involve technological improvement as a key feature.

It’s key to CCS – link-turns every impact.

Graciela ‘16 (/16 – Professor of Economics and of Statistics at Columbia University and Visiting Professor at Stanford
University, and was the architect of the Kyoto Protocol carbon market (being interviewed by Marcus Rolle, freelance journalist
specializing in environmental issues and global affairs, “Reversing Climate Change: Interview with Graciela Chichilnisky,”
http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/01/09/2016/reversing-climate-change-interview-graciela-chichilnisky)//cmr

GC: Green capitalism is a new economic system that values the natural resources on which human survival depends. It fosters a
harmonious relationship with our planet, its resources and the many species it harbors. It is a new type of market economics that
addresses both equity and efficiency. Using carbon negative technology™ it helps reduce carbon in the atmosphere while fostering
economic development in rich and developing nations, for example in the U S., EU, China and India. How does this work? In a
nutshell Green Capitalism requires the creation of global limits or property rights nation by nation for
the use of the atmosphere, the bodies of water and the planet’s biodiversity, and the creation of new markets
to trade these rights from which new economic values and a new concept of economic progress emerges updating GDP as is
now generally agreed is needed. Green Capitalism is needed now to help avert climate change and achieve
the goals of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement, which are very ambitious and universally supported but have no way to be realized
within the Agreement itself. The Carbon Market and its CDM play critical roles in the foundation of Green Capitalism, creating values
to redefine GDP. These are needed to remain within the world’s “CO2 budget” and avoid catastrophic climate change. As I see it,
the building blocks for Green Capitalism are then as follows; (1) Global limits nation by nation in the use
of the planet’s atmosphere, its water bodies and biodiversity - these are global public goods. (2) New global markets to
trade these limits, based on equity and efficiency. These markets are relatives of the Carbon Market and the SO2 market.
The new market create new measures of economic values and update the concept of GDP. (3)
Efficient use of Carbon Negative Technologies to avert catastrophic climate change by providing a smooth transition to
clean energy and ensuring economic prosperity in rich and poor nations. These building blocks have immediate practical implications
in reversing climate change and can assist the ambitious aims of Paris COP21 become a reality. MR: What is the greatest advantage
of the new generation technologies that can capture CO2 from the air? GC: These technologies build carbon
negative power plants, such as Global Thermostat, that clean the atmosphere of CO2 while producing electricity. Global Thermostat
is a firm that is commercializing a technology that takes CO2 out of air and uses mostly low cost residual heat rather than electricity
to drive the capture process, making the entire process of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere very inexpensive. There is enough
residua heat in a coal power plant that it can be used to capture twice as much CO2 as the plant emits, thus transforming the power
plant into a “carbon sink.” For example, a
400 MW coal plant that emits 1 million tons of CO2 per year can
become a carbon sink absorbing a net amount of 1 million tons of CO2 instead. Carbon capture
from air can be done anywhere and at any time, and so inexpensively that the CO2 can be sold
for industrial or commercial uses such as plastics, food and beverages, greenhouses, bio-
fertilizers, building materials and even enhanced oil recovery , all examples of large global markets and
profitable opportunities. Carbon capture is powered mostly by low (85°C) residual heat that is inexpensive, and any source will do. In
particular, renewable (solar) technology can power the process of carbon capture. This can help advance solar technology and make
it more cost-efficient. This
means more energy, more jobs, and it also means economic growth in
developing nations, all of this while cleaning the CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon negative
technologies can literally transform the world economy . MR: One final question. You distinguish between long-run
and short-run strategies in the effort to reverse climate change. Would carbon negative technologies be part of a short-run strategy?
GC: Long-run strategies are quite different from strategies for the short-run. Often long-run strategies do not work in
the short run and different policies and economic incentives are needed. In the long run the best climate change
policy is to replace fossil fuel sources of energy that by themselves cause 45% of the global emissions, and to plant trees to restore if
possible the natural sources and sinks of CO2. But the
fossil fuel power plant infrastructure is about 87% of the
power plant infrastructure and about $45-55 trillion globally. This infrastructure cannot be
replaced quickly, certainly not in the short time period in which we need to take action to
avert catastrophic climate change. The issue is that CO2 once emitted remains hundreds of years in
the atmosphere and we have emitted so much that unless we actually remove the CO2 that is
already there, we cannot remain long within the carbon budget, which is the concentration of CO2 beyond
which we fear catastrophic climate change. In the short run, therefore, we face significant time pressure. The IPCC
indicates in its 2014 5th Assessment Report that we must actually remove the carbon that is already in the
atmosphere and do so in massive quantities, this century (p. 191 of 5th Assessment Report). This is what I called
a carbon negative approach, which works for the short run. Renewable energy is the long run solution. Renewable
energy is too slow for a short run resolution since replacing a $45-55 trillion power plant
infrastructure with renewable plants could take decades. We need action sooner than that. For
the short run we need carbon negative technologies that capture more carbon than what is emitted. Trees do that and they must be
conserved to help preserve biodiversity. Biochar does that. But trees and other natural sinks are too slow for
what we need today. Therefore, negative carbon is needed now as part of a blueprint for transformation. It must be
part of the blueprint for Sustainable Development and its short term manifestation that I call Green Capitalism,
while in the long run renewable sources of energy suffice , including Wind, Biofuels, Nuclear, Geothermal, and
Hydroelectric energy. These are in limited supply and cannot replace fossil fuels . Global energy today
is roughly divided as follows: 87% is fossil, namely natural gas, coal, oil; 10% is nuclear, geothermal, and
hydroelectric, and less than 1% is solar power — photovoltaic and solar thermal. Nuclear fuel is scarce and nuclear
technology is generally considered dangerous as tragically experienced by the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster in Japan, and it
seems unrealistic to seek a solution in the nuclear direction. Only solar energy can be a long term solution: Less than 1% of the solar
energy we receive on earth can be transformed into 10 times the fossil fuel energy used in the world today. Yet we need a
short-term strategy that accelerates long run renewable energy , or we will defeat long-term goals. In the
short term as the IPCC validates, we need carbon negative tech nology, carbon removals. The short run
is the next 20 or 30 years. There is no time in this period of time to transform the entire fossil
infrastructure — it costs $45-55 trillion (IEA) to replace and it is slow to build. We need to directly reduce carbon in the
atmosphere now. We cannot use traditional methods to remove CO2 from smokestacks (called often Carbon Capture and
Sequestration, CSS) because they are not carbon negative as is required. CSS works but does not suffice because it only captures
what power plants currently emit. Any level of emissions adds to the stable and high concentration we have today and CO2 remains
in the atmosphere for years. We need to remove the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, namely air capture of CO2 also called
carbon removals. The solution is to combine air capture of CO2 with storage of CO2 into stable
materials such as biochar, cement, polymers, and carbon fibers that replace a number of other construction materials
such as metals. The most recent BMW automobile model uses only carbon fibers rather than metals. It is also possible to
combine CO2 to produce renewable gasoline , namely gasoline produced from air and water. CO2 can be separated
from air and hydrogen separated from water, and their combination is a well-known industrial process to produce gasoline. Is this
therefore too expensive? There are new technologies using algae that make synthetic fuel commercially
feasible at competitive rates. Other policies would involve combining air capture with solar thermal electricity using the
residual solar thermal heat to drive the carbon capture process. This can make a solar plant more productive and efficient so it can
out-compete coal as a source of energy. In summary, the
blueprint offered here is a private/public approach,
based on new industrial technology and financial markets, self-funded and using profitable
greenmarkets, with securities that utilize carbon credits as the “underlying” asset, based on the KP CDM, as well as new
markets for biodiversity and water providing abundant clean energy to stave off impending and actual energy crisis in developing
nations, fostering mutually beneficial cooperation for industrial and developing nations. The blueprint proposed provides the two
sides of the coin, equity and efficiency, and can assign a critical role for women as stewards for human survival and sustainable
development. My vision is a carbon negative economy that represents green capitalism in resolving the
Global Climate negotiations and the North–South Divide. Carbon negative power plants and capture of CO2 from air and
ensure a clean atmosphere together innovation and more jobs and exports: the more you produce and create jobs the cleaner
becomes the atmosphere. In practice, Green Capitalism means economic growth that is harmonious with
the Earth resources.
IEA studies and empirics prove that universal decoupling is occuring --- global
emissions have stalled for years despite consistent growth
Riti et. al 17 [Joshua Sunday Riti, School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and
Technology, Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Jos, “Decoupling
CO2 emission and economic growth in China: Is there consistency in estimation results in
analyzing environmental Kuznets curve?”, Journal of Cleaner Production Volume 166, 10
November 2017, Pages 1448-1461, Science Direct]

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), universal carbon dioxide-greenhouse gas
related emissions shows some stability in 2015 at approximately 32.1 Gt for the second year in a
row, validating the decoupling of global greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth
(Enerdata, 2015; Itskos et al., 2016). The stalling of global emissions is no surprise, as this is in
line with the slowing trend in annual emission growth over the past three years, starting from
2.0% in 2013 to 1.1% in 2014 and further down to 0.1% in 2015. A similar trend of declining
growth in global emissions could also be seen from 2010 to 2012, starting from 5.7% down to
0.7%. It is debatable whether the plateaued emission level will continue and results from
structural changes (Jackson et al., 2016; Qi et al., 2016; Green and Stern, 2016). In 2009, a
stronger global downward trend of 1.0% was recorded, compared to 2008 levels, but this was
due to the global economic downturn. Stalling in emissions is not coupled with the GDP trend,
as global GDP kept up with an annual growth of 3.0% in 2015 compared to 2014. A more
structural change with a shift away from carbon-intensive activities, particularly in China but also
in the United States, contributed considerably to this trend. This achievement was made
possible through the global investment in energy efficiency which increased by 6% in 2015 (IEA,
2010) and the rise in the proportion of renewables in the generation of power. It is estimated
that the share of renewables was around 90 percent of the latest power generation in year
2015, with power from wind alone responsible for over 50 percent.

extinction outweighs – it’s the upmost moral evil and disavowal of the risk
makes it more likely.
Burns 17 [Elizabeth Finneron-Burns is a Teaching Fellow at the University of
Warwick and an Affiliated Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in
Stockholm, What’s wrong with human extinction?,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00455091.2016.1278150?needAccess=true,
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2017]
Many, though certainly not all, people might believe that it would be wrong to bring about the end of the human species, and the reasons given for this belief are various. I begin by considering four reasons that could be given against the moral permissibility of
human extinction. I will argue that only those reasons that impact the people who exist at the time that the extinction or the knowledge of the upcoming extinction occurs, can explain its wrongness. I use this conclusion to then consider in which cases human

extinction would prevent

extinction would be morally permissible or impermissible, arguing that there is only a small class of cases in which it would not be wrong to cause the of the human race or allow it to happen. 2.1. It

the existence of very many people happy it is a good One reason of human extinction might be considered to be wrong lies in the value of human life itself. The thought here might be that

thing for people to exist and extinction would deprive more people of enjoying this
and enjoy happy lives good.

The ‘good could be understood in two ways.

’ in this case first at least According to the , one might believe that you benefit a person by bringing them into existence, or at least, that

it is good for that person that they come to exist if humans were to go extinct the . The second view might hold that ,
utility foregone by the billions (or more) of people who could have lived but will now never get
that opportunity , renders allowing human extinction to take place an incidence of wrongdoing. An example of this view can be found in two quotes from an Effective Altruism blog post by Peter Singer, Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage:

billions of people would likely die painful deaths

One very bad thing about human extinction would be that . But in our view, this is by far not the worst thing about human

The worst thing about human extinction is that there would be no future generations
extinction. . Since there could

the value of all those generations together greatly exceeds the value of the
be so many generations in our future,

current generation there is value in human life and something

. (Beckstead, Singer, and Wage 2013) The authors are making two claims. The first is that also

valuable about creating future people which gives us a reason to do so; furthermore, it would be a very bad thing if we did not do so. The second is that, not only would it be a bad thing for there to be
no future people, but it would actually be the worst thing about extinction. Since happy human lives have value, and the number of potential people who could ever exist is far greater than the number of people who exist at any one time, even if the extinction were
brought about through the painful deaths of currently existing people, the former’s loss would be greater than the latter’s. Both claims are assuming that there is an intrinsic value in the existence of potential human life. The second claim makes the further
assumption that the forgone value of the potential lives that could be lived is greater than the disvalue that would be accrued by people existing at the time of the extinction through suffering from painful and/or premature deaths. The best-known author of the
post, Peter Singer is a prominent utilitarian, so it is not surprising that he would lament the potential lack of future human lives per se. However, it is not just utilitarians who share this view, even if implicitly. Indeed, other philosophers also seem to imply that they
share the intuition that there is just something wrong with causing or failing to prevent the extinction of the human species such that we prevent more ‘people’ from having the ‘opportunity to exist’. Stephen Gardiner (2009) and Martin O’Neill (personal
correspondence), both sympathetic to contract theory, for example, also find it intuitive that we should want more generations to have the opportunity to exist, assuming that they have worth-living lives, and I find it plausible to think that many other people

When we talk about future lives being ‘prevented’, we are saying that
(philosophers and non-philosophers alike) probably share this intuition.

a possible person or a set of possible people who could potentially have existed will now never actually come
to exist . To say that it is wrong to prevent people from existing could either mean that a possible person could reasonably reject a principle that permitted us not to create them, or that the foregone value of their lives provides a reason for rejecting any
principle that permits extinction. To make the first claim we would have to argue that a possible person could reasonably reject any principle that prevented their existence on the grounds that it prevented them in particular from existing. However, this is
implausible for two reasons. First, we can only wrong someone who did, does or will actually exist because wronging involves failing to take a person’s interests into account. When considering the permissibility of a principle allowing us not to create Person X, we
cannot take X’s interest in being created into account because X will not exist if we follow the principle. By considering the standpoint of a person in our deliberations we consider the burdens they will have to bear as a result of the principle. In this case, there is no
one who will bear any burdens since if the principle is followed (that is, if we do not create X), X will not exist to bear any burdens. So, only people who do/will actually exist can bear the brunt of a principle, and therefore occupy a standpoint that is owed
justification. Second, existence is not an interest at all and a possible person is not disadvantaged by not being caused to exist. Rather than being an interest, it is a necessary requirement in order to have interests. Rivka Weinberg describes it as ‘neutral’ because
causing a person to exist is to create a subject who can have interests; existence is not an interest itself.3 In order to be disadvantaged, there must be some detrimental effect on your interests. However, without existence, a person does not have any interests so
they cannot be disadvantaged by being kept out of existence. But, as Weinberg points out, ‘never having interests itself could not be contrary to people’s interests since without interest bearers, there can be no ‘they’ for it to be bad for’ (Weinberg 2008, 13). So, a
principle that results in some possible people never becoming actual does not impose any costs on those ‘people’ because nobody is disadvantaged by not coming into existence.4 It therefore seems that it cannot be wrong to fail to bring particular people into
existence. This would mean that no one acts wrongly when they fail to create another person. Writ large, it would also not be wrong if everybody decided to exercise their prerogative not to create new people and potentially, by consequence, allow human
extinction. One might respond here by saying that although it may be permissible for one person to fail to create a new person, it is not permissible if everyone chooses to do so because human lives have value and allowing human extinction would be to forgo a
huge amount of value in the world. This takes us to the second way of understanding the potential wrongness of preventing people from existing — the foregone value of a life provides a reason for rejecting any principle that prevents it. One possible reply to this
claim turns on the fact that many philosophers acknowledge that the only, or at least the best, way to think about the value of (individual or groups of) possible people’s lives is in impersonal terms (Parfit 1984; Reiman 2007; McMahan 2009). Jeff McMahan, for
example, writes ‘at the time of one’s choice there is no one who exists or will exist independently of that choice for whose sake one could be acting in causing him or her to exist … it seems therefore that any reason to cause or not to cause an individual to exist … is
best considered an impersonal rather than individual-affecting reason’ (McMahan 2009, 52). Another reply along similar lines would be to appeal to the value that is lost or at least foregone when we fail to bring into existence a next (or several next) generations of
people with worth-living lives. Since ex hypothesi worth-living lives have positive value, it is better to create more such lives and worse to create fewer. Human extinction by definition is the creation of no future lives and would ‘deprive’ billions of ‘people’ of the
opportunity to live worth-living lives. This might reduce the amount of value in the world at the time of the extinction (by killing already existing people), but it would also prevent a much vaster amount of value in the future (by failing to create more people). Both
replies depend on the impersonal value of human life. However, recall that in contractualism impersonal values are not on their own grounds for reasonably rejecting principles. Scanlon himself says that although we have a strong reason not to destroy existing
human lives, this reason ‘does not flow from the thought that it is a good thing for there to be more human life rather than less’ (104). In contractualism, something cannot be wrong unless there is an impact on a person. Thus, neither the impersonal value of
creating a particular person nor the impersonal value of human life writ large could on its own provide a reason for rejecting a principle permitting human extinction. It seems therefore that the fact that extinction would deprive future people of the opportunity to
live worth-living lives (either by failing to create either particular future people or future people in general) cannot provide us with a reason to consider human extinction to be wrong. Although the lost value of these ‘lives’ itself cannot be the reason explaining the

wrongness of extinction, it is possible the knowledge of this loss might create a personal reason for some existing people. I will consider this possibility later on in section (d). But first I move to the second reason human extinction might be wrong per se. 2.2. It
would mean the loss of the only known form of intelligent life and all civilization and
intellectual progress would be lost A second reason we might think it would be wrong to cause human extinction is the loss that would occur of the only (known) form of rational life and the knowledge
and civilization that that form of life has created. One thought here could be that just as some might consider it wrong to destroy an individual human heritage monument like the Sphinx, it would also be wrong if the advances made by humans over the past few

millennia were lost or prevented from progressing. A related argument is made by those who feel that there is something special about humans’ capacity for rationality which is valuable in
itself . Since humans are the only intelligent life that we know of, it would be a loss, in itself, to the world for that to end. I admit that I struggle to fully appreciate this thought. It seems to me that Henry Sidgwick was correct in thinking that these things are
only important insofar as they are important to humans (Sidgwick 1874, I.IX.4).5 If there is no form of intelligent life in the future, who would there be to lament its loss since intelligent life is the only form of life capable of appreciating intelligence? Similarly, if there
is no one with the rational capacity to appreciate historic monuments and civil progress, who would there be to be negatively affected or even notice the loss?6 However, even if there is nothing special about human rationality, just as some people try to prevent the

extinction of nonhuman animal species, we might think that we ought also to prevent human extinction for the sake of biodiversity . The
thought in this, as well as the earlier examples, must be that it would somehow be bad for the world if there were no more humans even though there would be no one for whom it is bad. This may be so but the only way to understand this reason is impersonally.
Since we are concerned with wrongness rather than badness, we must ask whether something that impacts no one’s well-being, status or claims can be wrong. As we saw earlier, in the contractualist framework reasons must be personal rather than impersonal in
order to provide grounds for reasonable rejection (Scanlon 1998, 218–223). Since the loss of civilization, intelligent life or biodiversity are per se impersonal reasons, there is no standpoint from which these reasons could be used to reasonably reject a principle that

permitted extinction. Therefore, causing human extinction on the grounds of the loss of civilization, rational life or biodiversity would not be wrong. 2.3. Existing people would endure physical
pain and/or painful and/or premature deaths Thinking about the ways in which human extinction might come about brings to the fore two more reasons it might be wrong. It could,
for example, occur if all humans (or at least the critical number needed to be unable to replenish the population, leading to eventual extinction) underwent a sterilization procedure. Or perhaps it could come about due to anthropogenic climate change or a massive

Each scenario would involve significant physical and/

asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out the species in the same way it did the dinosaurs millions of years ago. of these s or

non-physical harms extinction

to existing people and their interests. Physically, people might suffer premature and possibly also painful deaths, for example. It is not hard to imagine examples in which the process of

could cause premature death A nuclear winter that killed everyone or even just every woman
.

under the age of 50 is a clear example of such a case . Obviously, some types of premature death themselves cannot be reasons to reject a principle. Every person dies
eventually, sometimes earlier than the standard expected lifespan due to accidents or causes like spontaneously occurring incurable cancers. A cause such as disease is not a moral agent and therefore it cannot be wrong if it unavoidably kills a person prematurely.
Scanlon says that the fact that a principle would reduce a person’s well-being gives that person a reason to reject the principle: ‘components of well-being figure prominently as grounds for reasonable rejection’ (Scanlon 1998, 214). However, it is not settled yet

being caused
whether premature death is a setback to well-being. Some philosophers hold that death is a harm to the person who dies, whilst others argue that it is not.7 I will argue, however, that regardless of who is correct in that debate,

to die prematurely can be reason to reject a principle when it fails to show respect to the person
as a rational agent appreciating the value of
. Scanlon says that recognizing others as rational beings with interests involves seeing reason to preserve life and prevent death: ‘

human life is primarily a matter of seeing human lives as to be respected something , where this involves seeing reasons not to destroy them,
reasons to protect them, and reasons to want them to go well’ (Scanlon 1998, 104). The ‘respect for life’ in this case is a respect for the person living, not respect for human life in the abstract. This means that we can sometimes fail to protect human life without
acting wrongfully if we still respect the person living. Scanlon gives the example of a person who faces a life of unending and extreme pain such that she wishes to end it by committing suicide. Scanlon does not think that the suicidal person shows a lack of respect for
her own life by seeking to end it because the person whose life it is has no reason to want it to go on. This is important to note because it emphasizes the fact that the respect for human life is person-affecting. It is not wrong to murder because of the impersonal

disvalue of death in general, but because taking someone’s life without their permission shows disrespect to that person . This
supports its inclusion as a reason in the contractualist formula, regardless of what side ends up winning the ‘is death a harm?’ debate because even if death turns out not to harm the person who died, ending their life without their consent shows disrespect to that

person. A person who could reject a principle permitting another to cause his or her premature death presumably does not wish to die at that time, or in that manner. Thus, if they are killed without their
consent, their interests have not been taken into account , and they have a reason to reject the principle that allowed their premature death.8 This is as true in
the case of death due to extinction as it is for death due to murder. However, physical pain may also be caused to existing people without killing them, but still resulting in human extinction. Imagine, for example, surgically removing everyone’s reproductive organs in

order to prevent the creation of any future people. Another example could be a nuclear bomb that did not kill anyone, but did painfully render
them infertile through illness or injury . These would be cases in which physical pain (through surgery or bombs) was inflicted on existing people and the extinction came about as a result of the painful
incident rather than through death. Furthermore, one could imagine a situation in which a bomb (for example) killed enough people to cause extinction, but some people remained alive, but in terrible pain from injuries. It seems uncontroversial that the infliction of
physical pain could be a reason to reject a principle. Although Scanlon says that an impact on well-being is not the only reason to reject principles, it plays a significant role, and indeed, most principles are likely to be rejected due to a negative impact on a person’s
well-being, physical or otherwise. It may be queried here whether it is actually the involuntariness of the pain that is grounds for reasonable rejection rather than the physical pain itself because not all pain that a person suffers is involuntary. One can imagine acts
that can cause physical pain that are not rejectable — base jumping or life-saving or improving surgery, for example. On the other hand, pushing someone off a cliff or cutting him with a scalpel against his will are clearly rejectable acts. The difference between the
two cases is that in the former, the person having the pain inflicted has consented to that pain or risk of pain. My view is that they cannot be separated in these cases and it is involuntary physical pain that is the grounds for reasonable rejection. Thus, the fact that a
principle would allow unwanted physical harm gives a person who would be subjected to that harm a reason to reject the principle. Of course the mere fact that a principle causes involuntary physical harm or premature death is not sufficient to declare that the
principle is rejectable — there might be countervailing reasons. In the case of extinction, what countervailing reasons might be offered in favour of the involuntary physical pain/ death-inducing harm? One such reason that might be offered is that humans are a harm
to the natural environment and that the world might be a better place if there were no humans in it. It could be that humans might rightfully be considered an all-things-considered hindrance to the world rather than a benefit to it given the fact that we have been
largely responsible for the extinction of many species, pollution and, most recently, climate change which have all negatively affected the natural environment in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Thus, the fact that human extinction would improve the
natural environment (or at least prevent it from degrading further), is a countervailing reason in favour of extinction to be weighed against the reasons held by humans who would experience physical pain or premature death. However, the good of the environment
as described above is by definition not a personal reason. Just like the loss of rational life and civilization, therefore, it cannot be a reason on its own when determining what is wrong and countervail the strong personal reasons to avoid pain/death that is held by the
people who would suffer from it.9 Every person existing at the time of the extinction would have a reason to reject that principle on the grounds of the physical pain they are being forced to endure against their will that could not be countervailed by impersonal
considerations such as the negative impact humans may have on the earth. Therefore, a principle that permitted extinction to be accomplished in a way that caused involuntary physical pain or premature death could quite clearly be rejectable by existing people
with no relevant countervailing reasons. This means that human extinction that came about in this way would be wrong. There are of course also additional reasons they could reject a similar principle which I now turn to address in the next section. 2.4.

Existing people could endure non-physical harms the fact there would not be any I said earlier than in itself that

future people could give rise to a personal

is an impersonal reason and can therefore not be a reason to reject a principle permitting extinction. However, this impersonal reason

reason there could be various deleterious

that is admissible. So, the final important reason people might think that human extinction would be wrong is that

psychological effects There are two main sources of this

that would be endured by existing people having the knowledge that there would be no future generations.

trauma The first relates to individual people and the undesired negative
, both arising from the knowledge that there will be no more people.

effect on well-being that would be experienced by those who would have wanted to have
children this is by no means universa it is fair to say that a good proportion of people feel a
. Whilst l,

strong pull towards reproduction and having their lineage continue in some way. Samuel Scheffler describes the pull towards reproduction as a ‘desire for a personalized relationship with the future’
(Scheffler 2012, 31). Reproducing is a widely held desire and the joys of parenthood are ones that many people wish to experience. For these people knowing that they would not have descendants (or that their descendants will endure painful and/or premature
deaths) could create a sense of despair and pointlessness of life. Furthermore, the inability to reproduce and have your own children because of a principle/policy that prevents you (either through bans or physical interventions) would be a significant infringement of

The
what we consider to be a basic right to control what happens to your body. For these reasons, knowing that you will have no descendants could cause significant psychological traumas or harms even if there were no associated physical harm.

second is a higher level sense of hopelessness or despair that there will be no more
more general,

humans and that your projects will end with you Even those who did not feel a strong desire to .

procreate themselves might feel a sense of hopelessness that any projects or goals they have for
the future would not be fulfilled . Many of the projects and goals we work towards during our lifetime are also at least partly future-oriented. Why bother continuing the search for a cure for cancer if either it
will not be found within humans’ lifetime, and/or there will be no future people to benefit from it once it is found? Similar projects and goals that might lose their meaning when confronted with extinction include politics, artistic pursuits and even the type of

without the hope of posterity

philosophical work with which this paper is concerned. Even more extreme, through the words of the character Theo Faron, P.D. James says in his novel The Children of Men that ‘

for our race all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to
if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live,

me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins’ (James 2006, 9). Even if James’ claim is a bit
hyperbolic and all pleasures would not actually be lost, I agree with Scheffler in finding it not implausible that the knowledge that extinction was coming and that there would be no more people would have at least a general depressive effect on people’s motivation

Both sources of psychological harm are personal reasons to reject a

and confidence in the value of and joy in their activities (Scheffler 2012, 43).

principle that permitted human extinction . Existing people could therefore reasonably reject the principle for either of these reasons. Psychological pain and the inability to pursue your
personal projects, goals, and aims, are all acceptable reasons for rejecting principles in the contractualist framework. So too are infringements of rights and entitlements that we accept as important for people’s lives. These psychological reasons, then, are also valid
reasons to reject principles that permitted or required human extinction.

Government action is key—reform can pursue genuine equality - defeatist

attitudes ensure that the world stays the same and cede politics.
Eddie S. GLAUDE Jr., Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton and a PhD
in Religion from Princeton, 16 [Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves, p. 185-197]

CHANGE HOW WE VIEW GOVERNMENT For more than three decades, we have been
bludgeoned with an idea of government that has little to no concern for the public good. Big
government is bad, we are told. It is inefficient, and its bloated bureaucracies are prone to
corruption. Even Democrats, especially since Bill Clinton, have taken up this view. For example,
Obama says, "We don't need big government; we need smart government." For some on the
right, big government is bad because it aims to distribute wealth to those who are lazy and
undeserving. "Big government" is just a shorthand for dreaded entitlement programs-all too
often coded language for race. In this view, "big government" is the primary agent of enforcing
racial equality, taking hard-earned stuff from white Americans and giving it to undeserving
others. Government cannot do such a thing, they argue, without infringing on the rights of white
Americans. And even government-mandated redistribution will not solve the problem. As Barry
Goldwater put the point in 1964, "No matter how we try, we cannot pass a law that will make
you like me or me like you. The key to racial and religious tolerance lies not in laws alone but,
ultimately, in the hearts of men." From this perspective, government plays no role in changing
our racial habits. Why would we want to make it bigger? But Goldwater failed to realize that
governmental indifference can harden hearts, and government action can create conditions that
soften them. People's attitudes aren't static or untouchable. They are molded by the quality of
interactions with others, and one of the great powers of government involves shaping those
interactions-not determining them in any concrete sense, but defining the parameters within
which people come to know each other and live together. Today, for example, most Americans
don't believe women should be confined to the home raising children, or subjected to crude
advances and sexist remarks by men. The women's-rights movement put pressure on the
government, which in turn passed laws that helped change some of our beliefs about women.
Similarly, the relative progress of the 1960s did not happen merely by using the blunt
instruments of the law. Change emerged from the ways those laws, with grassroots pressure,
created new patterns of interactions, and ultimately new habits. Neither Obama's election to
the presidency nor my appointment as a Princeton professor would have happened were it not
for these new patterns and habits. None of this happens overnight. It takes time and increasing
vigilance to protect and secure change. I was talking with a dose friend and he mentioned a
basic fact: that we were only fifteen years removed from the passage of the Voting Rights Act of
1965 when Ronald Reagan was elected president and Republicans began to dismantle the gains
of the black freedom struggle. Civil rights legislation and the policies of the Great Society had
just started to reshape our interactions when they started to be rolled back. We barely had a
chance to imagine America anew-to pursue what full employment might look like, to let the
abolition of the death penalty settle in, to question seriously the morality of putting people in
prison cells, and to enact policies that would undo what the 1968 Kerner Commission described
as "two Americas" before the attack on "big government" or, more precisely, the attack on racial
equality was launched. The objective was to shrink the size of government ("to starve the
beast") and to limit its domestic responsibilities to ensuring economic efficiency and national
defense. Democrats eventually buckled, and this is the view of government, no matter who is in
office, that we have today. It has become a kind of touchstone of faith among most Americans
that government is wasteful and should be limited in its role-that it shouldn't intrude on our
lives. Politicians aren't the only ones who hold this view. Many Americans do, too. Now we can't
even imagine serious talk of things like full employment or the abolition of prisons. We have
to change our view of government, especially when it comes to racial matters . Government
policy ensured the vote for African Americans and dismantled legal segregation. Policy
established a social safety net for the poor and elderly ; it put in place the conditions for the
growth of our cities. All of this didn't happen simply because of individual will or thanks to
some abstract idea of America. It was tied up with our demands and expectations. Goldwater
was wrong. So was Reagan. And, in many ways, so is Obama. Our racial habits are shaped by the
kind of society in which we live, and our government plays a big role in shaping that society. As
young children, our community offers us a way of seeing the world; it lets us know what is
valuable and sacred, and what stands as virtuous behavior and what does not. When Michael
Brown's body was left in the street for more than four hours, it sent a dear message about the
value of black lives. When everything in our society says that we should be less concerned about
black folk, that they are dangerous, that no specific policies can address their misery, we say to
our children and to everyone else that these people are "less than"-that they fall outside of our
moral concern. We say, without using the word, that they are niggers. One way to change that
view is to enact policies that suggest otherwise. Or, to put it another way, to change our view
of government, we must change our demands of government. For example, for the past fifty
years African American unemployment has been twice that of white unemployment. The 2013
unemployment rate for African Americans stood at 13.1 percent, the highest annual black
unemployment rate in more than seventy years. Social scientists do not generally agree on the
causes of this trend. Some attribute it to the fact that African Americans are typically the "last
hired and first fired." Others point to changes in the nature of the economy; still others point to
overt racial discrimination in the labor market. No matter how we account for the numbers, the
fact remains that most Americans see double-digit black unemployment as "normal." However,
a large-scale, comprehensive jobs agenda with a living wage designed to put Americans, and
explicitly African Americans, to work would go a long way toward uprooting the racial habits
that inform such a view. It would counter the nonsense that currently stands as a reason for
long-term black unemployment in public debate: black folk are lazy and don't want to work. If
we hold the view that government plays a crucial role in ensuring the public good -if we believe
that all Americans, no matter their race or class, can be vital contributors to our beloved
community-then we reject the idea that some populations are disposable , that some people
can languish in the shadows while the rest of us dance in the light. The question ''Am I my
brother's or my sister's keeper?" is not just a question for the individual or a mantra to motivate
the private sector. It is a question answered in the social arrangements that aim to secure the
goods and values we most cherish as a community. In other words, we need an idea of
government that reflects the value of all Americans, not just white Americans or a few people
with a lot of money. We need government seriously committed to racial justice. As a nation, we
can never pat ourselves on the back about racial matters. We have too much blood on our
hands. Remembering that fact-our inheritance, as Wendell Berry said-does not amount to
beating ourselves over the head, or wallowing in guilt, or trading in race cards. Remembering
our national sins serves as a check and balance against national hubris. We're reminded of what
we are capable of, and our eyes are trained to see that ugliness when it rears its head. But when
we disremember-when we forget about the horrors of lynching, lose sight of how African
Americans were locked into a dual labor market because of explicit racism, or ignore how we
exported our racism around the world-we free ourselves from any sense of accountability.
Concern for others and a sense of responsibility for the whole no longer matter. Cruelty and
indifference become our calling cards. We have to isolate those areas in which long-standing
trends of racial inequality short-circuit the life chances of African Americans. In addition to a
jobs agenda, we need a comprehensive government response to the problems of public
education and mass incarceration. And I do mean a government response . Private interests
have overrun both areas, as privatization drives school reform (and the education of our
children is lost in the boisterous battles between teachers' unions and private interests) and as
big business makes enormous profits from the warehousing of black and brown people in
prisons. Let's be clear: private interests or market-based strategies will not solve the problems
we face as a country or bring about the kind of society we need. We have to push for massive
government investment in early childhood education and in shifting the center of gravity of our
society from punishment to restorative justice. We can begin to enact the latter reform by
putting an end to the practice of jailing children. Full stop. We didn't jail children in the past . We
don't need to now. In sum, government can help us go a long way toward uprooting racial habits
with policies that support jobs with a living wage, which would help wipe out the historic
double-digit gap between white and black unemployment; take an expansive approach to early
childhood education, which social science research consistently says profoundly affects the life
chances of black children; and dismantle the prison-industrial complex. We can no longer
believe that disproportionately locking up black men and women constitutes an answer to social
ills. This view of government cannot be dismissed as a naive pipe dream, because political
considerations relentlessly attack our political imaginations and limit us to the status quo. We
are told before we even open our mouths that this particular view won't work or that it will
never see the light of day. We've heard enough of that around single payer health care reform
and other progressive policies over the Obama years. Such defeatist attitudes conspire to limit
our imaginations and make sure that the world stays as it is. But those of us who don't give a
damn about the rules of the current political game must courageously organize, advocate, and
insist on the moral and political significance of a more robust role for government. We have to
change the terms of political debate. Something dramatic has to happen. American democracy
has to be remade. John Dewey, the American philosopher, understood this: The very idea of
democracy, the meaning of democracy, must be continually explored afresh; it has to be
constantly discovered and rediscovered, remade and reorganized; while the political and
economic and social institutions in which it is embodied have to be remade and reorganized to
meet the changes that are going on in the development of new needs on the part of human
beings and new resources for satisfying these needs. Dewey saw American democracy as an
unfinished project. He knew that the aims and purposes of this country were not fixed forever in
the founding documents, but the particular challenges of our moment required imaginative
leaps on behalf of democracy itself. Otherwise, undemocratic forces might prevail; tyranny in
the form of the almighty dollar and the relentless pursuit of it might overtake any commitment
to the idea of the public good; and bad habits might diminish our moral imaginations. The
remaking of America will not happen inside the Beltway. Too many there have too much
invested in the status quo. A more robust idea of government will not emerge from the current
political parties. Both are beholden to big money. Substantive change will have to come from
us. Or, as the great civil rights leader Ella Baker said, "we are the leaders we've been looking
for"-a model of leadership that scares the hell out of the Reverena Sharpton. We will have to
challenge the status quo in the streets and at the ballot box. In short, it will take a full-blown
democratic awakening to enact this revolution. On February 7, 2014, I flew to Raleigh, North
Carolina, to join with tens of thousands of other like-minded people to protest the draconian
laws passed by the North Carolina state legislature. Since 2010, while many people-especially
black people-were still reeling from the 2008 recession/depression, Republicans eliminated
Medicaid coverage for half a million North Carolinians, passed a voter-ID law designed to
disenfranchise primarily African American voters, transferred $90 million from public schools to
voucher schools and cut pre-K for 30,000 children, passed a law requiring women about to have
an abortion to listen to the heartbeat of the fetus, repealed the earned income tax credit for
900,000 people, and constitutionally banned gay marriage. North Carolina Republicans had
declared war. They represented clear examples of those who hold a view of government that
hardens hearts and reinforces racial habits. I watched from afar as the Forward Together moral
movement took shape in response. People from all across North Carolina organized and
mobilized to take back the state from extremists. The state NAACP, with its charismatic leader,
Reverend William Barber II, built a movement from the ground up to challenge what they took
to be an allout assault on the moral and social fabric of the state. The movement was not simply
a reaction to Tea Party Republicans. "We started this when the Democrats were in power,"
Barber said. "We put out the word. The state had not complied with the Leandro decision [a
1994 publiceducation-equity lawsuit]. We still had not given public employees collective
bargaining rights. We didn't have a racial justice act." But the actions of the North Carolina GOP
intensified the group's efforts. More than 900 people who engaged in nonviolent civil
disobedience to protest the Republican agenda were arrested during the 2013 legislative
session. Reverend Barber put out a call across the country for a massive march in February to
launch the 2014 Forward Together campaign. Eighty thousand to 100,000 people answered. It
was the largest mass demonstration in the South since the Selma march in 1965. I arrived early.
It was cold, and clouds blocked the sun as organizers began to set up. A few people worked on
their signs. One sign read PROTECT ALL N.C. CITIZENS with different examples of vulnerable
groups written underneath (the mentally ill, the unemployed, teachers, the elderly, students,
prisoners, the uninsured, minorities). I was struck from the beginning by the cross-section of
people there. Old and young, straight and gay, black, white, and Latino all began to gather. I
asked a few of them why they were marching. Leslie Boyd, a white woman from Asheville, North
Carolina, told me about her son, Michael Danforth. He had suffered from a birth defect that
made it next to impossible for him to get health insurance. He died in the hospital, and ever
since, she has dedicated her life to health care activism. She started a small nonprofit called
Western North Carolina Health Advocates, through which she met Reverend Barber. He asked
her to join the movement. The cold weather drove me into the nearby McDonald's, where
several people sipped coffee while they waited for the march to begin. I struck up a
conversation with Martin Marshall from Atlanta, Georgia, and Ron Gray from Rock Hill, South
Carolina. Martin told me a story about his childhood experiences with racism, about the wall
that divided his white community from the black community, and how racism was still alive
today. "Voter restrictions and access to health care " were · the reasons he was marching. Ron
was less talkative. He said, "I will give you the short form: injustice. I am here because it is the
right place to be." Sitting next to Martin and Ron was an older white couple, Bill and Betsy
Crittendon from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They were members of an interracial choir called
the United Voices of Praise. They had been involved in interracial social issues for a number of
years and found the "regressive policies that have come about in this state [to be] just awful,
absolutely awful. They have completely reversed the course of this state." Mrs. Crittendon
wasn't too optimistic that the march would change the minds of state legislators, but she and
her husband understood the long-term significance of the march and the Forward Together
movement. "People need to see and hear what this is all about .... Every step along the way is a
building step [to clear] the way for justice issues." These were people from different walks of life
who understood the common ground of suffering in this country. For them, that understanding
did not require anyone to leave the particulars of their suffering at the door. Anti-racism
remained a part of their advocacy whether they struggled for universal health care or a living
wage. They joined with others to urge a fundamental change in North Carolina and the country
that could help break down racial habits. Reverend Barber thinks of their efforts in this way:
[It's] about showing people the intersectionality of their lives ; the intersectionality of their
moving together . ... We have a phrase: we is the most important word in the justice vocabulary.
The issue is not what I can do, but what we can do when we stand together, fight together, pray
together, and work together, and we feel movement together. As I finished the conversations in
McDonald's, I looked outside. Busload after busload of people had begun to arrive. Before the
march began, speakers rallied the crowd. The topics were wide-ranging, from LGBT concerns,
the state of public education, issues of immigration and the status of undocumented workers, to
racist voter-ID laws. It was an in-the-flesh performance of a multiracial, multi-issue coalition.
And whenever someone shouted, "Forward together," the crowd replied, "Not one step back."
Initially, to an outsider looking in, the moment resembled the traditional theater of
contemporary American protest. A march serves as a moment of catharsis. People gather,
tensions are released, folks go back to business as usual, and the men (and it is typically always
men) who lead the march leverage the spotlight for personal gain. But a brief glance beneath
the surface of this particular gathering revealed something much more expansive. The march
was just the tip of an organizing iceberg. Reverend Barber declared, "The Moral March
inaugurates a fresh year of grassroots empowerment, voter education, litigation, and nonviolent
direct action." In other words, this march wasn't a culmination but a catalyst: it dramatized an
organizing effort (which preceded the gathering) that encompassed the courtroom, the ballot
box, and the streets. For Barber, the work of democracy doesn't happen through marches or
backroom deals but through concerted efforts "to change the context in which power operates."
Of course, voting matters. But democracy is about the commitment to get one's hands dirty, and
that work is often selfless and thankless. At the heart of those efforts is a more robust
conception of government-a belief that government has the capacity to transform lives
through focused legislation-and an insistence that we shift the center of moral gravity in North
Carolina and in the nation. Five demands guide this insistence: (1) secure pro-labor, anti-poverty
policies that ensure economic sustainability; (2) provide well-funded, quality public education to
all; (3) stand up for the health of every North Carolinian by promoting health care access and
environmental justice across all the state's communities; (4) address the continuing inequalities
in the criminal justice system and ensure equality under the law for every person, regardless of
race, class, creed, documentation, or sexual preference; and (5) protect and expand voting
rights for people of color, immigrants, the elderly, and students to safeguard fair democratic
representation. Each demand carries with it an expectation of the role of government in
safeguarding the public good and an affirmation of the dignity and standing of all Americans. If
we were to embrace these demands as policy, we would be well on our way to a revolution of
value. As we marched from historic Shaw University, the place where the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee was founded in April 1960, to the state capitol, Americans from all
walks of life expressed a radically egalitarian vision of this country. This vision did not require
African Americans to leave their experiences at the door. Alongside demands for marriage
equality, cries for support of public education, and calls for a more robust commitment to labor,
marchers embraced the call for an anti-racist politics. As Reverend Barber said, "Some people
wanted us to emphasize poverty instead of race. But you have to speak the truth. [Race] can be
the Achilles' heel of the movement or lend itself to your moral positioning." We have to
confront white supremacy, or what Barber calls "the corruption of the spirit and the
conscience," as a fundamental contradiction of American democracy, or face the consequences
of our silence. As the march concluded, I stood amazed at the power of ordinary people.
Thousands of people had come together, for a moment, to declare their commitment to a
radical vision of democracy. This is what has been missing in contemporary American politics.
Reverend Barber's inspiring remarks struck a chord that reached back to the nineteenthcentury
abolitionists, black and white, who decided to become traitors in the name of American
democracy. They turned their backs on the slave regime . Barber called us to do the same with
the political extremists of our times. We need the kind of language that's not left or right or
conservative or liberal, but moral, fusion language that says look: it's extreme and immoral to
suppress the right to vote. It's extreme and immoral to deny Medicaid for millions of poor
people. . .. It's extreme and immoral to raise taxes on the working poor by cutting earned
income taxes and to raise taxes on the poor and middle class in order to cut taxes for the
wealthy. It's extreme and immoral to use power to cut off poor people's water in Detroit. That's
immoral! What we need to cut off is that kind of abusive power! It's extreme and immoral to re-
segregate our schools and underfund our public schools. It's extreme and immoral for people
who came from immigrants to now have a mean amnesia and cry out against immigrants and
the rights of children . ... That's not just bad policy, it's against the common good and a disregard
for human rights. It's a refusal to lean toward the angels of our better selves . ... In policy and
politics in America, we face two choices. One is the low road to political destruction, and the
other is the pathway to higher ground. Barber finished speaking-preaching, really. The crowd
joined hands to sing "We Shall Overcome." The voices were full of emotion and faith, not the
sound of trepidation heard in the voices of those who sang the song after Reagan's speech in the
Rose Garden. For much of the march, the day had been cloudy and cold. But as he spoke, the
sun finally broke through. "The sun has come out," Reverend Barber started to shout. "The sun
has come out. We are on our way to higher ground. Even the universe blesses this day. Even the
universe says yes to justice, yes to equality, yes to higher ground." Marchers shouted. In front of
me stood a white Episcopalian preacher in tears. I wiped my own eyes. This is the kind of social
movement that will transform our idea of government . It insists on the dignity and standing of
black people and other marginalized groups, and it argues for a dramatic change in what we as
Americans care" most about. To be sure, the Forward Together moral movement isn't the only
form of struggle we need. (In some ways, Reverend Barber represents the long-standing
tradition of the charismatic preacher as leader, although he happens to be aware of the pitfalls
of the model of leadership even as he exemplifies it.) It represents just one example of what a
democratic awakening must do if we are to change the terms of political debate in this country:
it must enact a different way of thinking about government and its relation to the most
vulnerable among us.
Capitalism stops environmental collapse – reject evidence that ignores
synergistic deployment of adaptative tech – the public won’t transition
to Maoism but WILL channel political energies into innovative solutions
that turn case.
Bailey ’18 [Ronald; March 12; B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia, member
of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Society for Bioethics and
Humanities, citing a compilation of interdisciplinary research; Reason, “Climate Change
Problems Will Be Solved Through Economic Growth,”
https://reason.com/2018/03/12/climate-change-problems-will-be-solved-t; RP]
"It is, I promise, worse than you think," David Wallace-Wells wrote in an infamously apocalyptic 2017 New York Magazine
article. "Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely
become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century." The "it" is man-
made climate change. Temperatures will become scalding, crops will wither, and rising seas will inundate coastal cities,
Wallace-Wells warns. But toward the end of his screed, he somewhat dismissively observes that "by and large, the
scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans….Now we've found a way
to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it,
one way or another." Over at Scientific American, John Horgan considers some eco-modernist views on how
humanity will indeed go about engineering our way out of the problems that climate change may pose.
In an essay called "Should We Chill Out About Global Warming?," Horgan reports the more dynamic and positive analyses of
two eco-modernist thinkers, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and science journalist Will Boisvert. In an essay for The
Breakthrough Journal, Pinker notes that such optimism "is commonly dismissed as the 'faith that
technology will save us.' In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us—that
knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for perpetuity. Indeed, a naive
faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never
happened." In his new book, Enlightenment Now, Pinker points out that "as the world gets richer and more
tech-savvy, it dematerializes, decarbonizes, and densifies, sparing land and species."
Economic growth and technological progress are the solutions not only to climate change
but to most of the problems that bedevil humanity. Boisvert, meanwhile, tackles and rebuts the apocalyptic
prophecies made by eco-pessimists like Wallace-Wells, specifically with regard to food production
and availabilty, water supplies, heat waves, and rising seas. "No, this isn't a denialist screed," Boisvert
writes. "Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather,
and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be cataclysmic. Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic. While the
climate upheaval will be large, the consequences for human well-being will be small. Looked at in
the broader context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our
progress in the effort to raise living standards." Boisvert proceeds to show how a series of technologies
—drought-resistant crops, cheap desalination, widespread adoption of air-conditioning,
modern construction techniques—will ameliorate and overcome the problems caused by rising
temperatures. He is entirely correct when he notes, "The most inexorable feature of climate-
change modeling isn't the advance of the sea but the steady economic growth that will make life
better despite global warming." Horgan, Pinker, and Boisvert are all essentially endorsing what I have called "the
progress solution" to climate change. As I wrote in 2009, "It is surely not unreasonable to argue that
if one wants to help future generations deal with climate change, the best policies would be
those that encourage rapid economic growth. This would endow future generations with the wealth
and superior technologies that could be used to handle whatever comes at them including
climate change." Six years later I added that that "richer is more climate-friendly, especially for
developing countries. Why? Because faster growth means higher incomes, which correlate
with lower population growth. Greater wealth also means higher agricultural productivity,
freeing up land for forests to grow as well as speedier progress toward developing and deploying
cheaper non–fossil fuel energy technologies. These trends can act synergistically to
ameliorate man-made climate change." Horgan concludes, "Greens fear that optimism will foster
complacency and hence undermine activism. But I find the essays of Pinker and Boisvert inspiring, not
enervating….These days, despair is a bigger problem than optimism." Counseling despair has
always been wrong when human ingenuity is left free to solve problems, and that will prove
to be the case with climate change as well.

Growth is sustainable, physical limits aren’t absolute or are chronically

underestimated, AND resource use is declining now – BUT – transition
away unleashes disaster that slips into Malthusian population crunches.
Bailey ’18 [Ronald; February 16; B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia,
member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Society for Bioethics
and Humanities, citing a compilation of interdisciplinary research; Reason, “Is Degrowth the
Only Way to Save the World?” https://reason.com/2018/02/16/is-degrowth-the-only-way-
to-save-the-wor; RP]
Unless us folks in rich countries drastically reduce our material living standards and distribute
most of what we have to people living in poor countries, the world will come to an end. Or at least that's the
stark conclusion of a study published earlier this month in the journal Nature Sustainability. The researchers who wrote
it, led by the Leeds University ecological economist Dan O'Neill, think the way to prevent the apocalypse is
"degrowth." Vice, pestilence, war, and "gigantic inevitable famine" were the planetary boundaries set on human
population by the 18th-century economist Robert Thomas Malthus. The new study gussies up old-fashioned
Malthusianism by devising a set of seven biophysical indicators of national environmental
pressure, which they then link to 11 indicators of social outcomes. The aim of the exercise is to concoct a "safe and just
space" for humanity. Using data from 2011, the researchers calculate that the annual per capita
boundaries for the world's 7 billion people consist of the emission of 1.6 tons of carbon dioxide
per year and the annual consumption of 0.9 kilograms of phosphorus, 8.9 kilograms of nitrogen,
574 cubic meters of water, 2.6 tons of biomass (crops and wood), plus the ecological services of 1.7
hectares of land and 7.2 tons of material per person. On the social side, meanwhile, the researchers say that life
satisfaction in each country should exceed 6.5 on the 10-point Cantril scale, that healthy life expectancy should average at least
65 years, and that nutrition should be over 2,700 calories per day. At least 95 percent of each country's citizens must have
access to good sanitation, earn more than $1.90 per day, and pass through secondary school. Ninety percent of citizens must
have friends and family they can depend on. The threshold for democratic quality must exceed 0.8 on an index scale stretching
from -1 to +1, while the threshold for equality is set at no higher than 70 on a Gini Index where 0 represents perfect equality
and 100 implies perfect inequality. They set the threshold for percent of labor force employed at 94 percent. So how does
the U.S. do with regard to their biophysical boundaries and social outcomes measures? We
Americans transgress all seven of the biophysical boundaries. Carbon dioxide emissions stand at 21.2
tons per person; we each use an average of 7 kilograms of phosphorus, 59.1 kilograms of nitrogen, 611 cubic meters of water,
and 3.7 tons of biomass; we rely on the ecological services of 6.8 hectares of land and 27.2 tons of material. Although the
researchers urge us to move "beyond the pursuit of GDP growth to embrace new measures of progress," it is worth noting that
U.S. GDP is $59,609 per capita. On the other hand, those transgressions have provided a pretty good life for
Americans. For example, life satisfaction is 7.1; healthy life expectancy is 69.7 years; and
democratic quality stands at 0.8 points. The only two social indicators we just missed on were employment
(91 percent) and secondary education (94.7 percent). On the other hand, our hemisphere is home to one
paragon of sustainability—Haiti. Haitians breach none of the researchers' biophysical boundaries. But the
Caribbean country performs abysmally on all 11 social indicators. Life satisfaction scores at
4.8; healthy life expectancy is 52.3 years; and Haitians average 2,105 calories per day. The country tallies -0.9 on
the democratic quality index. Haiti's GDP is $719 per capita. Other near-sustainability champions
include Malawi, Nepal, Myanmar, and Nicaragua. All of them score dismally on the social
indicators, and their GDPs per capita are $322, $799, $1,375, and $2,208, respectively. The country that
currently comes closest to the researchers' ideal of remaining within its biophysical boundaries while
sufficient social indicators is…Vietnam. For the record, Vietnam's per capita GDP is $2,306. "Countries with
higher levels of life satisfaction and healthy life expectancy also tend to transgress more
biophysical boundaries," the researchers note. A better way to put this relationship is that more wealth
and technology tend to make people happier, healthier, and freer. O'Neill and his unhappy team fail
drastically to understand how human ingenuity unleashed in markets is already well on the way
toward making their supposed planetary boundaries irrelevant. Take carbon dioxide
emissions: Supporters of renewable energy technologies say that their costs are already or
will soon be lower than those of fossil fuels. Boosters of advanced nuclear reactors similarly argue
that they can supply all of the carbon-free energy the world will need. There's a good chance that
fleets of battery-powered self-driving vehicles will largely replace private cars and mass transit later in this
century. Are we about to run out of phosphorous to fertilize our crops? Peak phosphorus is not at hand. The U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) reports that at current rates of mining, the world's known reserves will last
266 years. The estimated total resources of phosphate rock would last over 1,140 years.
"There are no imminent shortages of phosphate rock," notes the USGS. With respect to the
deleterious effects that using phosphorus to fertilize crops might have outside of farm fields, researchers are
working on ways to endow crops with traits that enable them to use less while maintaining
yields. O'Neill and his colleagues are also concerned that farmers are using too much nitrogen fertilizer, which runs
off fields into the natural environment and contributes to deoxygenated dead zones in the oceans, among other ill effects. This
is a problem, but one that plant breeders are already working to solve. For example, researchers at
Arcadia Biosciences have used biotechnology to create nitrogen-efficient varieties of staples like
rice and wheat that enable farmers to increase yields while significantly reducing fertilizer use.
Meanwhile, other researchers are moving on projects to engineer the nitrogen fixation trait from legumes into
cereal crops. In other words, the crops would make their own fertilizer from air. Water? Most water
is devoted to the irrigation of crops; the ongoing development of drought-resistant and
saline-tolerant crops will help with that. Hectares per capita? Humanity has probably already reached
peak farmland,

and nearly 400 million hectares will be restored to nature by 2060—an area almost
double the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. In fact, it is entirely possible that most
animal farming will be replaced by resource-sparing lab-grown steaks, chops, and milk. Such
developments in food production undermine the researchers' worries about overconsumption
of biomass. And humanity's material footprint is likely to get smaller too as trends toward further
dematerialization take hold. The price system is a superb mechanism for encouraging
innovators to find ways to wring ever more value out less and less stuff. Rockefeller University researcher
Jesse Ausubel has shown that this process of absolute dematerialization has already taken off for many
commodities. After cranking their way through their models of doom, O'Neill and his colleagues lugubriously conclude:
"If all people are to lead a good life within planetary boundaries, then the level of resource use
associated with meeting basic needs must be dramatically reduced." They are right, but they are
entirely backward with regard to how to achieve those goals. Economic growth provides the
wealth and technologies needed to lift people from poverty while simultaneously lightening
humanity's footprint on the natural world. Rather than degrowth, the planet—and especially its
poor people—need more and faster economic growth.

Try or die for sustainable growth – only innovation can solve in time – prefer
new IPCC report
King and Lichtenstein 21 (David King, Founder and Chair, Centre for Climate Repair at
Cambridge, University of Cambridge; and Jane Lichtenstein, Associate, Centre for Climate Repair
at Cambridge, University of Cambridge; “Surviving the next 50 years is an existential crisis – 3
things we must do now,” The Print, 8-14-2021, https://theprint.in/opinion/surviving-the-next-
50-years-is-an-existential-crisis-3-things-we-must-do-now/715069/)
The challenge of surviving the next 50 years is now seen as a planet-wide existential crisis ; we
need to work together urgently, just to secure a short-term future for human civilisation. Global weather
patterns are violently disrupted: Greece burns; the south of England floods; Texas has had its coldest weather ever, while
California and Australia suffer apocalyptic wild fires. All of these violent, record-breaking events are a direct
result of rapid heating in the Arctic – occurring faster than in the rest of the world. A warm
Arctic triggers new ocean and air currents that change the weather for everyone . The only way
to reverse some of these catastrophic patterns, and to regain a kind of stability in climate and
weather systems, is “ climate repair ” – a strategy we call “reduce, remove, repair” – which demands that we make
very rapid progress to net zero global emissions ; that there is massive, active removal of
greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and, in the first instance, that we refreeze the Earth’s poles
and glaciers to correct the wild weather patterns, slow down ice-melt, stabilise sea level, and
break the feedback loops that relentlessly accelerate global warming. There are no either/or
options . Reducing emissions About 70% of world economies have net zero emissions commitments
over varying timescales, but this has come too late to restore climate stability. The IPCC has
asked for accelerated progress on this trajectory, but whatever happens, current emission rates
of atmospheric greenhouse gases imply global warming of 1.5 ℃ by 2030 and well over 2℃
above pre-industrial level by the end of the century – a devastating outcome . In particular, melting
ice and thawing permafrost are considered inevitable even if rapid and deep CO2 emissions
reductions are achieved , with sea-level rise to continue for centuries as a result. In every area
of the world , climate events will become more severe and more frequent , whether flooding,
heating, coastal erosion or fires. There are definitely important steps that can still reduce the scale of this devastation,
including faster and deeper emissions reductions . However, this is not enough on its own to avert the

worst . Together there is real evidence that the massive removal of g reen h ouse g ases from the
atmosphere and solutions such as repairing the Earth’s poles and glaciers could help humanity
find a surviv able way out of this crisis. Removing greenhouse gases Taking CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases out
of the atmosphere, with the aim of getting back to 350ppm (parts per million) by 2100, involves creating new CO2 “sinks” – long-
term stores from which CO2 cannot escape. Sinks operate at many scales, with forest planting, mangrove restoration, wetland and
peat preservation all crucially important. Very large projects , such as the restoration of the Loess Plateau in China
demonstrate scalable CO2 removal, with multiple add-on benefits of food production , bio-d iversity
enhancement and weather stabilisation . Habitat restoration can also make economic sense. In the
Philippines, mangrove is the focus of a cost-benefit analysis. Mangrove captures four times more carbon than the same area of
rainforest, provides numerous ecosystem services and protects against flooding, conferring socio-economic benefits and significantly
reducing the cost of dealing with extreme weather events. Big new carbon sinks must be created wherever
safely possible, including in the oceans. Interventions that mimic natural processes, known to operate safely “in the
wild”, are a workable starting point. Promotion of ocean pastures to restore ocean diversity and fish and whale stocks to the levels
last seen 300 years ago is one such possibility – offering new sustainable food sources for humans, as well as contributing to climate
ecosystem services and carbon sinks. In nature, sprinklings of iron-rich dust blow from deserts or volcanic
eruptions, onto the surface of deep oceans, generating – in a matter of months – rich ocean
pastures, teeming fish stocks and an array of marine wildlife. Studies of ocean kelp regeneration show the full range
of real-life impacts, from increased protein sources for human consumption, to restoration of pre-industrial
levels of ocean biodiversity and productivity, and extensive carbon sequestration . Extending
the scale and number of ocean pastures could be achieved by systematically scattering iron-rich
dust onto target areas in oceans around the world. The approach is intuitively scalable, and
could sequester perhaps 30 billion tons per year of CO2 if 3% or so of the world’s deep oceans
were to be treated annually . Large-scale carbon-sink creation of this kind is pivotal if the
atmosphere is to return to pre-industrial CO2 levels. A billion tons per year of sequestration is
the minimum threshold coordinated by the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge given the intensity of the climate crisis.
While the scale of intervention is sometimes called “geoengineering”, the approach is closer to forest planting or mangrove
restoration. The aim is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using natural means, to return us to pre-industrial levels within a single
generation. Repairing the planet The immediate challenge is to stabilise the planet, achieving a
manageable equilibrium that gives a last chance to shift to renewable energy and towards a
circular global economy , with new norms in urban, rural and ocean management . “Repairing”
systematically seeks to draw the Earth back from climate tipping points (which, by definition,
cannot happen without direct effort ), providing a supporting framework in which “reduce” and “restore” can
happen. Political and societal will is needed. The most urgent effort is to refreeze the Arctic, interrupting a
bleak spiral of accelerating ice loss, sea-level rise – and the acceleration of climate change and
violent global weather changes that they cause . Arctic temperatures have risen much faster (and increasingly so)
than global average temperatures, when compared with pre-industrial levels. Figure 1 shows this clearly from 1850 to the present
day. Melting Arctic ice embodies a powerful feedback force in climate change. White ice reflects the Sun’s energy away from the
Earth before it can heat the surface. This is known as the albedo effect. As ice melts, dark-blue seawater absorbs increasing amounts
of the Sun’s energy, warming increases, and ever-larger areas of ice disappear each summer, expanding the acceleration. Arctic
temperatures govern winds, ocean currents and weather systems across the globe. A tipping point is passing: sea-ice loss is
becoming permanent and accelerating; Greenland ice will follow and will eventually raise global sea-levels by over seven metres.
Total loss may take centuries but, decade by decade, there will be relentless incremental impacts. By mid-century the melting will be
irreversible, and sea-level rise alone will leave low-lying countries like Vietnam in desperate circumstances, with reductions to global
rice production a certainty, many millions of climate refugees and no obvious pathway forward for such nations. Figure 1:
comparison between average global temperature change, and change in the Arctic region from 1850 to present day. Provided by
Nerilie Abram using IPCC data, ANU, Australia, 2021 The rapid Arctic temperature increase is matched by the rapid and accelerating
loss in minimum (summer) sea-ice volume (Figure 2), which further accelerates the temperature rise in a spiral of reinforcing
feedback loops. Figure 2: decline in annual minimum Arctic Sea ice volume 1980-2020. Provided by Nerilie Abram using IPCC data,
ANU, Australia, 2021 It is vital to pivot the world back from this ice-melt tipping point , and to repair
the Arctic as rapidly as possible . Marine cloud brightening in which floating solar-powered
pumps spray salt upwards to brighten clouds and create a reflective barrier between the Sun
and the ocean, is known to cool ocean surfaces and is a promising way to promote Arctic
summer cooling. It mimics nature, and can be scaled up or down in a flexible way . Studies of marine
cloud brightening, its climate impacts and interactions with human systems, are underway. As with promotion of ocean pastures,
such solutions must be critically analysed , but there is no longer any doubt of their crucial
importance . What we do in the next five years determines the viability of humanity’s future .
Even if we narrow our aspirations to “survival”, fixing on a timescale of 50 years or so, the challenges are daunting. Humanity
deserves better. We know what to do to be able to imagine thousands of years of human civilisation ahead, as well as behind us.

Solves inequality
*answers Hickel

Piper 21 (Kelsey, writing with Vox, citing Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at the
Breakthrough Institute, and Michael Mann, climatologist at Penn State, “Can we save the planet
by shrinking the economy?,” 8/3/21, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22408556/save-
planet-shrink-economy-degrowth)//NRG

There’s a lot of speculation here, and a lot of what degrowth’s critics would call hand-waving. Degrowth
is fundamentally
premised on the claim that we can cease to focus on growth while getting better than ever at
addressing human needs. If that’s true, then that would certainly be great news. But in many ways, it’s a vision more
wildly optimistic — disconnected from actual policy results — than any of the more standard “sustainable
development” models degrowthers criticize for being out of touch. First, in the world today, there’s an extremely strong
association between growth and welfare outcomes of every kind. GDP, while imperfect, is a better predictor
of a country’s welfare state, outcomes for poor citizens in that country, and well-being measures like leisure time and life expectancy
than any other measure. “GDP does leave out non-commercialized activities that are welfare-enhancing,” economist Branko
Milanovic writes in a rebuttal of degrowth: It is, like every other measure, imperfect and one-dimensional. But ... it is imperfect at
the edges while fairly accurate overall. Richercountries are countries that are generally better-off in almost
all metrics, from education, life expectancy, child mortality to women’s employment etc. Not only
that: richer people are also on average healthier, better educated, and happier . Income indeed buys you health and
happiness. (It does not guarantee that you are a better person; but that’s a different topic.) The metric of income or GDP is strongly
associated with positive outcomes, whether we compare countries to each other, or people (within a country) to each other. The
things degrowthers care about — leisure time, health care, life expectancy — are strongly correlated with societal wealth. The
generosity of a welfare state and the availability of transfers to a state’s poorest people are also strongly correlated with societal
wealth. Innovation, discovery, invention, and medical technology improvements are also strongly correlated with societal wealth.
The strong correlation between child mortality and GDP per capita is apparent on the above graph. There are
some outliers — some countries outperform or underperform their GDP somewhat, in terms of preventing child deaths — but in
general, wealth strongly predicts child survival. No single, simple medical intervention causes the difference. Wealthier societies on
average get better health outcomes across the board. This graph looks at child mortality not just by comparing rich countries to poor
ones but also by comparing countries over time, as they get richer: Getting richer improves outcomes for children. Leisure time, too,
has increased — and hours worked have declined — as the world has gotten wealthier. It might be possible in principle to do better
— to decouple, if you will, health and well-being from access to material resources, so that everyone is well-off with many fewer
resources. But the examples degrowthers point to remain speculative ones; if
we ought to be skeptical, as
degrowthers argue we should be, about the decoupling of wealth from ecological impact , we
ought to be at least as skeptical about the prospects of decoupling wealth from living standards .

Alt can’t spillover

- Constant pro-growth messages in media and politics make it the most effective frame—
alt must fiat mindset shift to solve, which should be rejected
- The alt’s strategy fails—creates resistance and unifies the pro growth camp
- Prefer—sociological studies demonstrate difficulties creating a unified, successful
anticap movement
Drews 16 [Stefan Drews, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona, Miklós Antal, Institute of Social Relations, Eötvös Loránd University,
"Degrowth: A “missile word” that backfires?", June 2016,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915305516?
casa_token=MdngnyoLsRYAAAAA:rfo3ysm8jZPC3m992fZng2HQB7iKrhE69yQO3WOSVoAwtO2a
UeguS-9p0w-irLYI7jF_54UBqcQ#!]

When thinking about economic growth, most people will make connections to positive ideas
such as prosperity, employment, development, economic and social improvement, higher
wages, and well-being (Mohai et al., 2010), which makes it a very effective frame in politics
(GSG, 2015). How much these positive connections are justified by evidence is debatable, but
most ordinary people will see economic growth as something good. Very few people would
think about environmental unsustainability, resource/energy limits, or social limits to growth
(Mohai et al., 2010). Again, the mass media plays an important role in shaping these
associations simply by the constant repetition of explicit pro-growth messages.

Degrowth, on the other hand, may evoke thoughts about crisis, recession, spending cuts, lower
salaries, and job losses. The reason for this is straightforward. In economic parlance, growth
generally means GDP growth, which is a main policy goal. People who are not familiar with the
term degrowth—i.e. the vast majority—may simply, and often unconsciously, negate that
meaning and understand degrowth as economic contraction or an intentional reduction of the
GDP. As past and current periods of GDP decline have been socially and psychologically painful
(De Neve et al., 2015), the first spontaneous conscious reactions to the idea of degrowth will be
generally negative. The retrieval of such negative conscious associations is facilitated by the
initial affective judgment of degrowth. Clearly, losses loom larger than gains in the degrowth
frame (see also Davey, 2014).

Therefore, attacking growth head on is a strategy that will inevitably create a lot of resistance
and—if it ever becomes more influential—may even activate and unify the growth camp.
Winning the battle seems unlikely as long as in most countries economic growth really is
correlated with important short-term goals such as lower unemployment, better public
finances, and higher social stability (Antal and van den Bergh, 2013). Furthermore, changing
initially negative opinions about degrowth will be difficult because people are generally more
reluctant to change their prior beliefs than to develop new and positive opinions about an issue
(Lord et al., 1979). In addition, an abstract slogan like degrowth communicated by the far left is
problematic because convincing an audience whose political positions differ from the speaker's
is more effective with concrete messages (Menegatti and Rubini, 2013). If repoliticizing
environmental issues is the way to go, then it should be done in a way that creates a more
favorable starting position in the debate.

Innovation reduces costs of climate action --- that creates a feedback loop
where each innovation spurs political will
Azevedo et. al 20 [INÊS AZEVEDO is Associate Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at
Stanford University, “The Paths to Net Zero, How Technology Can Save the Planet”,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-04-13/paths-net-zero]
These political hurdles are formidable. The good news is that technological progress can make it
much easier to clear them by driving down the costs of action. In the decades to come,
innovation could make severe cuts in emissions, also known as “deep decarbonization,”
achievable at reasonable costs. That will mean reshaping about ten sectors in the global
economy—including electric power, transportation, and parts of agriculture—by reinforcing
positive change where it is already happening and investing heavily wherever it isn’t.

In a few sectors, especially electric power, a major transformation is already underway, and
low-emission technologies are quickly becoming more widespread, at least in China, India, and
most Western countries. The right policy interventions in wind, solar, and nuclear power,
among other technologies, could soon make countries’ power grids far less dependent on
conventional fossil fuels and radically reduce emissions in the process.

Technological progress in clean electricity has already set off a virtuous circle, with each new
innovation creating more political will to do even more. Replicating this symbiosis of technology
and politics in other sectors is essential. In most other high-emission industries, however, deep
decarbonization has been much slower to arrive. In sectors such as transportation, steel,
cement, and plastics, companies will continue to resist profound change unless they are
convinced that decarbonization represents not only costs and risks for investors but also an
opportunity to increase value and revenue. Only a handful have grasped the need for action and
begun to test zero-emission technologies at the appropriate scale. Unless governments and
businesses come together now to change that—not simply with bold-sounding international
agreements and marginal tweaks such as mild carbon taxes but also with a comprehensive
industrial policy—there will be little hope of reaching net-zero emissions before it’s too late

Capitalism is antiracist.
Paul F. deLespinasse 20. Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science
at Adrian College. “Capitalism no friend to racism”.
https://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/paul-f-delespinasse-capitalism-no-friend-to-
racism/article_85bac3a8-805b-587d-9725-0e10f09547a8.amp.html
Some people argue that eliminating racism requires getting rid of capitalism . But racism
existed before capitalism developed. Since racism exists in non-capitalist societies, capitalism
can't be blamed for it.
True, in some ways capitalism is friendly to racism.
Capitalism combines mostly free markets with predominantly private ownership of the means of production, except for land
and other natural resources. (Privately owned natural resources aren't essential characteristics and must probably be
abandoned if capitalism is to survive. The alternative isn't governmental ownership of natural resources, but ownership by the
public, with government acting as a trustee for it.)

In a market economy people are free to enter into voluntary associations , created by mutual
consent, to exchange or transfer inducements. People can hire and be hired, buy and sell, mostly at mutually agreed-upon
prices.

Mutual consent being required, racists can refuse to enter voluntary associations with members of the
target race. They can refuse to hire them, sell to them or buy from them.
Racism is rooted in stereotyping, assuming that "when you have seen one (person of a certain race), you have seen them all."
Since all individuals are unique, stereotyping is stupid, but freedom includes freedom to act stupidly.
To this extent capitalism is racism's ally. But there is another side to this story.
Although capitalism's freedom allows people to indulge their prejudices, it makes them
pay for doing so. Their economic interest would be to hire the best available people without
considering their race and to sell to all willing customers. Not doing this reduces their
income.
Since buyers and sellers want to make the best deals possible, capitalism pushes society away
from racist behavior even though it won't immediately eliminate racist thinking . A notable
example was a well-known bigot who owned a sports team and hired black athletes because she wanted her team to win.

Racist thinking, though, should be undermined by capitalism's encouragement of

voluntary associations between people of different races. Personal relations can
undermine people's tendency to think in terms of stereotypes.
The American South was not capitalistic before the Civil War. Slaves did not give their
consent to be associated with their owners. Their association was involuntary, not voluntary. They were kept in bondage by
sanctions —government's power of the sword.

Capitalism didn't come to the South even after the Civil War. Once the attempted
"reconstruction" reforms ended, state governments prevented the normal anti-racist
capitalistic tendencies from working. Segregation made it illegal for white people and black
people to enter into many kinds of voluntary associations with one another, to work together, to go to school
together, even to marry. The fact that governments enacted such legislation indicates their fear that people otherwise would
associate with those of different races.

These restrictions
clearly violated the basic essence of capitalism: freedom of voluntary
association by mutual consent of the parties. Racist societies are not expressions of capitalism,
but its contradiction.
And they violated a fundamental requirement of good government: the rule of law. Genuine laws must be general rules of
action and cannot impose sanctions on people on the basis of their race.

Some more recent legislation attempting to force bigots to stop discriminating on the basis of race also contradicts the basic
capitalistic principle. How can people be forced to enter voluntary associations without their consent when such associations,
by definition, require mutual consent?

It is no wonder that today's very well-intended antidiscrimination law is such a conceptual mess. (Open accommodation —
first come, first served — laws, however, seem to work well.)

Although capitalism enables bigots to discriminate, it makes them pay an economic price in
the form of lost business and lost opportunities to employ the best people. Economic
interest tends to pull people together.
Capitalism and racism are basically deadly enemies.
World is Getting Better

****The world’s getting better by every metric

--poverty is declining rapidly post-Industrial revolution

--other metrics are positive: health, education, moral expansion

--tech innovation is increasing

--we’re cognitively biased toward belief in collapse

Dr. Toby Ord 20, Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University, DPhil in Philosophy
from the University of Oxford, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, p. 17-
19

Yet despite these real

problems, on average human life today is substantially better than at any
previous time. The most striking change may be in breaking free from poverty. Until 200 years ago—
the last thousandth of our history25—increases in humanity’s power and prosperity came hand in hand with increases in the human
population. Income per person stayed almost unchanged: a little above subsistence in times of plenty; a little below in times of
need.26 TheIndustrial Revolution broke this rule, allowing income to grow faster than population and
ushering in an unprecedented rise in prosperity that continues to this day.
We often think of economic growth from the perspective of a society that is already affluent, where it is not immediately clear if
further growth even improves our lives. But the most remarkable effects of economic growth have been for the
poorest people. In today’s world, one out of ten people are so poor that they live on less than two dollars per day—a widely used
threshold for “extreme poverty.” That so many have so little is among the greatest problems of our time, and has been a major focus
of my life. It is shocking then to look further back and see that prior to the Industrial Revolution 19 out of 20 people
lived on less than two dollars a day (even adjusting for inflation and purchasing power). Until the Industrial Revolution,
any prosperity was confined to a tiny elite with extreme poverty the norm. But over the last two centuries
more and more people have broken free from extreme poverty, and are now doing so more
quickly than at any earlier time.27 Two dollars a day is far from prosperity, and these statistics can be of little comfort to
those who are still in the grip of poverty, but the trends toward improvement are clear.

And it
is not only in terms of material conditions that life has improved. Consider education and
health. Universal schooling has produced dramatic improvements in education. Before the Industrial
Revolution, just one in ten of the world’s people could read and write; now more than eight in ten can do so.28 For the 10,000 years
since the Agricultural Revolution, life expectancy had hovered between 20 and 30 years. It has now more than doubled, to 72
years.29 And like literacy, these gains have been felt across the world. In 1800 the highest life expectancy of any country was a mere
43 years, in Iceland. Now every single country has a life expectancy above 50.30 The industrial period has seen all of humanity
become more prosperous, educated and long-lived than ever before. But we should not succumb to complacency in the face of this
astonishing progress. That we have achieved so much, and so quickly, should inspire us to address the suffering and injustices that
remain.

We have also seen substantial improvements in our moral thinking.31 One of the clearest trends
is toward the gradual expansion of the moral community, with the recognition of the rights of
women, children, the poor, foreigners and ethnic or religious minorities. We have also seen a
marked shift away from violence as a morally acceptable part of society.32 And in the last sixty
years we have added the environment and the welfare of animals to our standard picture of
morality. These social changes did not come naturally with prosperity. They were secured by reformers and
activists, motivated by the belief that we can—and must—improve. We still have far to go
before we are living up to these new ideals, and our progress can be painfully slow, but looking
back even just one or two centuries shows how far we have come.

Of course, there have been many setbacks and exceptions. The path has been tumultuous, things have often
become better in some ways while worse in others, and there is certainly a danger of choosing selectively from history to create a
simple narrative of improvement from a barbarous past to a glorious present. Yet
at the largest scales of human
history, where we see not the rise and fall of each empire, but the changing face of human civilization across
the entire globe, the trends toward progress are clear.33

It can be hard to believe such trends, when it so often feels like everything is collapsing around
us. In part this skepticism comes from our everyday experience of our own lives or
communities over a timespan of years—a scale where downs are almost as likely as ups. It
might also come from our tendency to focus more on bad news than good and on threats
rather than opportunities: heuristics that are useful for directing our actions, but which misfire when
attempting to objectively assess the balance of bad and good.34 When we try to overcome these
distortions, looking for global indicators of the quality of our lives that are as objective as
possible, it is very difficult to avoid seeing significant improvement from century to century.

And these trends should not surprise us. Everyday we are the beneficiaries of uncountable innovations
made by people over hundreds of thousands of years . Innovations in technology, mathematics,
language, institutions, culture, art; the ideas of the hundred billion people who came before us, and shaped almost
every facet of the modern world.35 This is a stunning inheritance . No wonder, then, that our lives are better for it.
Government Good

A strong administrative state spurs innovative solutions to global issues.

Mazzucato 21 – Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University
College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation &
Public Purpose (IIPP)

Mariana Mazzucato, “MISSION ECONOMY: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism,” Penguin

Publisher, 1/28/21,
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/315/315191/mission-economy/9780241419731.html

This book encourages us to apply the same level of boldness and experimentation to the biggest problems of our time –
from
health challenges such as pandemics, to environmental challenges such as global warming, to
educational challenges such as the divide in opportunity and achievement between students
partly caused by unequal access to digital technology . These ‘wicked’ problems require not just
technological, but also social, organizational and political innovations. They are huge, complex and
resistant to simple solutions. We must solve them – not merely accommodate them – by focusing policymaking
on outcomes. And this means getting the public and private sectors to truly collaborate on
investing in solutions, having a long-run view, and governing the process to make sure it is done
in the public interest.
The moon landing was a massive exercise in problem- solving, with the public sector in the driving seat and working closely with
companies – small, medium and large – on hundreds of individual problems. It
required collaboration between
government and many different sectors, from computing and electrical equipment to nutrition
and materials. Government used its purchasing power to develop procurement contracts that were short, clear and massively
ambitious. When the private sector sometimes failed to deliver, NASA threw back the challenge and did not pay until the solution
was right. If successful, companies could grow through serving the new markets that government purchases opened up and scale up
through a purpose-driven strategy.

What integrated all these efforts and gave them direction was that they were part of a mission –
a mission led by government and achieved by many. Today, a ‘mission- oriented’ approach -
partnerships between the public and private sectors aimed at solving key societal problems –
is desperately needed. Imagine, for example, using public- sector procurement policy to stimulate as much innovation as
possible – social, organizational and technological – to solve problems as diverse as knife crime in cities or loneliness of the elderly at
home.

Of course, lessons fromthe moon landing cannot just be cut and pasted onto any challenge. But they do highlight
the need to resurrect ambition and vision in our everyday policymaking. This cannot just be
about bold statements. We have to believe in the public sector and invest in its core
capabilities, including the ability to interact with other value creators in society, and design
contracts that work in the public interest . We must create more effective interfaces with innovations across the
whole of society; rethink how policies are designed; change how intellectual property regimes are governed; and use R&D to
distribute intelligence across academia, government, business and civil society. This
means restoring public purpose
in policies so that they are aimed at creating tangible benefits for citizens and setting goals that
matter to people – driven by public-interest considerations rather than profit.5 It also means placing purpose at
the core of corporate governance and considering the needs of all stakeholders, including
workers and community institutions, as opposed to just shareholders (owners of stock in a company).
In this context, ‘moonshot’
thinking is about setting targets that are ambitious but also inspirational,
able to catalyse innovation across multiple sectors and actors in the economy. It is about
imagining a better future and organizing public and private investments to achieve that future.
This, in the end, is what got a man on the moon and back.

But there is a catch.

Conventional wisdom continues to portray government as a clunky bureaucratic machine that

cannot innovate: at best, its role is to fix, regulate, redistribute; it corrects markets when they go
wrong. According to this view, civil servants are not as creative and risk-taking as the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, and
government should simply level the playing field and then get out of the way – so the risk-takers in private business can play the
game.

This book’s thesis is that we cannot move on from the key problems facing our economies until
we abandon this narrow view. Mission thinking of the kind I outline here can help us restructure contemporary
capitalism. The scale of the reinvention calls for a new narrative and new vocabulary for our
political economy, using the idea of public purpose to guide policy and business activity .6 This
requires ambition – making sure that the contracts, relationships and messaging result in a more sustainable and just society. And it
requires a process that is as inclusive as possible, involving many value creators. Public purpose must lie at the centre of how wealth
is created collectively to bring stronger alignment between value creation and value distribution. And the latter should not only be
about redistribution (ex post) but also predistribution ex ante: a more symbiotic way for economic actors to relate, collaborate and
share.

It is essential to link the micro properties of the system – such as how organizations are
governed – to the macro patterns of the type of growth desired. By rethinking how the
relationships between the public sector and private sector can be better governed around
public purpose, we can create growth that is better balanced and resilient, with new capabilities
and opportunities spread across the economy. But this means, at the start, replacing the fashionable, bland
terminology of ‘partnership’ with clearer metrics as to what a symbiotic and mutualistic ecosystem looks like; that is, one in which
risks and rewards are more equally shared. In our era, unfortunately, the relationship is often parasitic: public-health funding is
structured so that publicly financed drugs are too expensive for citizens to buy.

I call this different way of doing things a mission-oriented approach. It means choosing directions for the economy and then putting
the problems that need solving to get there at the centre of how we design our economic system. It means designing
policies that catalyse investment, innovation and collaboration across a wide variety of actors
in the economy, engaging both business and citizens. It means asking what kind of markets we want , rather
than what problem in the market needs to be fixed. It means using instruments such as loans, grants and procurement to drive
the most innovative solutions to tackle specific problems, whether those be getting plastic out of the ocean
or narrowing the digital divide. The wrong question is: how much money is there and what can we do with it? The right question is:
what needs doing and how can we structure budgets to meet those goals?
Economists Good

Economists are good---scientific data helps economists makes constructive

contributions that correct for the failures of capitalism.
Feuer 20, *MICHAEL FEUER is Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human
Development and Professor of Education Policy at George Washington University, a Nonresident
Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of The Rising Price of Objectivity:
Philanthropy, Government, and the Future of Education Research; (July/August 2020, “In
Defense of Economists”, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-01/defense-
economists)

Yet in making his case, Romer relies on problematic causal claims and overly broad
characterizations. His argument is most suspect when he faults certain individuals—such as
Thomas Schelling, who helped popularize the use of cost-benefit analysis to inform government
policy. Romer criticizes Schelling, incorrectly, for blurring the distinction between empirical
questions, such as how much it costs to save lives, and normative questions, such as how much
society should pay to save lives. But if society must choose how to spend limited resources, it is
not surprising that one of the (albeit imperfect) metrics includes the dollar sign. Cost-benefit
analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis are tools with advantages and limitations; it is one thing
to point out their limitations, another to come up with better tools. 

Not all economists are heralds of enlightened public policy, but it is a more heterogeneous
profession than Romer’s critique suggests. He should be thanked for reminding economists that
some of them have ignored or even perpetuated the familiar failures of capitalism. But he
seems to suggest that all economists bow at the altar of free-market fundamentalism, and he
implies that only the most orthodox strains of economic thought have influence. He does not
mention those who doggedly advocate sensible government intervention, such as Anne Case,
Angus Deaton, Paul Krugman, and many others. Policymakers have too often failed to heed the
advice of such public-minded economists. But Romer ought to have acknowledged their
constructive contributions to economic development, environmental protection, educational
opportunity, and the struggle against poverty and inequality.

In his plea for humility, Romer beseeches his fellow economists to just “say no when
government officials look to [them] for an answer to a normative question.” That is a
courageous suggestion, and one that could stimulate discussion about the role of science in
society. But especially now, when the COVID-19 pandemic requires governments everywhere to
embrace science, it is dangerous to scapegoat economists—or any scholars who understand
collective action and stand against leaders who reject scientific evidence.
Cap Good – War

This isn’t offense because central planning causes war

Horwitz 15 (Steven, Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of
Economics @ Ball State University, Director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy @
Ball State University, “Socialism Is War and War Is Socialism,” Foundation for Economic
Education, 6/9/15, https://fee.org/articles/socialism-is-war-and-war-is-socialism/, ccm)

But there’s another side to the story, which is that socialism and economic planning have a long and close
connection with war and militarization.

As Don Lavoie argues at length in his wonderful and underappreciated 1985 book National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, any
attempt to substitute economic planning (whether comprehensive and central or piecemeal
and decentralized) for markets inevitably ends up militarizing and regimenting the society. Lavoie
points out that this outcome was not an accident. Much of the literature defending economic planning
worked from a militaristic model. The “success” of economic planning associated with World
War I provided early 20th century planners with a specific historical model from which to
operate.
This connection should not surprise those who understand the idea of the market as a spontaneous order. As good economists from
Adam Smith to F.A. Hayek and beyond have appreciated, markets are the products of human action but not human design. No one
can consciously direct an economy. In fact, Hayek in particular argued that this is true not just of the economy, but of society in
general: advanced commercial societies are spontaneous orders along many dimensions.

Market economies have no purpose of their own, or as Hayek put it, they are “ends-independent.”
Markets are simply means by which people come together to pursue the various ends that each
person or group has. You and I don’t have to agree on which goals are more or less important in order to participate in the
market.

The same is true of other spontaneous orders. Consider language. We can both use English to construct sentences even if we wish to
communicate different, or contradictory, things with the language.

One implication of seeing the economy as a spontaneous order is that it lacks a “collective purpose.” There is no single scale of
values that guides us as a whole, and there is no process by which resources, including human resources, can be marshaled toward
those collective purposes.

The absence of such a collective purpose or common scale of values is one factor that explains
the connection between war and socialism. They share a desire to remake the spontaneous
order of society into an organization with a single scale of values, or a specific purpose. In a war,
the overarching goal of defeating the enemy obliterates the ends-independence of the market
and requires that hierarchical control be exercised in order to direct resources toward the
collective purpose of winning the war.

In socialism, the same holds true. To substitute economic planning for the market is to
reorganize the economy to have a single set of ends that guides the planners as they allocate
resources. Rather than being connected with each other by a shared set of means, as in private
property, contracts, and market exchange, planning connects people by a shared set of ends.
Inevitably, this will lead to hierarchy and militarization, because those ends require trying to force
people to behave in ways that contribute to the ends’ realization. And as Hayek noted in The Road to
Serfdom, it
will also lead to government using propaganda to convince the public to share a set of
values associated with some ends. We see this tactic in both war and socialism .
Ext -- Decoupling

IEA studies and empirics prove that universal decoupling is occuring --- global
emissions have stalled for years despite consistent growth
Riti et. al 17 [Joshua Sunday Riti, School of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and
Technology, Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Jos, “Decoupling
CO2 emission and economic growth in China: Is there consistency in estimation results in
analyzing environmental Kuznets curve?”, Journal of Cleaner Production Volume 166, 10
November 2017, Pages 1448-1461, Science Direct]

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), universal carbon dioxide-greenhouse gas
related emissions shows some stability in 2015 at approximately 32.1 Gt for the second year in a
row, validating the decoupling of global greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth
(Enerdata, 2015; Itskos et al., 2016). The stalling of global emissions is no surprise, as this is in
line with the slowing trend in annual emission growth over the past three years, starting from
2.0% in 2013 to 1.1% in 2014 and further down to 0.1% in 2015. A similar trend of declining
growth in global emissions could also be seen from 2010 to 2012, starting from 5.7% down to
0.7%. It is debatable whether the plateaued emission level will continue and results from
structural changes (Jackson et al., 2016; Qi et al., 2016; Green and Stern, 2016). In 2009, a
stronger global downward trend of 1.0% was recorded, compared to 2008 levels, but this was
due to the global economic downturn. Stalling in emissions is not coupled with the GDP trend,
as global GDP kept up with an annual growth of 3.0% in 2015 compared to 2014. A more
structural change with a shift away from carbon-intensive activities, particularly in China but also
in the United States, contributed considerably to this trend. This achievement was made
possible through the global investment in energy efficiency which increased by 6% in 2015 (IEA,
2010) and the rise in the proportion of renewables in the generation of power. It is estimated
that the share of renewables was around 90 percent of the latest power generation in year
2015, with power from wind alone responsible for over 50 percent.

Tech is good and inevitable – you’re biased toward pessimism which disproves
their links, BUT rejecting engagement makes it worse
Reinhart 18 [Will Rinehart is Director of Technology and Innovation Policy at the American
Action Forum, where he specializes in telecommunication, Internet, and data policy, with a focus
on emerging technologies and innovation. Rinehart previously worked at TechFreedom, where
he was a Research Fellow. He was also previously the Director of Operations at the International
Center for Law & Economics. In Defense of Techno-optimism.
https://techliberation.com/2018/10/10/in-defense-of-techno-optimism/]

Many are understandably pessimistic about platforms and technology. This year has been a tough one, from Cambridge
Analytica and Russian trolls to the implementation of GDPR and data breaches galore.
Those who think about the world, about the problems that we see every day, and about their own place in it, will quickly realize the
immense frailty of humankind. Fear and worry makes sense. We are flawed, each one of us. And technology only seems to
exacerbate those problems.

But life is getting better. Poverty continues nose-diving; adult literacy is at an all-time high;
people around the world are living longer, living in democracies, and are better educated than at any
other time in history. Meanwhile, the digital revolution has resulted in a glut of informational abundance,
helping to correct the informational asymmetries that have long plagued humankind. The problem
we now face is not how to address informational constraints, but how to provide the means for people to sort through and make
sense of this abundant trove of data. These macro
trends don’t make headlines. Psychologists know that
people love to read negative articles. Our brains are wired for pessimism.
In the shadow of a year of bad news, it helpful to remember that Facebook and Google and Reddit and Twitter also support humane
conversations. Most people aren’t going online to talk about politics and if you are, then you are rare. These sites are places where
families and friends can connect. They offer a space of solace – like when chronic pain sufferers find others on Facebook, or when
widows vent, rage, laugh and cry without judgement through the Hot Young Widows Club. Let’s also not forget that Reddit, while
sometimes a place of rage and spite, is also where a weight lifter with cerebral palsy can become a hero and where those with
addiction can find healing. And in the hardest to reach places in Canada, in Iqaluit, people say that “Amazon Prime has done more
toward elevating the standard of living of my family than any territorial or federal program. Full stop. Period” Three-fourths of
Americans say major technology companies’ products and services have been more good than bad for them personally. But when it
comes to the whole of society, they are more skeptical about technology bringing benefits. Here is how I read that disparity: Most of
us think that we have benefited from technology, but we worry about where it is taking the human collective. That is an
understandable worry, but one that shouldn’t hobble us to inaction. Nor is technology making us stupid. Indeed, quite the opposite
is happening. Technology use in those aged 50 and above seems to have caused them to be cognitively younger than their parents
to the tune of 4 to 8 years. While the use of Google does seem to reduce our ability to recall information, studies find that it has
boosted other kinds of memory, like retrieving information. Why remember a fact when you can remember where it is located?
Concerned how audiobooks might be affecting people, Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education, compared them to
physical reading and was surprised to find “no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and
listening simultaneously.” Cyberbullying and excessive use might make parents worry, but NIH supported work found that “Heavy
use of the Internet and video gaming may be more a symptom of mental health problems than a cause. Moderate use of the
Internet, especially for acquiring information, is most supportive of healthy development.” Don’t worry. The kids are going to be
alright.

And yes,there is a lot we still need to fix. There is cruelty, racism, sexism, and poverty of all kinds
embedded in our technological systems. But the best way to handle these issues is through the
application of human ingenuity. Human ingenuity begets technology in all of its varieties .
When Scott Alexander over at Star Slate Codex recently looked at 52 startups being groomed by startup incubator Y Combinator, he
rightly pointed out that many of them were working for the betterment of all:

Thirteen of them had an altruistic or international development focus, including Neema, an app to help poor people without
access to banks gain financial services; Kangpe, online health services for people in Africa without access to
doctors; Credy, a peer-to-peer lending service in India; Clear Genetics, an automated genetic counseling tool for
at-risk parents; and Dost Education, helping to teach literacy skills in India via a $1/month course.
Twelve of them seemed like really exciting cutting-edge technology, including CBAS, which describes itself as “human bionics plug-
and-play”; Solugen, which has a way to manufacture hydrogen peroxide from plant sugars; AON3D, which makes 3D printers for
industrial uses; Indee, a new genetic engineering system; Alem Health, applying AI to radiology, and of course the obligatory drone
delivery startup. Eighteen of them seemed like boring meat-and-potatoes companies aimed at businesses that need enterprise data
solution software application package analytics targeting management something something something “the cloud”. As for the
other companies, they were the kind of niche products that Silicon Valley has come to be criticized for supporting. Perhaps the
Valley deserves some criticism, but perhaps it deserves more credit than it’s been receiving as-of-late.

Contemporary tech criticism displays a kind of anti-nostalgia. Instead of being reverent for the past,
anxiety for the future abounds. In these visions, the future is imagined as a strange, foreign land, beset with problems.
And yet, to quote that old adage, tomorrow is the visitor that is always coming but never arrives. The future never arrives because
we are assembling it today. We need to work diligently together to piece together a better world. But if we constantly live
in fear of what comes next, that future won’t be built. Optimism needn’t be pollyannaish. It
only needs to be hopeful of a better world .
New Climate Impact Turn
Capitalism is sustainable. Only capitalism can counteract catastrophic climate
change.
Shi-Ling Hsu 21, D'Alemberte Professor of Law at the Florida State University College of Law, “2
How Capitalism Saves the Environment,” Capitalism and the Environment, Cambridge University
Press, 10/31/2021, pp. 28–55
2.8 CHOOSING CAPITALISM TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT: LARGE-SCALE DEPLOYMENT

Finally, a third reason that capitalism

is suited to the job of environmental restoration and protection is
its ability to undertake and complete projects at very large scales. In keeping with a major thesis of this
book, construction at very large scales should give us a little pause, because of the propensity of capital to metastasize into a source
of political resistance to change. But some global problems, especially climate change, may require very large-scale enterprises.

For example, because greenhouse gas emissions may already have passed a threshold for catastrophic
climate change, technology is almost certainly needed to chemically capture carbon dioxide from
ambient air. But carbon dioxide is only about 0.15% of ambient air by molecular weight, and a tremendous amount of
ambient air must be processed just to capture a small amount of carbon dioxide . This technology has
often been referred to as "direct air capture," or "carbon removal." Given that inherent limitation, direct air
capture technology must be deployed at vast scales in order to make any appreciable difference in greenhouse
gas concentrations. There is certainly no guarantee that direct air capture will be a silver bullet. But if it is to be an effectual
item on a menu of survival techniques, it will more assuredly be accomplished under the incentives
of a capitalist economy.

Capitalism might also help with the looming crisis of climate change by helping to ensure the
supply of vital life staples such as food, water, and other basic needs in future shortages caused by
climate-change. In a climate-changed future, there is the distinct possibility that supplies of vital
life staples may run short, possibly for long periods of time. Droughts are projected to last longer, with water
supplies and growing conditions increasingly precarious. Capitalist enterprise could, first of all, provide the impetus
to finally reform a dizzying multitude of price distortions that plague water supply and agriculture
worldwide. Second, capitalist enterprise can undertake scale production of some emergent
technologies that might alleviate shortages. Desalination technology can convert salty seawater
into drinkable freshwater.54 A number of environmental and economic issues need to be solved to deploy these technologies
at large scales, but in a crisis, solutions will be more likely to present themselves .

A technology that is already being adopted to produce food is the modernized version of old-
fashioned greenhouses. The tiny country of the Netherlands, with its 17 million people crowded onto 13,000 square miles,
is the second largest food exporter in the world,55 exporting fully three-quarters that of the United States in 2017.56 The secret to
Dutch agriculture is its climate-controlled, low-energy green-houses that project solar panel-powered artificial sunlight around the
clock. Dutch greenhouses produce lettuce at ten times the yield57 and tomatoes at fifteen times the yield outdoors in the United
States58 while using less than one-thirteenth the amount of water,59 very little in the way of synthetic pesticides and, of course,
very little fertilizer given its advanced composting techniques. Sustained
shortages in a climate-changed future
might require that a capitalist take hold of greenhouse growing and expand production to feed
the masses that might otherwise revolt.

2.9 CHOOSE CAPITALISM

Clearly, the job in front of humankind is enormous, complex, and many-faceted . The best hope is to be able to
identify certain human impacts that are clearly harmful to the global environment, and to disincentivize them. Getting back to
notions of institutions in capitalism, what
is crucial is aligning the right incentives with profit-making
activity. What capitalism does so well — beyond human comprehension — is coordinate activity and send
broad signals about scarcity. Information about a wide variety of environmental phenomena is
extremely difficult to collect and process . If a set of environmental taxes can help establish a network of environ-mental
prices, then an unfathomably large and complex machinery will have been set in motion in the right direction.

Also, because of the need for new scientific solutions to this daunting list of problems, new
science and technology is desperately needed. Capitalism is tried and true in terms of
producing innovation. Again drawing upon the study of institutions, it is not so much that individuals need a profit-motive in
order to tinker, but the prospect of profit-making has to be present in order for institutions, including
corporations, to devote resources, attention, and energy towards the development of solutions to
environmental problems. Corporations can and should demonstrate social responsibility by attempting to mitigate their impacts on
the global environment, but a much more conscious push for new knowledge, new techniques, and new solutions are needed.

Finally, the scale of needed change is profound. Huge networks of infrastructure centered upon a fossil
fuel-centered economy must somehow be replaced or adapted to new ways of generating, transmitting, consuming, and
storing energy. A global system of feeding seven billion humans (and counting), unsustainable on its face, must
be morphed into something else that can fill that huge role. About a billion and a half cars and trucks in
the world must, over time, be swapped out for vehicles that must be dramatically different.

This is a daunting to-do list, but look a bit more carefully among the gloomy news. Elon Musk, a freewheeling,
pot-smoking entrepreneur shows signs of breaking into not one, but two industries dominated by behemoths
with political power. Thanks to California emissions standards, automobile manufacturers have developed cars
that emit a fraction of what they did less than a generation ago. Hybrid electric vehicles have thoroughly
penetrated an American market that powerful American politicians had tried to cordon off for
American manufacturers only. At least two companies have developed meat substitutes that are now
widely judged to be indistinguishable from meat, and have established product outposts in the ancient power centers of
fast food, McDonald's and Burger King. The tiny country of the Netherlands, about half the size of West Virginia, exports
almost as much food as the United States, able to ship fresh produce all the way to Africa. At bottom, all of these
accomplishments and thousands more are and were capitalist in nature. While they collectively repre-sent a trifle of
what still needs to be accomplished, they were also undertaken without the correct incentives in place,
and thus also represent the tremendous promise of capitalism.

Warming – only CCS development solves.

Rice ‘11/3 [Doyle; Reporter for USA Today on climate, weather, and science; “'Past a point of no return': Reducing
greenhouse gas emissions to zero still won't stop global warming, study says”; 11/13/20; USA Today;
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/12/reducing-greenhouse-gas-emissions-stop-climate-change-study/
3761882001/; Accessed 11/16/20; NT]

Even if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to zero , global

temperatures may continue to rise for centuries afterward, according to a scientific study published
Thursday. "The world is already past a point of no return for global

warming ," the study authors report in the British journal Scientific Reports. The only way to stop the
warming, they say, is that "enormous amounts of carbon dioxide have to
be extracted from the atmosphere." The burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas release
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, causing global
temperatures to increase and sea levels to rise. The scientists modeled the effect of greenhouse gas emission
reductions on changes in the Earth's climate from 1850 to 2500 and created projections of global temperature and sea level rises.

"According to our models, humanity is beyond the point of no return when it comes to
halting the melting of permafrost using greenhouse gas cuts as the single tool," lead author Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of

If we want to stop this melting process

climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, told AFP. "

we must do something in addition – for example, suck carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere and store it underground, and make Earth's surface brighter," Randers said. The
study said that by the year 2500, the planet's temperatures will be about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were in 1850.

And sea levels will be roughly 8 feet higher. The authors suggest thatglobal temperatures could continue to
increase after human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced as the
continued melting of Arctic ice and carbon-containing permafrost increase water
vapor, methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The melting of Arctic
ice and permafrost also would reduce the area of ice reflecting heat and light from
the sun. According to the study, to prevent the authors' projected temperature and sea-level rises,
all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions would have had to be reduced
to zero between 1960 and 1970 . To prevent global temperature and sea level rises after greenhouse
gas emissions have ceased, and to limit the potentially catastrophic effects on Earth's ecosystems and human society, at least

33 gigatons of carbon dioxide would need to be removed from the

atmosphere each year from 2020 onward through carbon capture and storage
methods, according to the authors.
Cap’s sustainable---solves resource scarcity and climate change.
Rainer Zitelmann 21. German historian and author of “The Rich in Public Opinion.”
"Consumption Presumption: Are Human Beings Destroying the World?" National Interest. 2-12-
2021. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/consumption-presumption-are-human-beings-
destroying-world-178114

Some people claim that we need to cut our consumption or there will be no hope for the planet .
Such claims are based on the thesis that continued growth increases the rate at which the
earth’s finite resources are consumed and, moreover, leads to irreversible climate change . And
such warnings are by no means new. In 1970, for instance, the Club of Rome attracted a great deal of attention with the publication
of The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, which has to date sold more than
thirty million copies in thirty languages. The book warned people to change their ways and had a clear message: the world’s raw
materials, and in particular, oil would soon be used up. In twenty years, the scientists predicted, we would have used the very last
drop of oil. Of course, the Club of Rome’s models for the depletion of oil—and almost all other major raw materials—were wrong.
According to the scenarios presented in The Limits to Growth, we should now be living on a planet that has been devoid of natural
gas, copper, lead, aluminum and tungsten for decades. And we were supposed to have run out of silver in 1985. Despite the bleak
forecasts, as of January 2020, the United States Geological Survey estimated silver reserves worldwide at 560,000 tons.

More from Less 

Employing an extensive array of data, the American scientist Andrew McAfee proves in his book
More from Less that economic growth is no longer coupled to the consumption of raw
materials. Data for the United States, for example, show that of seventy-two resources, from
aluminum to zinc, only six are not yet post-peak. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the U.S. economy has grown
strongly in recent years, consumption of many commodities is actually decreasing .  

Back in 2015, the American environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel wrote an essay, “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates
the Environment,” showing that
Americans are consuming fewer and fewer raw materials per capita.
Total consumption of steel, copper, fertilizer, wood and paper, which had previously always risen in line with
economic growth, had plateaued and was now in constant decline. 

Such across-the-board reductions in natural resource consumption are only possible because
of much-maligned capitalism: companies are constantly developing more efficient production
methods and reducing the amount of raw materials they consume. Of course, they are not doing this
primarily to protect the environment but to cut costs.  

What's more, a constant stream of innovations has promoted the trend of miniaturization or dematerialization. Just
think of
your smartphone. How many devices has your smartphone replaced and how many raw materials did they
use to consume? 

Calculator 

Telephone
Video camera 

Alarm clock
Voice recorder

Navigation system 

Camera
CD-player/radio 

Compass

Nowadays, many people no longer have a fax machine or street atlas because they have
everything they need on their smartphone . Some even use their phones instead of a wristwatch. You used to need
four separate microphones in your telephone, cassette recorder, Dictaphone and video camera, today you just need one—in your
smartphone. 

Fighting climate change with nuclear energy 

The finite nature of the world’s natural resources is one argument against growth, climate
change is another. Let’s take China as an example: China currently emits more CO2 than any
other country in the world and is building a number of new nuclear power plants in order to
achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. With the new build program well underway, China’s first new-generation nuclear
power plant recently went into operation.
In the very near future, China
intends to start exporting power plants . The latest generation of nuclear
power plants is much safer than earlier models—and can play a pivotal role in the fight
against climate change. In the United States, Joe Biden is already evaluating the advantages of small modular reactor (SMR)
nuclear power plants. As the name suggests, SMRs are smaller than traditional nuclear fission reactors and offer a maximum
capacity of three hundred megawatts. In the United Kingdom, for example, a consortium led by Rolls-Royce has announced plans to
build up to sixteen SMR power plants.  

So far, two reactors of this type are in operation, both onboard the floating nuclear power plant  “\Akademik Lomonosov, which
supplies heat and electricity to the Siberian city of Pevec and its one hundred thousand inhabitants.  

Anticapitalists blame capitalism for resource consumption and climate change . But political
decisions—such as Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy—frequently have a negative impact on
climate change.  
Telling people to cut their consumption must seem like pure mockery to the hundreds of millions of people around the world who
are still living in extreme poverty. What they need is more capitalism and economic growth. Just like in China, where the number of
people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 88 percent in 1981 to less than 1 percent today. Andrew
McAfee’s book
has an optimistic message about how we don't have to turn back the clocks and cut our
consumption: capitalism and technological progress are allowing us to steward the world’s
resources, rather than stripping them bare.

Economy reversal will no longer stop climate change, need a highly advanced
society to do so
King and Lichtenstein 21 (David King, Founder and Chair, Centre for Climate Repair at
Cambridge, University of Cambridge; and Jane Lichtenstein, Associate, Centre for Climate Repair
at Cambridge, University of Cambridge; “Surviving the next 50 years is an existential crisis – 3
things we must do now,” The Print, 8-14-2021, https://theprint.in/opinion/surviving-the-next-
50-years-is-an-existential-crisis-3-things-we-must-do-now/715069/)
The challenge of surviving the next 50 years is now seen as a planet-wide existential crisis; we
need to work together urgently, just to secure a short-term future for human civilisation . Global weather
patterns are violently disrupted: Greece burns; the south of England floods; Texas has had its coldest weather ever, while
California and Australia suffer apocalyptic wild fires. All of these violent, record-breaking events are a direct
result of rapid heating in the Arctic – occurring faster than in the rest of the world. A warm
Arctic triggers new ocean and air currents that change the weather for everyone . The only way
to reverse some of these catastrophic patterns, and to regain a kind of stability in climate and
weather systems, is “climate repair” – a strategy we call “reduce, remove, repair” – which demands that we make
very rapid progress to net zero global emissions ; that there is massive, active removal of
greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and, in the first instance, that we refreeze the Earth’s poles
and glaciers to correct the wild weather patterns, slow down ice-melt, stabilise sea level, and
break the feedback loops that relentlessly accelerate global warming. There are no either/or
options. Reducing emissions About 70% of world economies have net zero emissions commitments
over varying timescales, but this has come too late to restore climate stability. The IPCC has asked
for accelerated progress on this trajectory, but whatever happens, current emission rates of
atmospheric greenhouse gases imply global warming of 1.5 ℃ by 2030 and well over 2℃ above
pre-industrial level by the end of the century – a devastating outcome . In particular, melting ice and
thawing permafrost are considered inevitable even if rapid and deep CO2 emissions
reductions are achieved, with sea-level rise to continue for centuries as a result. In every area
of the world, climate events will become more severe and more frequent, whether flooding,
heating, coastal erosion or fires. There are definitely important steps that can still reduce the scale of this devastation,
including faster and deeper emissions reductions . However, this is not enough on its own to avert the
worst. Together there is real evidence that the massive removal of greenhouse gases from the
atmosphere and solutions such as repairing the Earth’s poles and glaciers could help humanity
find a survivable way out of this crisis. Removing greenhouse gases Taking CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gases out
of the atmosphere, with the aim of getting back to 350ppm (parts per million) by 2100, involves creating new CO2 “sinks” – long-
term stores from which CO2 cannot escape. Sinks operate at many scales, with forest planting, mangrove restoration, wetland and
peat preservation all crucially important. Very
large projects, such as the restoration of the Loess Plateau in China
demonstrate scalable CO2 removal, with multiple add-on benefits of food production, bio-diversity
enhancement and weather stabilisation. Habitat restoration can also make economic sense. In the
Philippines, mangrove is the focus of a cost-benefit analysis. Mangrove captures four times more carbon than the same area of
rainforest, provides numerous ecosystem services and protects against flooding, conferring socio-economic benefits and significantly
reducing the cost of dealing with extreme weather events. Big new carbon sinks must be created wherever
safely possible, including in the oceans. Interventions that mimic natural processes, known to operate safely “in the
wild”, are a workable starting point. Promotion of ocean pastures to restore ocean diversity and fish and whale stocks to the levels
last seen 300 years ago is one such possibility – offering new sustainable food sources for humans, as well as contributing to climate
ecosystem services and carbon sinks. In nature, sprinklings of iron-rich dust blow from deserts or volcanic
eruptions, onto the surface of deep oceans, generating – in a matter of months – rich ocean
pastures, teeming fish stocks and an array of marine wildlife. Studies of ocean kelp regeneration show the full range of
real-life impacts, from increased protein sources for human consumption, to restoration of pre-industrial levels
of ocean biodiversity and productivity, and extensive carbon sequestration. Extending the scale
and number of ocean pastures could be achieved by systematically scattering iron-rich dust
onto target areas in oceans around the world. The approach is intuitively scalable, and could
sequester perhaps 30 billion tons per year of CO2 if 3% or so of the world’s deep oceans were to
be treated annually. Large-scale carbon-sink creation of this kind is pivotal if the atmosphere is
to return to pre-industrial CO2 levels. A billion tons per year of sequestration is the minimum
threshold coordinated by the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge given the intensity of the climate crisis. While the scale of
intervention is sometimes called “geoengineering”, the approach is closer to forest planting or mangrove restoration. The aim is to
remove CO2 from the atmosphere using natural means, to return us to pre-industrial levels within a single generation. Repairing the
planet The immediate challenge is to stabilise the planet, achieving a manageable equilibrium
that gives a last chance to shift to renewable energy and towards a circular global economy,
with new norms in urban, rural and ocean management . “Repairing” systematically seeks to
draw the Earth back from climate tipping points (which, by definition, cannot happen without
direct effort), providing a supporting framework in which “reduce” and “restore” can happen. Political and societal will is
needed. The most urgent effort is to refreeze the Arctic, interrupting a bleak spiral of accelerating
ice loss, sea-level rise – and the acceleration of climate change and violent global weather
changes that they cause. Arctic temperatures have risen much faster (and increasingly so) than global average
temperatures, when compared with pre-industrial levels. Figure 1 shows this clearly from 1850 to the present day. Melting Arctic ice
embodies a powerful feedback force in climate change. White ice reflects the Sun’s energy away from the Earth before it can heat
the surface. This is known as the albedo effect. As ice melts, dark-blue seawater absorbs increasing amounts of the Sun’s energy,
warming increases, and ever-larger areas of ice disappear each summer, expanding the acceleration. Arctic temperatures govern
winds, ocean currents and weather systems across the globe. A tipping point is passing: sea-ice loss is becoming permanent and
accelerating; Greenland ice will follow and will eventually raise global sea-levels by over seven metres. Total loss may take centuries
but, decade by decade, there will be relentless incremental impacts. By mid-century the melting will be irreversible, and sea-level
rise alone will leave low-lying countries like Vietnam in desperate circumstances, with reductions to global rice production a
certainty, many millions of climate refugees and no obvious pathway forward for such nations. Figure 1: comparison between
average global temperature change, and change in the Arctic region from 1850 to present day. Provided by Nerilie Abram using IPCC
data, ANU, Australia, 2021 The rapid Arctic temperature increase is matched by the rapid and accelerating loss in minimum
(summer) sea-ice volume (Figure 2), which further accelerates the temperature rise in a spiral of reinforcing feedback loops. Figure
2: decline in annual minimum Arctic Sea ice volume 1980-2020. Provided by Nerilie Abram using IPCC data, ANU, Australia, 2021 It
is vital to pivot the world back from this ice-melt tipping point, and to repair the Arctic as
rapidly as possible. Marine cloud brightening in which floating solar-powered pumps spray salt
upwards to brighten clouds and create a reflective barrier between the Sun and the ocean, is
known to cool ocean surfaces and is a promising way to promote Arctic summer cooling. It
mimics nature, and can be scaled up or down in a flexible way . Studies of marine cloud brightening, its
climate impacts and interactions with human systems, are underway. As with promotion of ocean pastures, such solutions
must be critically analysed, but there is no longer any doubt of their crucial importance. What
we do in the next five years determines the viability of humanity’s future. Even if we narrow our
aspirations to “survival”, fixing on a timescale of 50 years or so, the challenges are daunting. Humanity deserves better. We know
what to do to be able to imagine thousands of years of human civilisation ahead, as well as behind us.

Its too late to cut emissions – try or die for growth. Only innovation can
sequester carbon. Capitalism is key to innovation.
Emily Holden, Guardian US, ‘18, "Could carbon-capture technology be a silver bullet to stop
climate change?," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/17/carbon-
capture-technology-climate-change-solutions

People have done too much damage to the climate to avoid catastrophe just by halting the burning of
fossil fuels. They now will have to re-engineer the world, according to scientists with the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The livability of the planet will thus depend largely on tools that are
now available only on a small scale and currently still expensive. This carbon capture machine, by Healthy Climate
Alliance in partnership with Blue Planet, can pull carbon dioxide from the air and store it in construction materials.
The key, Fiekowsky said, is not the technology itself. It’s having a meaningful goal: restoring the climate, “because it means
maybe we’re not doomed”. The UN’s recent report – which says it will require unprecedented action
within the next 12 years to keep temperatures from climbing beyond a current 1C increase to a 1.5C increase – does not inspire
optimism in many carbon removal experts. While it’s technically feasible to slow fossil fuel use fast enough and capture enough
greenhouse gases to limit warming, the world is not on track to do so. California plans to show the world how to meet
the Paris climate target Scaling up carbon capture tech nology is possible but will be difficult, said Kurt Waltzer,
managing director for the Clean Air Task Force. “We are absolutely going to have to have a significant amount of carbon removal,
there’s no question about it,” Waltzer said. “The level will probably depend on how quickly we can get to a zero-carbon world, but it
is going to be enormous.” Most of the work has previously centered around sequestering carbon from power plants, which is
different than drawing it from the air. James Mulligan, carbon removal expert at World Resources Institute, said direct-air carbon
capture technologies are “unproven at the scale that we’ll need them”. A
decade ago, they were viewed as “impossibly
expensive”, he said. Now, some are touting a cost of $100 to $200 per ton of carbon. “That’s still expensive,” Mulligan said.
“But halting climate change isn’t going to be free .” Reforestation and new agricultural practices could also trap
carbon and help slow warming. But direct removal will still be necessary. With direct-air capture, the most obvious option is to store
carbon underground. But technologies that create a sellable product will help reduce costs. Three of the
biggest direct-air carbon removal companies – Carbon Engineering, Climeworks and Global Thermostat – are all working to store
CO2 in something useable.

Extinction
David Spratt 19, Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration,
Ian Dunlop, member of the Club of Rome, formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry
executive, chairman of the Australian Coal Association, May 2019, “Existential climate-related
security risk: A scenario approach,”
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_b2c0c79dc4344b279bcf2365336ff23b.pdf
An existential risk to civilisation is one posing permanent large negative consequences to
humanity which may never be undone, either annihilating intelligent life or permanently and
drastically curtailing its potential. With the commitments by nations to the 2015 Paris
Agreement, the current path of warming is 3°C or more by 2100. But this figure does not
include “long-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks, which are materially relevant now and in the
near future due to the unprecedented rate at which human activity is perturbing the
climate system. Taking these into account, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming by 2100. Scientists warn that
warming of 4°C is incompatible with an organised global community, is devastating to the
majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable. The World Bank says it may
be “beyond adaptation”. But an existential threat may also exist for many peoples and
regions at a significantly lower level of warming. In 2017, 3°C of warming was categorised as
“catastrophic” with a warning that, on a path of unchecked emissions, low-probability, high-impact warming
could be catastrophic by 2050. The Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warns
that “climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose
between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear
the consequences.” He says that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk
that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost
everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.”11 Unfortunately, conventional risk and probability analysis becomes
useless in these circumstances because it excludes the full implications of outlier events and possibilities lurking at the fringes.12
Prudent risk-management means a tough, objective look at the real risks to which we are
exposed, especially at those “fat-tail” events, which may have consequences that are
damaging beyond quantification, and threaten the survival of human civilisation. Global
warming projections display a “fat-tailed” distribution with a greater likelihood of
warming that is well in excess of the average amount of warming predicted by climate
models, and are of a higher probability than would be expected under typical statistical assumptions.
More importantly, the risk lies disproportionately in the “fat-tail” outcomes, as illustrated in Figure

Cap key to CCS – link-turns every impact.

Graciela ‘16 (/16 – Professor of Economics and of Statistics at Columbia University and Visiting Professor at Stanford
University, and was the architect of the Kyoto Protocol carbon market (being interviewed by Marcus Rolle, freelance journalist
specializing in environmental issues and global affairs, “Reversing Climate Change: Interview with Graciela Chichilnisky,”
http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/01/09/2016/reversing-climate-change-interview-graciela-chichilnisky)//cmr

GC: Green capitalism is a new economic system that values the natural resources on which human survival depends. It fosters a
harmonious relationship with our planet, its resources and the many species it harbors. It is a new type of market economics that
addresses both equity and efficiency. Using carbon negative technology™ it helps reduce carbon in the atmosphere while fostering
economic development in rich and developing nations, for example in the U S., EU, China and India. How does this work? In a
nutshell Green Capitalism requires the creation of global limits or property rights nation by nation for
the use of the atmosphere, the bodies of water and the planet’s biodiversity, and the creation of new markets
to trade these rights from which new economic values and a new concept of economic progress emerges updating GDP as is
now generally agreed is needed. Green Capitalism is needed now to help avert climate change and achieve
the goals of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement, which are very ambitious and universally supported but have no way to be realized
within the Agreement itself. The Carbon Market and its CDM play critical roles in the foundation of Green Capitalism, creating values
to redefine GDP. These are needed to remain within the world’s “CO2 budget” and avoid catastrophic climate change. As I see it,
the building blocks for Green Capitalism are then as follows; (1) Global limits nation by nation in the use
of the planet’s atmosphere, its water bodies and biodiversity - these are global public goods. (2) New global markets to
trade these limits, based on equity and efficiency. These markets are relatives of the Carbon Market and the SO2 market.
The new market create new measures of economic values and update the concept of GDP. (3)
Efficient use of Carbon Negative Technologies to avert catastrophic climate change by providing a smooth transition to
clean energy and ensuring economic prosperity in rich and poor nations. These building blocks have immediate practical implications
in reversing climate change and can assist the ambitious aims of Paris COP21 become a reality. MR: What is the greatest advantage
of the new generation technologies that can capture CO2 from the air? GC: These technologies build carbon
negative power plants, such as Global Thermostat, that clean the atmosphere of CO2 while producing electricity. Global Thermostat
is a firm that is commercializing a technology that takes CO2 out of air and uses mostly low cost residual heat rather than electricity
to drive the capture process, making the entire process of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere very inexpensive. There is enough
residua heat in a coal power plant that it can be used to capture twice as much CO2 as the plant emits, thus transforming the power
plant into a “carbon sink.” For example, a
400 MW coal plant that emits 1 million tons of CO2 per year can
become a carbon sink absorbing a net amount of 1 million tons of CO2 instead. Carbon capture
from air can be done anywhere and at any time, and so inexpensively that the CO2 can be sold
for industrial or commercial uses such as plastics, food and beverages, greenhouses, bio-
fertilizers, building materials and even enhanced oil recovery , all examples of large global markets and
profitable opportunities. Carbon capture is powered mostly by low (85°C) residual heat that is inexpensive, and any source will do. In
particular, renewable (solar) technology can power the process of carbon capture. This can help advance solar technology and make
it more cost-efficient. This
means more energy, more jobs, and it also means economic growth in
developing nations, all of this while cleaning the CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon negative
technologies can literally transform the world economy . MR: One final question. You distinguish between long-run
and short-run strategies in the effort to reverse climate change. Would carbon negative technologies be part of a short-run strategy?
GC: Long-run strategies are quite different from strategies for the short-run. Often long-run strategies do not work in
the short run and different policies and economic incentives are needed. In the long run the best climate change
policy is to replace fossil fuel sources of energy that by themselves cause 45% of the global emissions, and to plant trees to restore if
possible the natural sources and sinks of CO2. But the fossil fuel power plant infrastructure is about 87% of the
power plant infrastructure and about $45-55 trillion globally. This infrastructure cannot be
replaced quickly, certainly not in the short time period in which we need to take action to
avert catastrophic climate change. The issue is that CO2 once emitted remains hundreds of years in
the atmosphere and we have emitted so much that unless we actually remove the CO2 that is
already there, we cannot remain long within the carbon budget, which is the concentration of CO2 beyond
which we fear catastrophic climate change. In the short run, therefore, we face significant time pressure. The IPCC
indicates in its 2014 5th Assessment Report that we must actually remove the carbon that is already in the
atmosphere and do so in massive quantities, this century (p. 191 of 5th Assessment Report). This is what I called
a carbon negative approach, which works for the short run. Renewable energy is the long run solution. Renewable
energy is too slow for a short run resolution since replacing a $45-55 trillion power plant
infrastructure with renewable plants could take decades. We need action sooner than that. For
the short run we need carbon negative technologies that capture more carbon than what is emitted. Trees do that and they must be
conserved to help preserve biodiversity. Biochar does that. But trees and other natural sinks are too slow for
what we need today. Therefore, negative carbon is needed now as part of a blueprint for transformation. It must be
part of the blueprint for Sustainable Development and its short term manifestation that I call Green Capitalism,
while in the long run renewable sources of energy suffice , including Wind, Biofuels, Nuclear, Geothermal, and
Hydroelectric energy. These are in limited supply and cannot replace fossil fuels . Global energy today
is roughly divided as follows: 87% is fossil, namely natural gas, coal, oil; 10% is nuclear, geothermal, and
hydroelectric, and less than 1% is solar power — photovoltaic and solar thermal. Nuclear fuel is scarce and nuclear
technology is generally considered dangerous as tragically experienced by the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster in Japan, and it
seems unrealistic to seek a solution in the nuclear direction. Only solar energy can be a long term solution: Less than 1% of the solar
energy we receive on earth can be transformed into 10 times the fossil fuel energy used in the world today. Yet we need a
short-term strategy that accelerates long run renewable energy , or we will defeat long-term goals. In the
short term as the IPCC validates, we need carbon negative tech nology, carbon removals. The short run
is the next 20 or 30 years. There is no time in this period of time to transform the entire fossil
infrastructure — it costs $45-55 trillion (IEA) to replace and it is slow to build. We need to directly reduce carbon in the
atmosphere now. We cannot use traditional methods to remove CO2 from smokestacks (called often Carbon Capture and
Sequestration, CSS) because they are not carbon negative as is required. CSS works but does not suffice because it only captures
what power plants currently emit. Any level of emissions adds to the stable and high concentration we have today and CO2 remains
in the atmosphere for years. We need to remove the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, namely air capture of CO2 also called
carbon removals. The solution is to combine air capture of CO2 with storage of CO2 into stable
materials such as biochar, cement, polymers, and carbon fibers that replace a number of other construction materials
such as metals. The most recent BMW automobile model uses only carbon fibers rather than metals. It is also possible to
combine CO2 to produce renewable gasoline , namely gasoline produced from air and water. CO2 can be separated
from air and hydrogen separated from water, and their combination is a well-known industrial process to produce gasoline. Is this
therefore too expensive? There are new technologies using algae that make synthetic fuel commercially
feasible at competitive rates. Other policies would involve combining air capture with solar thermal electricity using the
residual solar thermal heat to drive the carbon capture process. This can make a solar plant more productive and efficient so it can
out-compete coal as a source of energy. In summary, the
blueprint offered here is a private/public approach,
based on new industrial technology and financial markets, self-funded and using profitable
greenmarkets, with securities that utilize carbon credits as the “underlying” asset, based on the KP CDM, as well as new
markets for biodiversity and water providing abundant clean energy to stave off impending and actual energy crisis in developing
nations, fostering mutually beneficial cooperation for industrial and developing nations. The blueprint proposed provides the two
sides of the coin, equity and efficiency, and can assign a critical role for women as stewards for human survival and sustainable
development. My vision is a carbon negative economy that represents green capitalism in resolving the
Global Climate negotiations and the North–South Divide. Carbon negative power plants and capture of CO2 from air and
ensure a clean atmosphere together innovation and more jobs and exports: the more you produce and create jobs the cleaner
becomes the atmosphere. In practice, Green Capitalism means economic growth that is harmonious with
the Earth resources.

Tech innovation and profit motives are driving the Second Machine Age, which
dematerializes capitalism and makes growth sustainable.
McAfee, 19—cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT
Sloan School of Management, former professor at Harvard Business School and fellow at
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Andrew, “Looking Ahead: The World
Cleanses Itself This Way,” More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper
Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next, Chapter 14, pg 278-292, Kindle, dml)

The decreases in resource use, pollution, and other exploitations of the earth cataloged in the
preceding chapters are great news. But are they going to last? It could be that we're just living in a
pleasant interlude between the Industrial Era and another rapacious period during which we
massively increase our footprint on our planet and eventually cause a giant Malthusian crash.

It could be, but I

don't think so. Instead, I think we're going to take better care of our planet from now
on. I'm confident that the Second Machine Age will mark the time in our history when we started to
progressively and permanently tread more lightly on the earth, taking less from it and
generally caring for it better, even as we humans continue to become more numerous and
prosperous. The work of Paul Romer, who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, is one of the sources of this confidence.
Growth Mindset

Romer's largest contribution to economics was to show that it's best not to think of new technologies as something that companies
buy and bring in from the outside, but instead as something they create themselves (the title of his most famous paper, published in
1990, is "Endogenous Technological Change"). These technologies are like designs or recipes; as Romer put it, they’re
"the instructions that we follow for combining raw materials ." This is close to the definitions of technology
presented in chapter 7.

Why do companies invent and improve technologies? Simply, to generate profits. They come up
with instructions, recipes, and blueprints that will let them grow revenues or shrink costs. As we
saw repeatedly in chapter 7, capitalism provides ample incentive for this kind of tech progress .

So far, all this seems like a pretty standard argument for how the first two horsemen work together. Romer's brilliance was to
highlight the importance of two key attributes of the technological
ideas companies come up with as they pursue profits. The
first is that they're nonrival, meaning that they can be used by more than one person or company at a
time, and that they don't get used up. This is obviously not the case for most resources made out of atoms—I can't
also use the pound of steel that you've just incorporated into the engine of a car—but it is the case for ideas and instructions. The
Pythagorean theorem, a design for a steam engine, and a recipe for delicious chocolate chip cookies aren't ever going to get "used
up" no matter how much they're used.

The second important aspect of corporate technologies is that they're partially excludable. This means that companies
can kind of prevent others from using them. They do this by keeping the technologies secret (such as the exact recipe for Coca-Cola),
filing for patents and other intellectual-property protection, and so on. However, none of these measures is perfect (hence the
words partially and kind of). Trade secrets leak. Patents expire, and even before they expire, they must describe the invention
they're claiming and so let others study it.

Partial excludability is a beautiful thing. It provides strong incentives for companies to create useful,
profit-enhancing new technologies that they alone can benefit from for a time, yet it also ensures that the
new techs will eventually "spill over"—that with time they’ll diffuse and get adopted by more
and more companies, even if that's not what their originators want.

Romer equated tech progress to the production by companies of nonrivalrous, partially excludable ideas and showed that these
ideas cause an economy to grow. What's more, he also demonstrated that this idea-fueled growth doesn't
have to slow down with time. It's not constrained by the size of the labor force, the amount of
natural resources, or other such factors. Instead, economic growth is limited only by the idea-
generating capacity of the people within a market. Romer called this capacity "human capital" and said at the end
of his 1990 paper, "The most interesting positive implication of the model is that an economy with a larger total stock of human
capital will experience faster growth."

This notion, which has come to be called "increasing returns to scale," is as powerful as it is
counterintuitive. Most formal models of economic growth, as well as the informal mental ones most of us
walk around with, feature decreasing returns—growth slows down as the overall economy gets
bigger. This makes intuitive sense; it just feels like it would be easier to experience 5 percent growth in a $1 billion
economy than a $1 trillion one. But Romer showed that as long as that economy continued to add to its human
capital—the overall ability of its people to come up with new technologies and put them to
use—it could actually grow faster even as it grew bigger. This is because the stock of useful,
nonrivalrous, nonexcludable ideas would keep growing. As Romer convincingly showed, economies run and
grow on ideas.

The Machinery of Prosperity

Romer's ideas should leave us optimistic about the planetary benefits of digital tools—hardware, software, and networks—for three
main reasons. First, countless examples show us how good these tools are at fulfilling the central role of
technology, which is to provide "instructions that we follow for combining raw materials." Since raw
materials cost money, profit-maximizing companies are particularly keen to find ways to use
fewer of them. So they use digital tools to come up with beer cans that use less aluminum, car engines that use less steel and
less gas, mapping software that removes the need for paper atlases, and so on and so on. None of this is done solely for
the good of the earth—it's done for the pursuit of profit that's at the heart of capitalism—yet it
benefits the planet by, as we've seen, causing us to take less from it.
Digital tools are technologies for creating technologies, the most prolific and versatile ones we've ever come up with. They're
machines for coming up with ideas. Lots of them. The
same piece of computer-aided design software can be
used to create a thinner aluminum can or a lighter and more fuel-efficient engine. A drone can
be used to scan farmland to see if more irrigation is needed, or to substitute for a helicopter when filming a
movie. A smartphone can be used to read the news, listen to music, and pay for things, all without consuming a
single extra molecule.

In the Second Machine Age, the

global stock of digital tools is increasing much more quickly than ever
before. It's being used in countless ways by profit-hungry companies to combine raw materials
in ways that use fewer of them. In advanced economies such as America's, the cumulative impact of this
combination of capitalism and tech progress is clear: absolute dematerialization of the
economy and society, and thus a smaller footprint on our planet.

The second way Romer's ideas about technology and growth are showing up at present is via decreased excludability. Pervasive
digital tools are making it much easier for good designs and recipes to spread around the world.
While this is often not what a company wants—it wants to exclude others from its great cost-saving idea— excludability is not as
easy as it used to be.

This isn't because of weaker patent protection, but instead because of stronger digital tools. Once
one company shows
what's possible, others use hardware, software, and networks to catch up to the leader. Even if
they can't copy exactly because of intellectual-property restrictions, they can use digital tools to explore
other means to the same end. So, many farmers learn to get higher yields while using less
water and fertilizer, even though they combine these raw materials in different ways. Steve Jobs
would certainly have preferred for Apple to be the only provider of smartphones after it developed the iPhone, but he couldn't
maintain the monopoly no matter how many patents and lawsuits he filed. Other companies found ways to combine processors,
memory, sensors, a touch screen, and software into phones that satisfied billions of customers around the world.

The operating system that powers most non-Apple smartphones is Android, which is both free to use and freely modifiable. Google's
parent company, Alphabet, developed and released Android without even trying to make it excludable; the explicit goal was to make
it as widely imitable as possible. This is an example of the broad trend across digital industries of giving away valuable technologies
for free.

The Linux operating system, of which Android is a descendant, is probably the best-known example of free and open-source
software, but there are many others. The online software repository GitHub maintains that it's "the largest open source community
in the world" and hosts millions of projects. The Arduino community does something similar for electronic hardware, and the
Instructables website contains detailed instructions for making equipment ranging from air-particle counters to machine tools, all
with no intellectual-property protection. Contributors to efforts such as these have a range of motivations (Alphabet's goals with
Android were far from purely altruistic—among other things, the parent of Google wanted to achieve a quantum leap in mobile
phone users around the world, who would avail themselves of Google Search and services such as YouTube), but they're all part of
the trend of technology without excludability, which is great news for growth.

As we saw in chapter 10, smartphone use and access to the Internet are increasing quickly across the
planet. This means that people no longer need to be near a decent library or school to gain
knowledge and improve their abilities. Globally, people are taking advantage of the skill-
building opportunities of new technologies. This is the third reason that the spread of digital tools should make us
optimistic about future growth: these tools are helping human capital grow quickly.

The free Duolingo app, for example, is now the world's most popular way to learn a second language. Of the nearly 15 billion
Wikipedia page views during July of 2018, half were in languages other than English. Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, points out
that hundreds of millions of how-to videos are viewed every day on YouTube, saying, "We never had a technology before that could
educate such a broad group of people anytime on an as-needed basis for free."
Romer's work leaves me hopeful because it shows that it's our ability to build human capital, rather than chop
down forests, dig mines, or burn fossil fuels that drives growth and prosperity. His model of how
economies grow also reinforces how well capitalism and tech progress work together, which is a central point of this book. The
surest way to boost profits is to cut costs, and modern technologies, especially digital ones,
offer unlimited ways to combine and recombine materials—to swap, slim, optimize, and
evaporate—in cost-reducing ways. There's no reason to expect that the two horsemen of capitalism
and tech progress will stop riding together anytime soon. Quite the contrary. Romer's insights reveal that
they're likely to gallop faster and farther as economies grow.
Our Brighter, Lighter Future

The world still has billions of desperately poor people, but they won't remain that way. All
available evidence strongly suggests that most will become much wealthier in the years and
decades ahead. As they earn more and consume more, what will be the impact on the planet?

The history and economics of the Industrial Era lead to pessimism on this important question. Resource use
increased in lockstep with economic growth throughout the two centuries between James Watt's
demonstration of his steam engine and the first Earth Day. Malthus and Jevons seemed to be right, and it was
just a question of when, not if, we'd run up against the hard planetary limits to growth.

But in America and other rich countries something strange, unexpected, and wonderful happened: we
started getting more from less. We decoupled population and economic growth from resource
consumption, pollution, and other environmental harms. Malthus's and Jevons's ideas gave way
to Romer's, and the world will never be the same.

This means that instead of worrying about the world's poor becoming richer, we should instead be
helping them upgrade economically as much and as quickly as possible. Not only is it the morally correct
thing to do, it's also the smart move for our planet. As today’s poor countries get richer, their
institutions will improve and most will eventually go through what Ricardo Hausmann calls "the
capitalist makeover of production." This makeover doesn't enslave people, nor does it befoul
the earth.

As today’s poor get richer, they'll consume more, but they'll also consume much differently from
earlier generations. They won't read physical newspapers and magazines. They'll get a great deal of
their power from renewables and (one hopes) nuclear because these energy sources will be the
cheapest. They’ll live in cities, as we saw in chapter 12; in fact, they already are. They'll be less likely to own cars
because a variety of transportation options will be only a few taps away. Most important, they'll come up with ideas that
keep the growth going, and that benefit both humanity and the planet we live on.
Predicting exactly how technological progress will unfold is much like predicting the weather: feasible in the short term, but
impossible over a longer time. Great uncertainty and complexity prevent precise forecasts about , for
example, the computing devices we’ll be using thirty years from now or the dominant types of artificial intelligence
in 2050 and beyond.

But even though we can't predict the weather long term, we can accurately forecast the climate. We know how much
warmer and sunnier it will be on average in August than in January, for example, and we know that global average temperatures will
rise as we keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Similarly, we can predict the
"climate" of future
technological progress by starting from the knowledge that it will be heavily applied in the areas
where it can affect capitalism the most. As we've seen over and over, tech progress supplies
opportunities to trim costs (and improve performance) via dematerialization, and capitalism
provides the motive to do so.

As a result, the
Second Enlightenment will continue as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. I'm confident that it
will accelerate as digital technologies continue to improve and multiply and global competition
continues to increase. We’ll see some of the most striking examples of slim, swap, evaporate, and optimize in exactly the
places where the opportunities are biggest. Here are a few broad predictions, spanning humanity's biggest industries.

Manufacturing. Complex parts will be made not by the techniques developed during the Industrial Era, but instead by three-
dimensional printing. This is already the case for some rocket engines and other extremely expensive items. As
3-D printing
improves and becomes cheaper, it will spread to automobile engine blocks, manifolds and other complicated
arrangements of pipes, airplane struts and wings, and countless other parts. Because 3-D printing generates
virtually no waste and doesn't require massive molds, it accelerates dematerialization.

We'll also be building things out of very different materials from what we're using today. We're rapidly
improving our ability to use machine learning and massive amounts of computing power to
screen the huge number of molecules available in the world. Well use this ability to determine
which substances would be best for making flexible solar panels, more efficient batteries, and
other important equipment. Our search for the right materials to use has so far been slow and
laborious. That's about to change.

So is our ability to understand nature's proteins, and to generate new ones. All living things are made
out of the large biomolecules known as proteins, as are wondrous materials such as spiders' silk. The cells in our bodies are assembly
lines for proteins, but we currently understand little about how these assembly lines work—how they fold a two-dimensional string
of amino acids into a complicated 3-D protein. But thanks to digital tools, we're learning quickly. In 2018, as part of a contest,
the AlphaFold software developed by Google DeepMind correctly guessed the structure of twenty-five out of forty-three proteins it
was shown; the second-place finisher guessed correctly three times. DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis says, "We [haven't]
solved the protein-folding problem, this is just a first step... but we have a good system and we have a ton of ideas we haven't

implemented yet." As these good ideas accumulate, they might well let us make spider-strength materials.

Energy. One
of humanity's most urgent tasks in the twenty-first century is to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Two ways to do this are to become more efficient in using energy and, when
generating it, to shift away from carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Digital tools will help greatly with
both.

Several groups have recently shown that they can combine machine learning and other
techniques to increase the energy efficiency of data centers by as much as 30 percent. This large
improvement matters for two reasons. First, data centers are heavy users of energy, accounting for about 1 percent
of global electricity demand. So efficiencies in these facilities help. Second, and more important, these gains indicate how
much the energy use of all our other complicated infrastructures— everything from electricity
grids to chemical plants to steel mills—can be trimmed. All are a great deal less energy
efficient than they could be. We have both ample opportunity and ample incentive now to
improve them.

Both wind and solar power are becoming much cheaper, so much so that in many parts of the world
they're now the most cost-effective options, even without government subsidies, for new electrical generators.
These energy sources use virtually no resources once they're up and running and generate no greenhouse gases; they're
among the world champions of dematerialization.
In the decades to come they might well be joined by nuclear fusion, the astonishingly powerful process
that takes place inside the sun and other stars. Harnessing fusion has been tantalizingly out of reach for more than half a century—
the old joke is that it's twenty years away and always will be. A big part of the problem is that it's hard to control the fusion reaction
inside any human- made vessel, but massive
improvements in sensors and computing power are boosting
hope that fusion power might truly be only a generation away.

Transportation. Our current transportation systems are chronically inefficient. Most vehicles aren't used
much of the time, and even when they’re in use, they're not nearly full. Now that we have technologies that let us know where
every driver, passenger, piece of cargo, and vehicle is at all times, we can greatly increase the utilization and
efficiency of every element of transportation.
Renting instead of owning transportation is a likely consequence of this shift. Instead of owning cars, which typically sit idle more
than 90 percent of the time, more people will choose to access transportation as needed. We're already seeing this with car-hailing
companies such as Uber and Lyft. These services are quickly spreading around the world, and expanding to cover more modes of
transportation, from motorbikes to bicycles to electric scooters. They're also moving into commercial applications such as long- and
short-haul trucking. As this shift continues, we’ll
need fewer tons of steel, aluminum, plastic, gasoline, and
other resources to move the world's people and goods around .
We might also experience less congestion and gridlock as we try to get around. Bikes and scooters take up little space compared to
cars, so streets can accommodate many more of them. Technology also gives us the ability to implement many forms of "congestion
pricing," which has been shown to reduce gridlock by making car access to busy streets expensive enough that people use other
options. The most intriguing future transportation platform of all might be the sky. The same technologies that power today's small
drones can be scaled up to build "air taxis" with as many as eight propellers and no pilot. Such contraptions sound like science fiction
today, but they might be carrying us around by midcentury.

Agriculture. As we saw in chapter 5, leading

farms have demonstrated an ability to increase their tonnage
of output year after year while decreasing their use of inputs such as land, water, and fertilizer.
This trend toward optimization will continue thanks to a set of innovations under the label precision
agriculture. The precision comes from many sources, including better sensors of plant and animal health, soil quality and
moisture, and so on; the ability to deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and water just where they're needed; and machinery that adapts
itself to each plant or animal. All these varieties of precision will combine to allow traditional farms to
generate more from less.

So will changes to the genomes of plants and animals. DNA modifications will increase disease
and drought tolerance, expand where crops can be grown, and allow us to get more of what
we want from each crop or herd. As we saw in chapter 9, they'll also allow us to take better care of
vulnerable populations such as infants in poor countries by creating golden rice and other nutrition
enhancers. We'll also be able to make much more precise and targeted genetic modifications
thanks to a new crop of gene-editing tools that are large improvements over their more scattershot predecessors. Opposition to
genetically modified organisms is fierce in some quarters, but isn't based on reason or science. This opposition will, one hopes, fade.

Throughout human history, just about all farming has been done in fields. For some crops, this is now
changing. Agriculture has moved indoors, where parameters such as light, humidity, fertilizer, and even the
composition of the atmosphere can be precisely monitored and controlled. In everything from urban buildings to
shipping containers, crops are now being grown with progressively less labor and fewer material
inputs. These completely contained farms will spread and help reduce the planetary footprint
of our agriculture.
These examples aren't intended to be comprehensive, and I don't have precise estimates of how likely each innovation is, or when
it's most likely to occur. I offer them only to indicate how broad and exciting are the possibilities offered by the two horsemen of
capitalism and technological progress, and how they’ll continue to dematerialize our consumption and
let us increase our prosperity while treading more lightly on our planet.
Neg sustainability claims are a Malthusian trap---innovation solves.
Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, & Simon Bunel 21. Professor at the Collège de France,
INSEAD, and the London School of Economics and Political Science and was previously Professor
of Economics at Harvard. Senior Researcher at OFCE, the French Economic Observatory at
Sciences Po in Paris, and Research Associate in the Innovation Lab at the Collège de France.
Senior Economist at INSEE, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, and
at the Bank of France. “The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth
of Nations.” Harvard University Press.

In Chapter 2, we discussed the Malthusian trap: long-term growth is impossible in this model
because every gain in productivity generates a demographic expansion that brings GDP per
capita back to subsistence level. This paradigm may seem extreme but in reality many of our
fellow citizens are Malthusians without realizing it, like Monsieur Jourdain of Molière’s Le
Bourgeois gentilhomme [The Middle-Class Gentleman], who speaks in prose without knowing it.
This is in any case true of those who advocate for “antigrowth” as the only possible response to
the constraints of limited natural resources and the urgency of climate change. Their viewpoint
can be expressed as follows.

Consider an economy whose growth comes entirely from capital accumulation, in which the
final production of consumer goods (known as final production) requires both capital and the
extraction of natural resources. The accumulation of capital—investment—is equal to savings,
and savings represents part of final production, the remainder being devoted to consumption.3
Suppose that the stock of natural resources is limited. We can prove two propositions that
remain valid whether returns to capital accumulation increase or decrease with the amount of
accumulated capital. First, the economy is bound to stagnate in the very long term; second, a
slowdown of growth in the short term will prolong the economy’s lifespan.

To prove that the economy is bound to stagnate in the very long term, one reasons by
contradiction. Suppose that the economy were to continue to grow indefinitely at a positive
rate. It follows that final production would not converge toward zero over time. For this to be
the case, the flow extraction of natural resources must continue above a certain level. But then
the stock of natural resources will end up being depleted in a finite time. Once the stock is
depleted, final production falls to zero, which contradicts the initial assumption of ever-
increasing final production. Therefore, the only possible rate of growth over the long term is
zero.

The second proposition—that slowing growth in the short term prolongs the lifespan of the
economy—results directly from the fact that any slowdown of the economy in the short run
saves natural resources, thereby making it possible to extract those resources over a longer
period, which prolongs the time during which final goods can be produced.

It was this very logical and persuasive reasoning that inspired the champions of zero growth in
the 1970s. The same reasoning drives the advocates of antigrowth. Can we escape this logic?
Just as in the case of the Malthusian trap, the answer can be summed up in a single word:
innovation. Only innovation can push back the limits of what is possible. Only innovation has the
potential to improve quality of life while using fewer and fewer of our natural resources and
emitting less and less carbon dioxide. Only innovation will enable us to discover new and cleaner
sources of energy. For example, the introduction of nuclear power plants en abled France to
reduce its CO2 emissions, and the development of renewable energies amplified this
movement.

Creative destruction is a very powerful engine of change . Not only does it enable a new
technology to replace an older one, it can also open the path to a radical change in production
processes. And environmental urgency calls for radical change in some fields; for example,
modifying the mix of energy sources to rely more on renewables requires the entire energy
industry to change models. A critical question is whether innovation will be directed
spontaneously toward less polluting technologies or toward technologies that use fewer natural
resources, or whether, on the contrary, governmental intervention is necessary. We now turn
our attention to this question.

Only modernization can solve warming

Pollin 18 (Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political
Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “De-Growth vs A
Green New Deal”, New Left Review, 112, July/Aug 2018,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-
deal.pdf)

Problems with degrowth

As I emphasized at the outset, degrowth proponents have made valuable contributions in addressing many of the untenable
features of economic growth. But on the specific issue of climate change, degrowth does not provide
anything like a viable stabilization framework . Consider some very simple arithmetic. Following the ipcc, we know
that global co2 emissions need to fall from their current level of 32 billion tons to 20 billion tons within twenty years. If we
assume that, following a degrowth agenda, global gdp contracts by 10 per cent over the next
two decades, that would entail a reduction of global gdp four times greater than during the
2007–09 financial crisis and Great Recession . In terms of co2 emissions, the net effect of this 10 percent
gdp contraction, considered on its own, would be to push emissions down by precisely 10 percent —that
is, from 32 to 29 billion tons. It would not come close to bringing emissions down to 20 billion tons by
2040.

Clearly then, even under a degrowth scenario, the overwhelming factor pushing emissions down
will not be a contraction of overall gdp but massive growth in energy efficiency and clean
renewable-energy investments—which, for accounting purposes, will contribute towards increasing gdp
—along with similarly dramatic cuts in fossil-fuel production and consumption, which will register as reducing gdp. Moreover, the
immediate effect of any global gdp contraction would be huge job losses and declining living
standards for working people and the poor. During the Great Recession, global unemployment rose by
over 30 million. I have not seen a convincing argument from a degrowth advocate as to how we
could avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if gdp were to fall by twice as much.

These fundamental problems with degrowth are illustrated by the case of Japan, which has
been a slow-growing
economy for a generation now, even while maintaining high per capita incomes . Herman Daly himself
describes Japan as being ‘halfway to becoming a steady-state economy already, whether they call it that or not.’footnote22 Daly is
referring to the fact that, between 1996 and 2015, gdp growth in Japan averaged an anemic 0.7 per cent per year. This compares
with an average Japanese growth rate of 4.8 per cent per year for the 30-year period 1966 to 1995. Nevertheless, as
of 2017,
Japan remained in the ranks of the large, upper-income economies, with average gdp per capita
at about $40,000. Yet despite the fact that Japan has been close to a no-growth economy for twenty
years, its co2 emissions remain among the highest in the world, at 9.5 tons per capita. This is 40 per cent
below the figure for the United States, but it is four times higher than the average global level of 2.5 tons per capita that must be
achieved if global emissions are to drop by 40 per cent by 2040. Moreover, Japan’s
per capita emissions have not
fallen at all since the mid-1990s. The reason is straightforward: as of 2015, 92 per cent of Japan’s total
energy consumption comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas.

Thus, despite‘being halfway to becoming a steady-state economy’ , Japan has accomplished

virtually nothing in advancing a viable climate-stabilization path . The only way it will make
progress is to replace its existing, predominantly fossil-fuel energy system with a clean-energy
infrastructure. At present, hydro power supplies 5 per cent of Japan’s total energy needs, and other renewable sources only 3
per cent. Overall then, like all large economies—whether they are growing rapidly or not at all—Japan needs to embrace the Green
New Deal.

Profit motive and innovation make Capitalism key to solve warming. The alt
ensures extinction.
Saul Zimet 20, is a writer and artist who works on the moral problems of economics,
philosophy, and history, 5/17/2020, "Capitalism or the Climate?,"
https://quillette.com/2020/05/17/capitalism-or-the-climate/, Marsh

Another foundational tool for knowledge production is innovation, which capital and profit
motive facilitate. A large amount of innovation comes from excess capital being invested in new
research and development. Poorer populations, whether subnational, national, or global, have less to invest in prospective new inventions and
processes of which the details are unpredictable in advance. No system incentivizes useful investments and

disincentivizes wasteful investments better than the capitalist system, in which the investor’s own capital is on
the line. Incentives and wealth are two main reasons why all of the most innovative nations, such as the top 10 on
the 2020 Bloomberg Innovation Index, are capitalist countries. The sociologist Susan Cozzens at the Georgia Institute of Technology offers a
succinct description of the process:

In the classic literature of the economics of innovation, private firms are the driving force. They seek
competitive advantage in the market by introducing new products that give them a
temporary monopoly. By charging high prices during the period of temporary monopoly, the
firm makes profits and grows. Introducing new processes can result in competitive advantage if that step reduces costs or
increases productivity. In this view, firms drive innovation in order to survive and win in the marketplace .

Indeed, no
serious critics of capitalism argue that any other system produces greater material wealth
and innovation. Even Marxists, capitalism’s most vehement antagonists, generally acknowledge that no system has
ever produced more innovation and abundance. In The Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx and Engels wrote this:

The bourgeoisie [capitalist

class], during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive
and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of
Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,
clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had
even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
If only Marx and Engels could see how drastically the affluence of the proletariat has grown under global
capitalism since then.

Environmental technology
In 1894, just 21 years before Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Michelson famously proclaimed, “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly
established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” Some phenomena, like blizzards and thunderstorms, are somewhat predictable to those with the requisite equipment and training. But the
future of human knowledge is no such phenomenon. Discoveries, by their very nature, are unknown until they are not. Innovations are often unimaginable until they occur because the act of imagining them is what brings them into existence.

The history of failures to predict future knowledge is long and robust. In 1901, two years before they both achieved flight by aircraft, Wilbur Wright said to his brother, “Don’t think men will fly for a thousand years.” In 1932, just six years before the successful
splitting of the atom, Albert Einstein said, ”There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.” In 1957, 12 years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, the father of radio Lee de Forest stated, “Man will never reach the Moon
regardless of all future scientific advances.”

Even after world-changing technologies are invented, estimates of their utility are often wildly
inaccurate. The Internet, cars, and telephones were all dismissed as insignificant inventions in the years preceding their universal ascendance. So
we should be skeptical when we see publications like the BBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes denying the plausibility of
imminent technological advances on our climate problems. The truth is nobody has any idea what salutary
innovations and discoveries do or do not exist in our imminent future.

Many popular technological solutions to environmental issues have already been proposed in recent years. Carbon capture and sequestration
technology is endorsed by climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as by United States

Congress members from both the Democratic and Republican parties. Inventions
are being implemented to remove
plastic from the oceans. Sea walls are being engineered in some coastal communities and considered at
larger scales to mitigate sea level rise.
In The Climate Casino, Nordhaus writes: “Current estimates are that geoengineering would cost between one tenth and one hundredth as much as
reducing CO2 emissions for an equivalent amount of cooling.” But at their present level of development, such technologies are inadequate to the full
scope of the problem because they don’t sufficiently address certain dangers such as ocean acidification. Therefore, many environmentalists prefer
extreme reductions in carbon emissions, which would stop anthropogenic climate change at its root. But anthropogenic climate change is not just a
phenomenon of the future. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and other news organizations have noted that it is already having
serious effects here and now. The transition from predicted impact to experienced impact took place decades ago. So, how well are we adapting so far?

Scientific American reports that global warming may already be responsible for 150,000 deaths worldwide each year due to its effects on the frequency
and scale of floods and hurricanes, droughts and heat waves, spread of vector-borne diseases, and other factors. However, research from the Reason
Foundation shows that deaths caused by extreme weather events have declined by more than 90 percent since
1920. University of Oxford economist Max Roser’s research shows that the burden of  disease, famine, and other

relevant problems have also declined in recent years and decades (the disease statistics cited above are older than the
COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no evidence that COVID-19 is directly exacerbated by climate change like vector-borne diseases such as malaria and
dengue are). And overall life expectancy has risen globally from about 34 years in 1900 to about 72 years in 2019.
Why are climate-related death rates declining overall while climate change seems to be causing more deaths? Because as economic activity continues to drive up carbon emissions, the resulting growth rates give more communities access to strongly built and
climate-controlled buildings, medical education and supplies, life-saving infrastructure such as hospitals and clean water, and many other enormous advantages. When the media and activists argue that burning fossil fuels has not been worth the climate-related
damage to human life, they are counting the victims of climate catastrophe while ignoring the beneficiaries of economic growth in developing countries and elsewhere. That is a mistake because the two are inextricably linked.

Choose your own extinction

Of course, just because we’ve adapted extremely well so far doesn’t mean the trend will continue. Dangerous tipping points may yet accelerate the problem beyond our capacity to respond. As living organisms, we have a problem of evolutionary magnitude: we
adapt gradually in an environment that can change rapidly. If we go on existing like any other animal, our niche will eventually change so quickly that we won’t be able to adapt fast enough. This has happened to 99.9 percent of all known species since the beginning
of life on Earth roughly four billion years ago. These changes have ranged from asteroid impacts, to volcanic eruptions, to viral pandemics, and of course to human activity in recent millennia, and are typically unpredictable to the species they eliminate because they
come from outside the limited context in which those species evolved.

Some argue that humans are just another mammal like any other, and that all our claims of exceptionality have been ignorant hubris. If this is true, we are almost certainly doomed to relatively imminent extinction by forces beyond our influence. But thinking this
way about the human species does not quite account for the implications of the economic growth trend of the last few centuries. In his book Scale, former Santa Fe Institute president Geoffrey West, whose renowned scientific research put him on Time Magazine’s
2006 list of the 100 most influential people in the world, discusses a profound biological fact about mammal species: they virtually all have the same average number of heartbeats per capita. An average elephant has a long lifespan but a slow heart-rate, and an
average mouse has a short lifespan but a fast heart-rate. It all balances out to roughly one-and-a-half billion heartbeats over the course of a lifetime. Other classes of animals follow similar metabolic scaling laws.

A few hundred years ago, before the rise of capitalism, humans were no different—they lived roughly 35 years on average and had about one-and-a-half billion heartbeats just like any other mammal. But gains in knowledge since then, such as innovations in
medicine, agriculture, and government, have roughly doubled our life expectancy and with it our average number of heartbeats per lifetime (some dogs and other domesticated animals have been similarly altered by access to human innovations). This constitutes a
totally unprecedented departure from the biological status quo.

Technological knowledge, fueled by capital, has allowed us to do many things categorically

unlike the achievements of other species as far as we know. The universal extinction paradigm, which has limited all
mammal species so far to one million years or less, should be high on our list of patterns to break . We don’t know what

existential threats will come or how long we have to prepare for them, but we can’t expect human ingenuity to rush us

past the finish line at the last minute without a context of widespread continuous technological
and scientific progress until that point—a project it seems only capitalism can hope to fund.
David Deutsch observes that the word “sustain” generally refers to the absence or prevention of
change. This is what environmentalists such as Naomi Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would like to do with our
environment by ending capitalism . Their solution to climate change is what all non-human
animals have always done: leave the environment basically unaltered by refraining from large-scale production, and wait around
to go extinct. Unfortunately, as Deutsch writes, “Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic
inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe.”
Thus, it is not that capitalism is the problem and sustainability is the solution, but that sustainability is

the problem and capitalism is the solution.

Every year, global capitalism allows more research and development departments to be funded. Every day it
gives more citizens of affluent and developing nations the material wealth required for better
education and information technology. Economic growth, coupled with rising carbon emissions, might lead to a climate
apocalypse—or it might continue to bring us material and technological salvation. We cannot really know in advance. But we would be

crazy to choose the time-tested alternative to capitalism: extinction by stagnation.

Capitalism got us in the crisis, but it’s the only way to avert it---investment ends
political backlash.
David Fickling 20, Bloomberg Opinion columnist, 10/14/2020, "Capitalism Caused Climate
Change; It Must Also Be the Solution," https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-
14/capitalism-caused-climate-change-it-must-also-be-the-solution, Marsh + IB

Can the world shrink its emissions footprint without immiserating its population?

We’re seeing a brutal real-world experiment on that front right now. The
coronavirus pandemic has caused the
the biggest drop in emissions in history. It has also resulted in more than a million deaths
and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
That’s just a foretaste of what’s to come, though. To remain within the carbon budgets needed to give a 50-50 chance of keeping
global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to repeat the 7% annual decline in emissions seen in 2020 every
year until 2050. Think this has been a bad year for human welfare? The
coming decades risk being even worse
unless we can rapidly sever the centuries-long link between economic growth and carbon
pollution.

Growing Problem

Barring occasional crises, emissions have kept growing almost every year for decades

One argument that’s gained ground in recent years is that growth itself is the problem. The
issue is one of “capitalism versus the climate,” to quote the subtitle of a 2014 book by Canadian
journalist Naomi Klein. “All you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic
growth,” Swedish activist Greta Thunberg told a 2019 UN summit: “How dare you!”

Perhaps insteadof trying to make the climate subservient to the needs of expanding gross domestic
product, we need to cut our economic coat according to our atmospheric cloth?

The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook provides one reason why that’s unlikely to work. 
The outlook, released Tuesday, is structured around scenarios reflecting different policy settings and how they’ll affect energy consumption and
emissions over the coming decades. This year, two are new: one illustrating the path to net-zero emissions by 2050, and one showing how a delayed
recovery from the pandemic might alter the picture.
Such a recession would indeed reduce emissions in the near term. Until 2023, the Delayed Recovery Scenario sends less carbon into the atmosphere
than the Sustainable Development Scenario, which is meant to model the path to keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius.

Killing Cure

A more damaging coronavirus pandemic will reduce emissions, but only in the short term
[Graph Omitted]

After that, though, things fall apart. Thanks to ongoing economic weakness, governments and businesses lose the
capacity to carry out the spending needed to remake the world’s energy system. Investment in
fossil fuels falls by 10% relative to expectations under current policies, but spending on renewables and
nuclear drops by 5% as well, so that $2.2 trillion less is spent by 2030.
Rather than investing to replace our power plants and appliances with lower-carbon alternatives, we eke out their polluting lives a little bit longer. By
2030, annual emissions are about 29% higher than they would be under Sustainable Development.

This desktop model of how the world could develop reflects a profound truth. The atmosphere can accommodate about 500 billion metric tons more
carbon dioxide to give an even chance of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees — but the world’s current industrial base is currently pumping out
roughly 33 billion tons a year, and will continue to do so unless we can replace it.

How to Spend It

Average annual spending on renewable power will have to surge over the coming decade to hit the IEA's Sustainable
Development Scenario
[Graph Omitted]

Retrofitting the world’s energy systems is going to require vast sums of money. Renewable power alone will need an average $569
billion of investment every year over the coming decade under the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario. That’s
almost twice the rate seen over the past five years, and not far behind what the entire oil and gas sector would spend under the same settings.
If anything, the world needs a target that’s more ambitious still.

If we can get up to speed, that

volume of spending will create its own momentum. One justified complaint of
anti-capitalist climate activists is that our political systems frequently put their thumbs on the scale to favor powerful
incumbent businesses, which at present are mostly the polluting ones. But a system where investment dollars are

flowing away from fossil fuels and toward decarbonization is one where power, too, is shifting away from
the carbon economy.
Follow the Money

Cumulative investment in low-carbon power will overtake fossil power under either of the IEA's main scenarios
between 2020 and 2040

[Graph Omitted]

Even under the IEA’s less ambitious Stated Policies Scenario, the $15.14 trillion that gets spent globally on fossil fuel generation and production by 2040
is smaller than the $15.97 trillion spent on renewables and nuclear — and doesn’t include the amounts that go to energy efficiency and grid networks.

Under the Sustainable Development Scenario, which has historically often been a better guide to the path of the energy transition, low-carbon power
ends up with $2.70 of spending for every $1 going to fossil fuel extraction and generation. That’s a world in which renewables will increasingly set the
rules of the game, encouraging governments to remove the remaining subsidies that support oil, gas and coal.

Since the industrial revolution, the fossil-fueled

engine of capitalist growth has conspired to put the world in its current
climate crisis. Harnessing that power to drive the carbon transition is now our best hope of
turning that disaster around.
Newest data flows AFF---EPI shows capitalists are twice more effective in
reducing emissions.
Jeff Luse 4/20, at C3, 4/20/21, "How Economic Freedom Creates a Healthier Environment,"
https://c3newsmag.com/cleaned-by-capitalism-how-economic-freedom-creates-a-healthier-
environment/, Marsh

In the United States, and around the globe, there is a growing consensus that climate change is real. While many
conservative are looking to address this issue through free markets, a growing faction of the Left is turning to big government spending to reduce
emissions all while painting capitalism as a villain to the health of the planet.  

The attack on capitalism is not only misplaced, but it is also counterproductive. In a study released today
by C3 Solutions authored by Nick Loris of The Heritage Foundation, titled Free Economies are Clean Economies, Loris outlines the many ways in which
capitalism and free markets benefit the environment.

“Free and competitive markets have reduced emissions, brought millions of people out of poverty,
and have led to innovations that have benefitted the health of the planet and its people,” said Loris in the C3 Solutions press release.
“While global environmental issues like climate change are incredibly complex, economic freedom is the best solution to

reduce emissions and promote economic prosperity.”

Specifically, the report found that openmarkets double the environmental health of countries. “Mostly free”
economies, as determined by The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, had a higher score on Yale University’s

Environmental Performance Index, than “mostly unfree” economies—with scores of 71.72 and 35.17
respectively.

This makes sense. As

markets open and economies of countries grow, efficiency becomes prioritized and
consumers have the ability to invest in making the environment cleaner. This purchasing power allows
for people to make buildings more energy efficient, and for companies to choose materials that have a
lower carbon footprint. As economist Donald Boudreaux succinctly put it, we are “cleaned by capitalism.” 

In addition to open markets, private property rights play an important role in environmental well-being. Ownership of
property incentivizes stewardship and environmental responsibility. As a 2020 report from the National Academies of Science found, “ territories

with full property rights show a significant decrease in deforestation, while the effect does not exist
in territories without full property rights.”
Perhaps the greatest example of this is seen in the cases of Venezuela and the United States. In Venezuela, Loris points out, the government’s
ownership of industry and property decreased foreign investments and prosperity, while increasing corruption and environmental degradation. In
contrast, private
property rights in America made the fracking revolution possible, which substantively lowered our
domestic emissions.

In the same way that government ownership hurts the environment, overregulation can stile
environmental prosperity.
Overregulating businesses slows down the innovations that are needed to reduce emissions. As seen in the
case of nuclear energy, regulations have increased construction costs by 200%, leading in part to the

shrinking of America’s nuclear energy fleet.

Allowing businesses to freely operate greatly improves the health of the economy and the environment. To analyze this, Loris looks to the World Banks’
Ease of Doing Business Index where he found “a strong, positive correlation between the Ease of Doing Business Index and EPI” (Environmental
Performance Index). Specifically, countries with the “Most Ease” of doing business had an EPI score twice that of countries with the “Least Ease” of
doing business.

With a growing number of people looking to the government to solve climate and environmental issues, it is
important to realize that free markets are the best way to lower emissions. As seen in “Free Economies,” open markets,
limited government, private property rights, and rule of law are the best ways in which we can improve the health of the planet.
While global issues such as climate change are complex, the best way to tackle it is through economic freedom.

Capitalism is self-correcting and the only solution to climate change – expert

reports
Fickling 20 (David, Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial
and consumer companies, citing a report from the International Energy Agency, “Capitalism
Caused Climate Change; It Must Also Be the Solution,” Bloomberg, 10/14/20,
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-14/capitalism-caused-climate-change-it-
must-also-be-the-solution, ccm)

After that, though, things

fall apart. Thanks to ongoing economic weakness, governments and
businesses lose the capacity to carry out the spending needed to remake the world’s energy
system. Investment in fossil fuels falls by 10% relative to expectations under current policies , but
spending on renewables and nuclear drops by 5% as well, so that $2.2 trillion less is spent by
2030.

Rather than investing to replace our power plants and appliances with lower-carbon
alternatives, we eke out their polluting lives a little bit longer . By 2030, annual emissions are
about 29% higher than they would be under Sustainable Development.
This desktop model of how the world could develop reflects a profound truth. The atmosphere can accommodate about 500 billion
metric tons more carbon dioxide to give an even chance of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees — but the world’s current industrial
base is currently pumping out roughly 33 billion tons a year, and will continue to do so unless we can replace it.

Retrofitting the world’s energy systems is going to require vast sums of money. Renewable
power alone will need an average $569 billion of investment every year over the coming decade
under the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario . That’s almost twice the rate seen over the past five years, and
not far behind what the entire oil and gas sector would spend under the same settings. If anything, the world needs a target that’s
more ambitious still.

If we can get up to speed, that volume of spending will create its own momentum. One justified
complaint of anti-capitalist climate activists is that our political systems frequently put their
thumbs on the scale to favor powerful incumbent businesses , which at present are mostly the polluting ones.
But a system where investment dollars are flowing away from fossil fuels and toward
decarbonization is one where power, too, is shifting away from the carbon economy.

Even under the IEA’s less ambitious Stated Policies Scenario, the $15.14 trillion that gets spent globally
on fossil fuel generation and production by 2040 is smaller than the $15.97 trillion spent on
renewables and nuclear — and doesn’t include the amounts that go to energy efficiency and grid
networks.

Under the Sustainable Development Scenario, which has historically often been a better guide to
the path of the energy transition, low-carbon power ends up with $2.70 of spending for every
$1 going to fossil fuel extraction and generation . That’s a world in which renewables will
increasingly set the rules of the game, encouraging governments to remove the remaining
subsidies that support oil, gas and coal.
Since the industrial revolution, the
fossil-fueled engine of capitalist growth has conspired to put the
world in its current climate crisis. Harnessing that power to drive the carbon transition is now
our best hope of turning th It’s sustainable and solves poverty and every quality of
life metric.
Radelet ’16 (Steven; February 2016; Ph.D. and M.P.P. from Harvard University, B.A. from Central Michigan University,
Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Development, and is Director of the Global Human Development Program at Georgetown
University, former Professor of Government and Economics at Harvard University, former economic advisor to President Sirleaf of
Liberia; Foreign Affairs, “Prosperity Rising,” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-12-14/prosperity-rising)

Since the early 1990s, daily

life in poor countries has been changing profoundly for the better: one
billion people have escaped extreme poverty, average incomes have doubled, infant death rates have
plummeted, millions more girls have enrolled in school, chronic hunger has been cut almost in half,
deaths from malaria and other diseases have declined dramatically, democracy has spread far and wide,
and the incidence of war—even with Syria and other conflicts—has fallen by half. This unprecedented
progress goes way beyond China and India and has touched hundreds of millions of people in dozens of developing
countries across the globe, from Mongolia to Mozambique, Bangladesh to Brazil . Yet few people are aware
of these achievements, even though, in aggregate, they rank among the most important in human
history. In 2013, the Swedish survey organization Novus Group International asked Americans how they thought the share of the
world’s population living in extreme poverty had changed over the last two decades. Sixty-six percent of respondents said that they
thought it had doubled, and another 29 percent said that it hadn’t changed. Only five percent knew (or guessed) the truth: that the
share of people living in extreme poverty had fallen by half. Perhaps that ignorance explains why
Washington has done so little to take advantage of these promising trends, giving only tepid
support to nascent democracies, making limited investments in economic development and in new
health and agricultural technologies, and failing to take the lead in building more effective international
institutions. Whatever the reason, many developing countries are now responding to what they perceive
as the United States’ indifference by looking elsewhere—especially toward China—for deeper engagement and advice
on how to keep growing. At the same time, climate change, the slowdown in global growth, and rising tensions
in the Middle East and beyond have begun to threaten further progress. As a result, the United States now
risks missing out on a historic chance to strengthen its global leadership and help create a safer,
more prosperous, and more democratic world—just at the moment when it could help the most. ONE GIANT LEAP Global
poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history. In 1993, about two billion people were
trapped in extreme poverty (defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day); by 2012, that number had
dropped to less than one billion . The industrialization of China is a big part of the story, of course, but even excluding
that country, the number of extreme poor has fallen by more than 400 million. Since the 1980s, more than 60 countries
have reduced the number of their citizens who are impoverished, even as their overall populations have
grown. This decline in poverty has gone hand in hand with much faster economic growth. Between 1977
and 1994, the growth in per capita GDP across the developing countries averaged zero; since 1995, that figure has shot up
to three percent. Again, the change is widespread: between 1977 and 1994, only 21 developing countries (out of 109 with
populations greater than one million) exceeded two percent annual per capita growth, but between 1995 and 2013, 71 such
countries did so. And going
backward has become much less common : in the earlier period, more than 50
developing countries recorded negative growth, but in the later one, just
ten did. The improvements in health have
been even bigger. In 1960, 22 percent of children in developing countries died before their fifth birthday,
but by 2013, only five percent did. Diarrhea killed five million children a year in 1990 but claimed fewer than one million
in 2014. Half as many people now die from malaria as did in 2000, and deaths from tuberculosis and AIDS
have both dropped by a third. The share of people living with chronic hunger has fallen by almost half
since the mid-1990s. Life expectancy at birth in developing countries has lengthened by nearly one-
third, from 50 years in 1960 to 65 years today. These improvements in health have left no country untouched,
even the worst-governed ones. Consider this: the rate of child death has declined in every single country (at
least those where data are available) since 1980. Meanwhile, far more children are enrolling in and completing
school. In the late 1980s, only 72 percent of all primary-school-age children attended school; now, the figure exceeds 87
percent. Girls in developing countries have enjoyed the biggest gains. In 1980, only half of them finished primary
school, whereas four out of five do so today. These leaps in education are beginning to translate into better-skilled workers. Then
there is the shift to democracy. Prior to the 1980s, most developing countries were run by left- or right-wing dictators. Coups and
countercoups, violence and assassinations, human rights abuses—all formed part of regular political life. But starting in
the
1980s, dictators began to fall, a process that accelerated after the Cold War. In 1983, only 17 of 109 developing countries
qualified as democracies, based on data from Freedom House and the Center for Systemic Peace; by 2013, the number had
more than tripled, to 56 (and that’s not counting the many more developing countries with populations of less than one
million). As those numbers suggest, power today is far more likely to be transferred through the ballot box
than through violence, and elections in most countries have become fairer and more transparent. Twenty years ago, few
Indonesians could have imagined that a furniture maker from central Java would beat one of Suharto’s relatives in a free and fair
election, as Joko Widodo did in 2014. Nor would many have predicted that Nigeria, then still under military rule, would in 2015 mark
its first peaceful transfer of power between parties, or that Myanmar (also called Burma) would hold its most successful democratic
election the same year. Across the developing world, individual freedoms and rights are honored to a much greater
degree, human rights abuses are rarer, and legislative bodies have more power. Yes, many of these new
democracies have problems. And yes, the march toward democracy has slowed since 2005—and even
reversed in some countries, such as Thailand and Venezuela. But in many more—from Brazil to Mongolia to Senegal—
democracy has deepened. Never before in history have so many developing countries been so
democratic. As states have become wealthier and more democratic, conflict and violence within them have
declined. Those who think otherwise should remember that as recently as the 1980s and early 1990s, much of the
world was aflame, from Central America to Southeast Asia to West Africa. There were half as many
civil wars in the last decade as there were in the 1980s, and the number of people killed in armed conflicts
has fallen by three-quarters. Three major forces sparked this great surge in development progress. First, the end of the
Cold War brought an end to the superpowers’ support for some of the world’s nastiest dictators and reduced the frequency of
conflict. As ideas about economic and political governance began to change, developing
countries introduced more
market-based economic systems and more democracy. Second, globalization created vast new opportunities
for economic growth. Increased flows of trade, investment, information, and technology created more jobs and
improved living standards. Third, new and more effective leaders—in politics, business, religion, and civil society—began to
forge deep change. Where courageous figures, such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa, stepped forward, countries progressed;
where old-style dictators, such as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, remained in power, countries languished. This incredibly
wide-ranging progress should not obscure the considerable work that remains: progress has not reached
everyone, everywhere. One billion people still live in extreme poverty, six million children die every year from preventable diseases,
too few girls get the education they deserve, and too many people suffer under dictatorships. Countries such as Haiti, North Korea,
Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe lag far behind. But the fact remains that an enormous transformation is under way—one
that has already substantially improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. WIN-WIN The United
States should welcome and encourage this progress. For starters, broad-based development enhances global
security. It is not true that poverty necessarily breeds terrorism, as some argue—after all, most poor people are not terrorists,
and many terrorists are not poor. But it is true that poor states tend to be weak states unable to prevent terrorist
and criminal networks from operating on their soil. Sustained development strengthens government
institutions and reduces the need for outside intervention. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it,
“Development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.” Development also builds states’ capacities to fight pandemic
disease. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were overwhelmed by Ebola in 2014 largely because they all had
weak health systems. The same was true in many of the countries hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS epidemic decades ago. As poor
countries grow wealthier, however, they become better equipped to fight diseases that can spread
quickly beyond their borders. A more prosperous developing world also benefits the U.S. economy. The spread of economic
growth creates new markets for American businesses not just in China but also in Brazil, Indonesia, South
Africa, and beyond. Developing countries are buying more and more aircraft, automobiles, semiconductors, medical
equipment, pharmaceuticals, consultancy services, and entertainment. Although the growth in trade with developing countries has
slowed during the last year, their economies will no doubt remain major market opportunities for U.S. companies. In 1990, such
states accounted for one-third of the global economy; today, their share is half, and they purchase more than half of U.S.
exports. In 2011, Walmart spent $2.4 billion to acquire a controlling share of a holding company that operates more than 350
retail stores in South Africa and 11 other African countries, signaling a level of interest in African consumers that would have been
unimaginable two decades ago. To be sure, emerging markets also create competition for U.S. businesses and hardship for
American workers who lose their jobs as a result. But they also create many new jobs, as American firms expand abroad and as
companies in the developing world send more capital to the West. Moreover, developing countries are increasingly
coming up with their own innovations and technologies, in medicine, agriculture, energy, and more.
The United States should respond to this growing competition not with protectionism but by strengthening its own
capacities: rebuilding its infrastructure, improving its educational system, and investing in new
technologies. Finally, development helps spread and deepen the values that Americans hold dear: openness,
economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom. These values tend to go hand in hand with growing prosperity: as incomes rise,
citizens demand greater freedoms. History suggests that even governments that do not welcome these ideas eventually embrace
them or are replaced by those that do. And as more developing countries achieve progress under market-based economic systems
and democracy, other countries seek to emulate the model. The United States and Europe have a strong self-
interest in encouraging this process, since it will
enhance global stability and add to the number of like-minded partners
that can help address future challenges. SUSTAINING THE SURGE What makes all this progress especially impressive is that it
has continued despite a number of major shocks that in an earlier age could well have stopped it: the outbreak of
the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis in 1997–98, the 9/11 attacks, the global food
crisis of 2007–8, and the global financial crisis of 2008. In each case, pundits predicted that the disaster of the day would set
back progress. Yet in each case, the gains continued. There are good reasons to believe they can continue well into the
future. The forces that sparked these changes were fundamental, not transitory. Governments
have learned from their mistakes and gotten much better at managing inevitable downturns. Global
integration has made critical technologies available to more and more people. State institutions have
become more effective, with improved (if imperfect) legal systems, clearer property rights, and greater respect for individual
liberties. Democratic rules and norms governing the transfer of political power, free speech, and accountability have
become more deeply entrenched. Civil society groups are more active. These deep-seated changes have put enormous
additional gains well within reach. If economic growth proceeds along the lines of most projections over the next
two decades, some 700 million more people will escape extreme poverty. Per capita incomes in poor
countries will double again, millions of childhood deaths will be avoided, tens of millions of children will
get the education they deserve, hunger will decline, and basic rights and freedoms will spread further. At least, that’s
what should happen—but none of these future gains is guaranteed. Growth has slowed markedly since
2008 in emerging economies such as Brazil and China and throughout the developing world. Russia, Thailand, and
Venezuela have turned less democratic , and South Africa and Turkey seem to be headed in that direction as well.
The Middle East has seen the return of conflict and authoritarian rule. China’s aggressive actions in the
South China Sea could spark a major conflict that could kill tens of thousands of people and devastate the region’s
economies. Outbreaks of SARS and the H1N1 and Ebola viruses underscore humanity’s vulnerability to disease, and many doctors
worry that growing resistance to antibiotics could reverse some of the hard-fought gains in health. Meanwhile, global population is
on track to exceed nine billion by 2050, and the
combination of more people, higher incomes, and warmer
climates will place enormous strains on the world’s supplies of fresh water, food, and energy. Although there
are ample grounds for pessimism, the doomsayers continue to underestimate humanity’s growing ability to
cooperate in the face of new challenges . In the eighteenth century, when Thomas Malthus looked at population
growth and foresaw catastrophic famine, he failed to appreciate the advances in ag riculture, health, and
governance that human ingenuity could create. The same was true for those that predicted a population disaster in Asia in the
1960s and 1970s. Today, the problems facing developing countries are plain to see, while the new ideas and innovations that will
overcome them are harder to picture. Continued progress isn’t automatic or guaranteed. But with smart choices, it
is within reach. LEADING BY EXAMPLE Most of the key choices will be made in developing countries themselves. Sustaining
progress will require leaders there to reduce their countries’ dependence on natural resources, make their economies more
inclusive, invest more in health and education, expand opportunities for women, and strengthen democracy and the rule of law. Yet
the future of development will also depend on the actions of the world’s leading countries, since
poorer countries can prosper only in a strong global system. The United States must do its part by
regaining its economic leadership through major investments in infrastructure, education, and
technological advances in health, agriculture, and alternative fuels. It must act to fix its long-term budget problems by
improving the solvency of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and strengthen the financial system through better regulation.
The country must also do a much better job of leading by example on democracy. Deep political polarization, the
lack of substantive debate, the unwillingness to compromise, misguided foreign policy adventurism, and the Great Recession have
made liberal democracy look unattractive and ineffective. That malaise matters, because many developingcountries are
now engaged in a battle of ideas over which economic and political model they should follow. On the
one side stands the model that has prevailed in the West since World War II: market capitalism coupled
with liberal democracy. On the other is the model practiced by China, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and, increasingly, Russia,
among others: state capitalism coupled with authoritarian rule . And there’s yet one more option, with a smaller but more
dangerous following: religious fundamentalism, as promulgated by Iran and Saudi Arabia and groups such as the Islamic State (or
ISIS) and Boko Haram in Nigeria. As
the Western countries struggle and China continues to rise, authoritarian
capitalism is becoming more appealing. Consider Beijing’s ties to Africa. China purchased $26 billion in imports from the
continent in 2013; the United States purchased $9 billion. Chinese investment in Africa has been growing by 50 percent per year
since 2000, whereas U.S. investment is growing by 14 percent per year. Make
no mistake: many Africans still prefer to
follow the American model and view China with suspicion. But those attitudes are beginning to shift ,
and Beijing’s apparent ability to get things done will only enhance China’s appeal, especially if Washington seems to talk big but
deliver little. THE NEXT SURGE FORWARD Aside from the broader task of getting their own houses in order, the United States and
other Western powers should also assert leadership in several specific areas to keep the progress going. The first
is climate change, which presents one of the greatest threats to poverty reduction. Most of the world’s poor countries had little to
do with creating the problem, yet they will bear the brunt of the damage. Rising sea levels, changing rainfall patterns, higher
temperatures, and dwindling water supplies will derail progress, will undermine global food production, and could engender major
conflict. Developing countries have an important role to play in curbing emissions, but they will not switch to low-carbon fuels and
other clean technologies if their developed-world counterparts do not. Washington has taken important first steps to reduce power-
plant emissions and raise automotive fuel-efficiency standards, but there is a very long way to go. Second, leading countries—
especially the United States—should invest more in technological innovation. Much of the credit for recent
improvements in living standards goes to vaccines, medicines, high-yielding seed varieties, cell phones, and the Internet. These
new technologies (alongside old ones such as electricity and paved roads) have not yet reached everywhere, so
simply making them more widely available would do wonders . But sustaining progress for the next several
decades will also require significant investments in new vaccines, more powerful drugs, drought- and heat-resistant
seeds, desalination techniques, and clean energy.

at disaster around.

Green tech is thriving

Smith 21 (Noah, was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, “Clean-Tech
Investment Isn't Just a Bubble This Time,” Bloomberg Opinion, 3/18/21,
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-18/clean-tech-investment-isn-t-just-a-
bubble-this-time, ccm)
Green energy investment is hot again in the U.S. To some, the new boom will raise the specter of the clean-tech
bust that followed a streak of exuberance a decade ago. But there are reasons to believe that this time the trend is no
bubble or mirage.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was an explosion of investment in clean technology — renewable energy, plus other
technologies to reduce carbon emissions. At first the money came largely from venture capitalists, but then the federal government
stepped in and began providing cheap loans and subsidies. Then in 2011, solar manufacturer Solyndra spectacularly failed, causing
an immense political backlash. And that was only the most prominent failure; overall, investors lost about $25 billion when the
sector crashed. Money dried up fast. For years, "clean tech" was a dirty word in venture capitalists’ conversations.

But the worm turns, and clean tech is back.

A venture fund led by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates (in which Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg News, also invests)
is committing billions of dollars. Funding
for battery companies and electric-vehicle companies has
skyrocketed. And investment in solar and wind energy dwarfs everything else.
This raises fear of another bubble for some — of history repeating itself. My colleague Liam Denning believes that the rapid rise in
valuations is a clear indicator of overpricing, which he expects to collapse when interest rates rise. Others see investors repeating
the mistakes of a decade ago.

I’m more optimistic. Although investors will certainly experience some ups and downs — already the Wilderhill Clean Energy Index
has had a major correction since early February — I’m pretty confident that the clean-tech industry as a whole won’t
experience the kind of bust it did last time .

The most basic reason is that the fundamental underlying technology has matured in a way it simply
hadn’t a decade ago. In 2009, the levelized cost of solar photovoltaic electricity was $359 per megawatt-hour — more
than four times as expensive as electricity from a natural gas plant. By 2019, solar PV had fallen in price to $40 per
megawatt-hour, 28% cheaper than gas. That’s an 89% decline in 10 years, with more cost drops
yet to come. Meanwhile, lithium-ion batteries have experienced a similar drop in prices.

That order-of-magnitude drop in costs makes all the difference. First of all, it means that solar and
wind aren’t risky new technologies. Solyndra failed because it was trying to market an innovative new kind of solar cell,
which ended up being too expensive when the tried-and-true design came down in cost. Future investments in solar
won’t have to bet on any difficult technological breakthroughs. Batteries might be a different story — lots of
money is being thrown at startups trying to create solid-state batteries, which would be a true breakthrough. But Tesla Inc. is doing
just fine with the old kind, so that sector is probably going to do OK as well. Venture investing does well when it doesn’t have to bet
on “hard tech”, and much of clean tech is no longer hard.

Second, cost drops in clean energy mean that success doesn’t depend on government
intervention. In the earlier boom, fickle government subsidies were often necessary for capital-intensive energy companies to
succeed. Now, even though President Joe Biden is planning a big push into clean-energy investment , the
market is investing quite a lot in renewables all on its own.

Finally, investors have probably learned their lesson. Clean energy itself was never a good fit for
venture. It’s capital intensive, since buying solar panels and wind turbines entails a lot of money up front; venture capital
tends to focus on cheap, small investments that scale. And instead of companies creating highly
differentiated products and new markets, as in software, clean electricity companies are basically all
trying to provide the same commodified product.

This time around, venture

capitalists are letting bigger investors handle the build out of solar and
wind, and finding other niches where low-cost, differentiated startups can add value — such as
solar services and financing, lab-grown meat and electric vehicles. Some of those bets are certainly going
to fail, but that’s always the case in private equity. The
success of Tesla — now with a market cap of almost $700
billion, or 28 times the amount that was lost in the clean-tech bust — demonstrates the time-
honored principle that a few big hits can compensate for a lot of little failures.

In other words, clean

tech is entering the final stage of the famous Gartner Hype Cycle — a pattern
that describes the progression of emerging tech nologies and business models, starting with an
innovation that sees expectations climb and then crash , before they finally rise again to
sustained productivity.
1ar – at: cap causes war
Ext – Transition Wars
The ALT fails without the AFF.
Paul Mason 15, writer and broadcaster on economics and social justice, visiting professor at
the University of Wolverhampton, “Introduction,” PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Allen
Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2015, pp. 6–17

What started in 2008 as an

economic crisis morphed into a social crisis, leading to mass unrest; and now,
as revolutions turn into civil wars, creating military tension between nuclear superpowers, it has
become a crisis of the global order.

There are, on the face of it, only two ways it can end. In the first scenario, the global elite clings on, imposing the cost of crisis on to
workers, pensioners and the poor over the next ten or twenty years. The global order – as enforced by the IMF, World Bank and
World Trade Organisation – survives, but in a weakened form. The cost of saving globalization is borne by the ordinary people of the
developed world. But growth stagnates.

In the second scenario, the

consensus breaks. Parties of the hard right and left come to power as ordinary
people refuse to pay the price of austerity. Instead, states then try to impose the costs of the crisis on
each other. Globalization falls apart, the global institutions become powerless and in the process the
conflicts that have burned these past twenty years – drug wars, post-Soviet nationalism,
jihadism, uncontrolled migration and resistance to it – light a fire at the centre of the system. In this scenario, lip-
service to international law evaporates; torture, censorship, arbitrary detention and mass
surveillance become the regular tools of statecraft. This is a variant of what happened in the 1930s and there is
no guarantee it cannot happen again.

In both scenarios, the

serious impacts of climate change, demographic ageing and population growth kick
in around the year 2050. If we can’t create a sustainable global order and restore economic
dynamism, the decades after 2050 will be chaos.

So I
want to propose an alternative: first, we save globalization by ditching neoliberalism; then
we save the planet – and rescue ourselves from turmoil and inequality – by moving beyond capitalism itself.

Ditching neoliberalism is the easy part. There’s a growing consensus among protest movements, radical
economists and radical political parties in Europe as protest movements, radical economists and radical political parties
in Europe as to how you do it: suppress high finance, reverse austerity, invest in green energy and promote high-waged work.

But then what?

As the Greek experience demonstrates, any government that defies austerity will instantly clash
with the global institutions that protect the 1 per cent. After the radical left party Syriza won the
election in January 2015, the European Central Bank, whose job was to promote the stability of Greek
banks, pulled the plug on those banks, triggering a €20 billion run on deposits. That forced the left-wing
government to choose between bankruptcy and submission. You will find no minutes, no voting records, no
explanation for what the ECB did. It was left to the right-wing German newspaper Stern to explain: they had ‘smashed’ Greece.3 It
was done, symbolically, to reinforce the central message of neoliberalism that there is no alternative;
that all routes away from capitalism end in the kind of disaster that befell the Soviet Union; and that a revolt against
capitalism is a revolt against a natural and timeless order.
The current crisis not only spells the end of the neoliberal model, it is a symptom of the longer-term mismatch between market
systems and an economy based on information. The aim of this book is to explain why replacing capitalism is no longer a utopian
dream, how the basic forms of a postcapitalist economy can be found within the current system, and how they could be expanded
rapidly.

Neoliberalism is the doctrine of uncontrolled markets: it says that the best route to prosperity is individuals pursuing their own self-
interest, and the market is the only way to express that self-interest. It says the state should be small (except for its riot squad and
secret police); that financial speculation is good; that inequality is good; that the natural state of humankind is to be a bunch of
ruthless individuals, competing with each other.

Its prestige rests on tangible achievements: in the past twenty-five years, neoliberalism has triggered the biggest surge in
development the world has ever seen, and it unleashed an exponential improvement in core information technologies. But in the
process, it has revived inequality to a state close to that of 100 years ago and has now triggered a survival-level event.

The civil war in Ukraine, which brought Russian special forces to the banks of the Dniestr; the triumph of ISIS in Syria
and Iraq; the rise of fascist parties in the Dniestr; the triumph of ISIS in Syria and Iraq; the rise of fascist parties in Europe;
the paralysis of NATO as its populations withhold consent for military intervention – these are not problems separate from
the economic crisis. They are signs that the neoliberal order has failed.

Over the past two decades, millions of people have resisted neoliberalism but in general the resistance
failed. Beyond all the tactical mistakes, and the repression, the reason is simple: free-market
capitalism is a clear and powerful idea, while the forces opposing it looked like they were
defending something old, worse and incoherent.

Among the 1 per cent, neoliberalism has the power of a religion: the more you practise it, the better you feel – and the
richer you become. Even among the poor, once the system was in full swing, to act in any other way but according to neoliberal
strictures became irrational: you borrow, you duck and dive around the edges of the tax system, you stick to the pointless rules
imposed at work.

And for decades the opponents of capitalism have revelled in their own incoherence. From the anti-
globalization movement of the 1990s through to Occupy and beyond, the movement for social justice has rejected the idea of a
coherent programme in favour of ‘One No, Many Yes-es’. The incoherence is logical, if you think the only
alternative is what the twentieth century left called ‘socialism’ . Why fight for a big change if it’s only a
regression – towards state control and economic nationalism, to economies that work only if everyone
behaves the same way or submits to a brutal hierarchy? In turn, the absence of a clear alternative
explains why most protest movements never win: in their hearts they don’t want to. There’s even a term for it in
the protest movement: ‘refusal to win’.4

To replace neoliberalism we need something just as powerful and effective; not just a bright idea about how
the world could work but a new, holistic model that can run itself and tangibly deliver a better
outcome. It has to be based on micro-mechanisms, not diktats or policies; it has to work spontaneously. In
this book, I make the case that there is a clear alternative, that it can be global, and that it can deliver a
future substantially better than the one capitalism will be offering by the mid-twenty-first century.

It’s called postcapitalism.

Capitalism is more than just an economic structure or a set of laws and institutions. It is the whole system – social, economic,
demographic, cultural, ideological – needed to make a developed society function through markets and private ownership. That
includes companies, markets and states. But it also includes criminal gangs, secret power networks, miracle preachers in a Lagos
slum, rogue analysts on Wall Street. Capitalism is the Primark factory that collapsed in Bangladesh and it is the rioting teenage girls
at the opening of the Primark store in London, overexcited at the prospect of bargain clothes.

By studying capitalism as a whole system, we can identify a number of its fundamental features. Capitalism is an organism: it has a
lifecycle – a beginning, a middle and an end. It is a complex system, operating beyond the control of individuals, governments and
even superpowers. It creates outcomes that are often contrary to people’s intentions, even when they are acting rationally.
Capitalism is also a learning organism: it adapts constantly, and not just in small increments. At major turning points, it morphs and
mutates in response to danger, creating patterns and structures barely recognizable to the generation that came before. And its
most basic survival instinct is to drive technological change. If we consider not just info-tech but food production, birth control or
global health, the past twenty-five years have probably seen the greatest upsurge in human capability ever. But the technologies
we’ve created are not compatible with capitalism – not in its present form and maybe not in any form. Once capitalism can no
longer adapt to technological change, postcapitalism becomes necessary. When behaviours and organizations adapted to exploiting
technological change appear spontaneously, postcapitalism becomes possible.

That, in short, is the argument of this book: that capitalism is a complex, adaptive system which has reached the limits of its capacity
to adapt.

This, of course, stands miles apart from mainstream economics. In the boom years, economists started to believe the system that
had emerged after 1989 was permanent – the perfect expression of human rationality, with all its problems solvable by politicians
and central bankers tweaking control dials marked ‘fiscal and monetary policy’.

When they considered the possibility that the new technology and the old forms of society were mismatched, economists assumed
society would simply remould itself around technology. Their optimism was justified because such adaptations have happened in the
past. But today the adaptation process is adaptations have happened in the past. But today the adaptation process is stalled.

Information is different from every previous technology. As I will show, its spontaneous tendency is to dissolve markets, destroy
ownership and break down the relationship between work and wages. And that is the deep background to the crisis we are living
through.

If I am right we have to admit that for most of the past century the
left has misunderstood what the end of
capitalism would look like. The old left’s aim was the forced destruction of market mechanisms.
The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades.
The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic
collapse. Instead, over the past twenty-five years, it is the left’s project that has collapsed. The market
destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the massively expanded workforce of the
world looks like a ‘proletariat’, but no longer thinks or behaves purely as one.

If you lived through all this, and hated capitalism, it was traumatic. But
in the process, technology has created a
new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to
embrace or die.

Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating
something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which
breaks through, reshaping the economy around new values, behaviours and norms. As with feudalism 500
years ago, capitalism’s demise will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being.
And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three impacts of the new technology in the past twenty-five years.

First, information technology has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the
relationship between work and wages.

Second, information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity
while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies on a scale not seen in the past 200 years –
yet these cannot last.

Third, we’reseeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and
organizations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of services and organizations
are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial
hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by 27,000 volunteers, for free,
abolishing the encyclopaedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3 billion a year in
revenue.
Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic
life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives
and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the
shattering of old structures after the 2008 crisis.

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over
the past ten years, which the media has dubbed the ‘sharing economy’. Buzzterms such as the ‘commons’ and ‘peer-
production’ are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this means for capitalism itself.

I believe it
offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and
protected by a massive change in what governments do. This must in turn be driven by a change in our thinking
about technology, ownership and work itself. When we create the elements of the new system we should be able to say to ourselves
and others: this
is no longer my survival mechanism, my bolt-hole from the neoliberal world, this is
a new way of living in the process of formation.

In the old socialist project, the state takes over the market, runs it in favour of the poor instead of the rich,
then moves key areas of production out of the market and into a planned economy. The one time it
was tried, in Russia after 1917, it didn’t work. Whether it could have worked is a good question, but a
dead one.

Today the terrain of capitalism has changed: it is global, fragmentary, geared to small-scale choices,
temporary work and multiple skill-sets. Consumption has become a form of self-expression – and millions of people have a stake in
the finance system that they did not have before.

With the new terrain, the old path is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative
production, using network technology to produce goods and services that work only when they are free, or shared,
defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework,
and the postcapitalist sector might coexist with the market sector for decades. But it is postcapitalist
sector might coexist with the market sector for decades. But it is happening.

Networks restore ‘granularity’ to the postcapitalist project; that is, they can be the basis of a non-
market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen
of a commissar.

The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it
happen, the entire project of the left, from the protest groups to mainstream social-democratic and liberal parties, has
to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the urgency of this postcapitalist project, it’s no longer the property of
the left, but of a much wider movement, for which we will probably need new labels.

transition wars --- extinction

Gubrud 97 Mark Gubrud, Center for Superconductivity Research, University of Maryland, “Nanotechnology and International
Security” 1997 http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Papers/Gubrud/

With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized
production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful
source of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on
wage labor, transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we

don't know how to organize one. As global capitalism retreats , it will leave behind a world dominated
by politics, and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power . Economic insecurity, and fears
for the material and moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost
two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the
most predictable outcome is chaos : shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic
conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more
than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to
sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination . Competition among the leading technological
powers for the political loyalty of clients might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic imperialism.

Geopolitical War – – robust studies

Dafoe & Kelsey 14 (Political Science and International Economics Allan & Nina; assistant professor in political science at
Yale & research associate in international economics at Berkeley; Journal of Peace Research, “Observing the capitalist peace:
Examining market-mediated signaling and other mechanisms,” http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/51/5/619.full)

Countries with liberal political and economic systems rarely use military force against each
other. This anomalous peace has been most prominently attributed to the ‘democratic peace’ – the apparent
tendency for democratic countries to avoid militarized conflict with each other (Maoz & Russett, 1993; Ray, 1995; Dafoe, Oneal & Russett, 2013).More recently, however,

scholars have proposed that the liberal peace could be partly (Russett & Oneal, 2001) or primarily (Gartzke, 2007; but see
Dafoe, 2011) attributed to liberal economic factors, such as commercial and financial

interdependence. In particular, Erik Gartzke, Quan Li & Charles Boehmer (2001), henceforth referred to as GLB, have demonstrated that measures of
capital openness have a substantial and statistically significant association with peaceful
dyadic relations. Gartzke (2007) confirms that this association is robust to a large variety of model
specifications. To explain this correlation, GLB propose that countries with open capital markets are more able to
credibly signal their resolve through the bearing of greater economic costs prior to the
outbreak of militarized conflict. This explanation is novel and plausible, and resonates with the rationalist view of asymmetric information as a cause
of conflict (Fearon, 1995). Moreover, it implies clear testable predictions on evidential domains different from those examined by GLB. In this article we exploit this

opportunity by constructing a confirmatory test of GLB’s theory of market-mediated signaling.

We first develop an innovative quantitative case selection technique to identify crucial cases
where the mechanism of market-mediated signaling should be most easily observed . Specifically, we
employ quantitative data and the statistical models used to support the theory we are probing to create an impartial and transparentmeans of selecting cases in which the
theory – as specified by the theory’s creators –makes its most confident predictions.We implement three different case selection rules to select cases that optimize on two
criteria: (1) maximizing the inferential leverage of our cases, and (2) minimizing selection bias. We examine these cases for a necessary implication of market-mediated signaling:
that key participants drew a connection between conflictual events and adverse market movements. Such an inference is a necessary step in the process by which market-
mediated costs can signal resolve. For evidence of this we examine news media, government documents, memoirs, historical works, and other sources. We additionally examine
other sources, such as market data, for evidence that economic costs were caused by escalatory events. Based on this analysis, we assess the evidence for GLB’s theory of
market mediated costly signaling. Our article then considers a more complex heterogeneous effects version of market-mediated signaling in which unspecified scope conditions
are required for the mechanism to operate. Our design has the feature of selecting cases in which scope conditions are most likely to be absent. This allows us to perform an
exploratory analysis of these cases, looking for possible scope conditions. We also consider alternative potential mechanisms. Our cases are reviewed in more detail in the online

our confirmatory test finds that while market-mediated signaling may be

appendix.1 To summarize our results,

operative in the most serious disputes, it was largely absent in the less serious disputes that
characterize most of the sample of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). This suggests either that
other mechanisms account for the correlation between capital openness and peace, or that
the scope conditions for market-mediated signaling are restrictive . Of the signals that we observed,
strategicmarket-mediated signals were relatively more important than automatic market-
mediated signals in the most serious conflicts . We identify a number of potential scope conditions, such as that (1) the
conflict must be driven by bargaining failure arising from uncertainty and (2) the economic
costs need to escalate gradually and need to be substantial, but less than the expected
military costs of conflict. Finally, there were a number of other explanations that seemed present in the cases we examined and could account for the
capitalist peace: capital openness is associated with greater anticipated economic costs of conflict ;

capital openness leads third parties to have a greater stake in the conflict and therefore be
more willing to intervene; a dyadic acceptance of the status quo could promote both peace and capital openness; and countries seeking to institutionalize
a regional peace might instrumentally harness the pacifying effects of liberal markets. The correlation: Open capital markets and peace The empirical puzzle at the core of this
article is the significant and robust correlation noted by GLB between high levels of capital openness in both members of a dyad and the infrequent incidence of militarized
interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars between the members of this dyad (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). The index of capital openness (CAPOPEN) is intended to capture the
‘difficulty states face in seeking to impose restrictions on capital flows (the degree of lost policy autonomy due to globalization)’ (Gartzke & Li, 2003: 575). CAPOPEN is
constructed from data drawn from the widely used IMF’s Annual Reports on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Controls; it is a combination of eight binary variables that
measure different types of government restrictions on capital and currency flow (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 407). The measure of CAPOPEN starts in 1966 and is defined for
many countries (increasingly more over time). Most of the countries that do not have a measure of CAPOPEN are communist.2 GLB implement this variable in a dyadic
framework by creating a new variable, CAPOPENL, which is the smaller of the two dyadic values of CAPOPEN. This operationalization is sometimes referred to as the ‘weak-link’
specification since the functional form is consonant with a model of war in which the ‘weakest link’ in a dyad determines the probability of war. CAPOPENL has a negative
monotonic association with the incidence of MIDs, fatal MIDs, and wars (see Figure 1).3 The strength of the estimated empirical association between peace and CAPOPENL,
using a modified version of the dataset and model from Gartzke (2007), is comparable to that between peace and, respectively, joint democracy, log of distance, or the GDP of a
contiguous dyad (Gartzke, 2007: 179; Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 412). In summary, CAPOPENL seems to be an important and robust correlate of peace. The question of why
specifically this correlation exists, however, remains to be answered. The mechanism: Market-mediated signaling? Gartzke, Li & Boehmer (2001) argue that the classic liberal
account for the pacific effect of economic interdependence – that interdependence increases the expected costs of war – is not consistent with the bargaining theory of war (see
also Morrow, 1999). GLB argue that ‘conventional descriptions of interdependence see war as less likely because states face additional opportunity costs for fighting. The
problem with such an account is that it ignores incentives to capitalize on an opponent’s reticence to fight’ (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 400.)4 Instead, GLB (see also Gartzke,

that financial interdependence could promote peace by facilitating the

2003; Gartzke & Li, 2003) argue

sending of costly signals. As the probability of militarized conflict increases, states incur a
variety of automatic and strategically imposed economic costs as a consequence of escalation
toward conflict. Those states that persist in a dispute despite these costs will reveal their
willingness to tolerate them, and hence signal resolve. The greater the degree of economic
interdependence, the more a resolved country could demonstrate its willingness to suffer
costs ex ante to militarized conflict. Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s mechanism implies a commonly perceived costly signal before militarized conflict
breaks out or escalates: if market-mediated signaling is to account for the correlation between CAPOPENL and the absence of MIDs, then visible market-mediated costs should
occur prior to or during periods of real or potential conflict (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). Thus, the proposed mechanism should leave many visible footprints in the historical

This theory predicts that these visible signals must arise in any escalating conflict,
record.

involving countries with high capital openness, in which this mechanism is operative Clarifying the
signaling mechanism Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s signaling mechanism is mostly conceptualized on an abstract, game-theoretic level (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). In order to

elucidate the types of observations that could inform this theory’s validity, we discuss with greater specificity the possible ways in which such signaling might occur. A
conceptual classification of costly signals The term signaling connotes an intentional
communicative act by one party directed towards another. Because the term signaling thus suggests a willful act, and a
signal of resolve is only credible if it is costly , scholars have sometimes concluded that states
involved in bargaining under incomplete information could advance their interests by
imposing costs on themselves and thereby signaling their resolve (e.g. Lektzian & Sprecher, 2007). However, the game-
theoretic concept of signaling refers more generally to any situation in which an actor’s behavior reveals information about her private information. In fact, states

frequently adopt sanctions with low costs to themselves and high costs to their rivals because
doing so is often a rational bargaining tactic on other grounds: they are trying to coerce their
rival to concede the issue. Bargaining encounters of this type can be conceptualized as a type
of war-of-attrition game in which each actor attempts to coerce the other through the
imposition of escalating costs. Such encounters also provide the opportunity for signaling:
when states resist the costs imposed by their rivals, they ‘signal’ their resolve. If at some point one party
perceives the conflict to have become too costly and steps back, that party ‘signals’ a lack of resolve. Thus, this kind of signaling arises as a by-

product of another’s coercive attempts. In other words, costly signals come in two forms: self-inflicted (information about a leader arising
from a leader’s intentional or incidental infliction of costs on himself) or imposed (information about a leader that arises from a leader’s response to a rival’s imposition of costs).

Additionally, costs may arise as an automatic byproduct of escalation towards military conflict or
may be a tool of statecraft that is strategically employed during a conflict. The automatic mechanism stipulates
that as the probability of conflict increases, various economic assets will lose value due to the risk of conflict and

investor flight. However, the occurrence of these costs may also be intentional outcomes of specific escalatory decisions of the states, as in the case of deliberate
sanctions; in this case they are strategic. Finally, at a practical level, we identify three different potential kinds of

economic costs of militarized conflict that may be mediated by open capital markets: capital costs from political risk,
monetary coercion, and business sanctions.
Even if growth is imperfect, the transition away fails
Hubert Buch-Hansen 18. Associate Professor, Department of Business and Politics,
Copenhagen Business School. “The Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from
Critical Political Economy.” Ecological Economics 146: 157-63. Emory Libraries.

Still, the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and type of support it needs if
its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes. The number of political
parties, labour unions, business associations and international organisations that have so far
embraced degrowth is modest to say the least. Economic and political elites, including social
democratic parties and most of the trade union movement, are united in the belief that
economic growth is necessary and desirable. This consensus finds support in the prevailing type
of economic theory and underpins the main contenders in the neoliberal project, such as centre-
left and nationalist projects. In spite of the world's multidimensional crisis, a pro-growth
discourse in other words continues to be hegemonic: it is widely considered a matter of
common sense that continued economic growth is required .

It is also noteworthy that

economic and political elites, to a large extent, continue to support the
neoliberal project, even in the face of its evident shortcomings. Indeed, the 2008 financial crisis
did not result in the weaken ing of transnational financial capital that could have paved the way
for a paradigm shift. Instead of coming to an end, neoliberal capitalism has arguably entered a
more authoritarian phase (Bruff, 2014). The main reason the power of the pre-crisis coalition
remains intact is that governments stepped in and saved the dominant fraction by means of
massive bailouts. It is a foregone conclusion that this fraction and the wider coalition behind the
neoliberal paradigm (transnational industrial capital, the middle classes and segments of
organized labour) will consider the degrowth paradigm unattractive and that such social forces
will vehemently oppose the implementation of degrowth policies (see also Rees, 2014: 97).
While degrowth advocates envision a future in which market forces play a less prominent role than they do today, degrowth is not
an antimarket project. As such, it can attract support from certain types of market actors. In particular, it is worth noting that social
enterprises, such as cooperatives (Restakis, 2010), play a major role in the degrowth vision. Such enterprises are defined by being
‘organisations involved at least to some extent in the market, with a clear social, cultural and/or environmental purpose, rooted in
and serving primarily the local community and ideally having a local and/or democratic ownership structure’ (Johanisova et al., 2013:
11). Social enterprises currently exist at the margins of a system, in which the dominant type of business entity is profit-oriented,
shareholder-owned corporations. The further dissemination of social enterprises, which is crucial to the transitions to degrowth
societies, is – in many cases – blocked or delayed as a result of the centrifugal forces of global competition (Wigger and Buch-
Hansen, 2013). Overall, social enterprises thus (still) constitute a social force with modest power.

Ougaard (2016: 467) notes that one of the major dividing lines in the contemporary transnational capitalist class is between
capitalists who have a material interest in the carbon-based economy and capitalists who have a material interest in
decarbonisation. The latter group, for instance, includes manufacturers of equipment for the production of renewable energy (ibid.:
467). As mentioned above, degrowth advocates have singled out renewable energy as one of the sectors that needs to grow in the
future. As such, it seems likely that the owners of national and transnational companies operating in this sector would be more
positively inclined towards the degrowth project than would capitalists with a stake in the carbon-based economy. Still, the prospect
of the “green sector” emerging as a driving force behind degrowth currently appears meagre. Being under the control of
transnational capital (Harris, 2010), such companies generally embrace the “green growth” discourse, which ‘is deeply embedded in
neoliberal capitalism’ and indeed serves to adjust this form of capitalism ‘to crises arising from contradictions within itself’ (Wanner,
2015: 23).

In addition to support from the social forces engendered by the production process, a political project ‘also needs the political ability
to mobilize majorities in parliamentary democracies, and a sufficient measure of at least passive consent’ (van Apeldoorn and
Overbeek, 2012: 5–6) if it is to become hegemonic. As mentioned, degrowth enjoys little support in parliaments, and certainly the
pro-growth discourse is hegemonic among parties in government.5 With capital accumulation being the most important driving
force in capitalist societies, political decision-makers are generally eager to create conditions conducive to production and the
accumulation of capital (Lindblom, 1977: 172). Capitalist
states and international organisations are thus
“programmed” to facilitate capital accumulation, and do as such constitute a strategically
selective terrain that works to the disadvantage of the degrowth project .

The main advocates of the degrowth project are grassroots , small fractions of left-wing parties and labour
unions as well as academics and other citizens who are concerned about social injustice and the environmentally unsustainable
nature of societies in the rich parts of the world. The project is thus ideationally driven in the sense that support for it is not so much
rooted in the material circumstances or short-term self-interests of specific groups or classes as it is rooted in the conviction that
degrowth is necessary if current and future generations across the globe are to be able to lead a good life. While there is no shortage
of enthusiasts and creative ideas in the degrowth movement, it
has only modest resources compared to other
political projects. To put it bluntly, the advocates of degrowth do not possess instruments that
enable them to force political decision-makers to listen to – let alone comply with – their views .
As such, they are in a weaker position than the labour union movement was in its heyday, and
they are in a far weaker position than the owners and managers of large corporations are today
(on the structural power of transnational corporations, see Gill and Law, 1989).

6. Consent

It is also safe to say that degrowth

enjoys no “passive consent” from the majority of the population . For
the time being, degrowth remains unknown to most people. Yet, if it were to become generally
known, most people would probably not find the vision of a smaller economic system appealing.
This is not just a matter of degrowth being ‘a missile word that backfires’ because it triggers
negative feelings in people when they first hear it (Drews and Antal, 2016). It is also a matter of the
actual content of the degrowth project .
Two issues in particular should be mentioned in this context. First, for many, the anti-capitalist sentiments embodied in the
degrowth project will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow. Today, the
vast majority of people find it almost
impossible to conceive of a world without capitalism . There is a ‘widespread sense that not only
is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to
even imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2). As Jameson (2003) famously observed, it is, in a
sense, easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. However,
not only is degrowth – like other anti-capitalist projects – up against the challenge that most
people consider capitalism the only system that can function; it is also up against the additional
challenge that it speaks against economic growth in a world where the desirability of growth is
considered common sense.

Second, degrowth is incompatible with the lifestyles to which many of us who live in rich countries
have become accustomed. Economic growth in the Western world is, to no small extent,
premised on the existence of consumer societies and an associated consumer culture most of us
find it difficult to completely escape . In this culture, social status, happiness, well-being and identity
are linked to consumption (Jackson, 2009). Indeed, it is widely considered a natural right to lead an environmentally
unsustainable lifestyle – a lifestyle that includes car ownership, air travel, spacious accommodations, fashionable clothing, an
omnivorous diet and all sorts of electronic gadgets. This Western norm of consumption has increasingly been
exported to other parts of the world, the result being that never before have so many people
taken part in consumption patterns that used to be reserved for elites (Koch, 2012). If degrowth
were to be institutionalised, many citizens in the rich countries would have to adapt to a
materially lower standard of living. That is, while the basic needs of the global population can be met in a non-growing
economy, not all wants and preferences can be fulfilled (Koch et al., 2017). Undoubtedly, many people in the rich
countries would experience various limitations on their consumption opportunities as a violent
encroachment on their personal freedom. Indeed, whereas many recognize that contemporary
consumer societies are environmentally unsustainable, fewer are prepared to actually change
their own lifestyles to reverse/address this .
At present, then, the degrowth project is in its “deconstructive phase”, i.e., the phase in which its advocates are able to present a
powerful critique of the prevailing neoliberal project and point to alternative solutions to crisis. At this stage, not enough support
has been mobilised behind the degrowth project for it to be elevated to the phases of “construction” and “consolidation”. It is
conceivable that at some point, enough people will become sufficiently discontent with the existing economic system and push for
something radically different. Reasons for doing so could be the failure of the system to satisfy human needs and/or its inability to
resolve the multidimensional crisis confronting humanity. Yet, various
material and ideational path-
dependencies currently stand in the way of such a development, particularly in countries with
large middle-classes. Even if it were to happen that the majority wanted a break with the current
system, it is far from given that a system based on the ideas of degrowth is what they would
demand.

Boundary struggle doesn’t create successful new logistics- it would invite

unfathomable scales of crackdowns.
Flaherty 5 USC BA in International Relations, researcher in political affairs, activist and organic
farmer in New Zealand, http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html

[ACS = American Corporate State]

THE NATURE OF ARMED INSURGENCY AGAINST THE ACS Any violent insurgency against the ACS is sure to fail and will
only serve to enhance the state's power. The major flaw of violent insurgencies, both cell based
(Weathermen Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations etc.) and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the

Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is that they are attempting to attack the system using the same tactics the

ACS has already mastered: terror and psychological operations. The ACS attained primacy through the effective
application of terror and psychological operations. Therefore, it has far more skill and experience in the use of these

tactics than any upstart could ever hope to attain .4 This makes the ACS impervious to traditional
insurgency tactics. - Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus The ACS employs a full time
counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources that are unimaginable to most would be
insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe actually is.
Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful , idealistic, political activists. Whether or not political activists know it,
even with very mundane levels of political activity, they are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS. The U.S. military classifies political activism
as “low intensity conflict.” The scale of warfare (in terms of intensity) begins with individuals distributing anti-government handbills and public
gatherings with anti-government/anti-corporate themes. In the middle of the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to as Operations Other
than War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right hand side of the graph is global thermonuclear war. What is
important to remember is that the military is concerned with ALL points along this scale because they represent different types of threats to the ACS.
Making distinctions between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence services is no longer necessary. After
September 11, 2001, all
national security assets would be brought to bear against any U.S. insurgency
movement. Additionally, the U.S. military established NORTHCOM which designated the U.S. as an active military
operational area. Crimes involving the loss of corporate profits will increasingly be treated as acts of terrorism
and could garner anything from a local law enforcement response to activation of regular
military forces. Most of what is commonly referred to as “political activism” is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as
a useful and necessary component of political control. Letters-to-the-editor... Calls-to-elected-representatives... Waving banners... “Third” party
political activities... Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech zones... Political activism amounts to an utterly useless
waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise that is sold to people who are dissatisfied,
but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency
teams routinely monitor these
activities, attend the meetings, join the groups and take on leadership roles in the organizations. It's only a
matter of time before some individuals determine that political activism is a honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate
state knows that some small percentage of the peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in
activists will probably do one of two things; drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways. If the clued-in activist drops his or her political
activities, the ACS wins. But what if the clued-in activist refuses to give up the struggle? Feeling powerless, desperation could set in and these
individuals might become increasingly radicalized. Because
the corporate state's counterinsurgency operatives
have infiltrated most political activism groups, the radicalized members will be easily identified,
monitored and eventually compromised/turned, arrested or executed. The ACS wins again.

Militancy fails and greases the wheels for state crackdown – the historical
record proves that is doesn’t spill over to legal change.
Rhee 18 – Professor, West Virginia University College of Law (William, Using the
Master ’s Tool to Dismantle His House: Derrick Bell, Herbert Wechsler, and
Critical Legal Process , Volume 3 Number 1 Concordia Law Review Article 2,
2018)
Critical Legal Process echoes Erika Wechsler and the Last Black Hero’s desire for concrete action . Concrete action, of course, is not
necessary.471 The common complaint lodged against critical legal movements as nihilistic is unfounded.472 Before you can resolve
a problem, you have to know that the problem exists. Identifying a problem without offering any concrete solutions remains a
genuine scholarly contribution. However, Bell appears to disagree. He prefaces his Erika Wechsler story with a quote from the Book
of James in the Bible: “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”473 Mere
faith in
critical theory thus would appear to be insufficient to Bell. One must live that faith through
concrete action. If, however, we take critical legal movements’ pessimistic assumptions about the
Master’s oppression474 seriously, then ironically, the only viable alternative for concrete action is
the rule of law. Critical Legal Process thus literally or figuratively focuses on using the Master’s favorite
tool to dismantle his house. Because they agree with Lorde that the Master’s favorite tool, the rule of law,
can never be used to dismantle his house of legal doctrine,475 Erika and the Last Black Hero choose to
act through potentially violent revolution.476 If the Master’s oppression is so entrenched and permanent as Bell
argues,477 then nonviolent protest, which relies upon changing public opinion and the Master’s heart, would be futile. As Erika and
the Last Black Hero both concede, the
problem with violent revolution is that the permanent structural
power disparities that multiple critical legal movements take for granted,478 by their own admission,
doom their violent revolution to failure as well. As the Last Black Hero explained: “Universal black
militance would end black people. Whites could not stand it.”479 In fact, Bell’s Last Black Hero conceded
that his black militancy was nearly suicidal: Militant black leadership is like being on a bomb squad .
It requires confidence in your skills and a courage able to survive the continuing awareness that you’re messing with dynamite, but
that someone has to do it. One mistake, and you’re gone! Sometimes you’re gone whether or not you
make a mistake.480 At the end of the day, the more radical and pessimistic core assumptions at the
heart of critical legal movements such as Bell’s Racial Realism481 are just that: unprovable
assumptions.482 They are unprovable because there are simply too many variables to test their veracity .
For example, you either believe, along with Bell and Critical Race Theorists, that U.S. racism is
structurally permanent and impervious to legal reform, or, along with Wechsler and civil rights
advocates, that U.S. racism, while still present in modern American society, can be lessened
through the rule of law. In the final analysis, core assumptions like the permanence or
impermanence of racism are more about faith than reason or evidence . As Bell recognized with his
critical deconstruction of legal doctrine,483 for better or worse, many lawmakers and practicing attorneys in a democracy believe
that legal doctrine is the only “real” form of law.484 They unfairly reject critical theoretical legal scholarship as useless.485 Even if
they refuse to accept critically deconstructed hypothetical legal doctrine seriously as workable alternatives, they can nevertheless
better understand critical legal theoretical concepts when “translated” into legal doctrine. Just as identifying the problem is the
necessary prerequisite to solving the problem, Bell’s critical deconstruction of legal doctrine is the necessary prerequisite to
Wechsler’s transformative reconstruction of legal doctrine. Above all, Critical
Legal Process’s willingness to use legal
doctrine symbolically and practically allows people who run the ideological gamut, from well-
intentioned but hesitant incremental law reformers to radical critical legal theorists disdainful
of the rule of law, to work together to improve the lives of oppressed groups. CONCLUSION In
another story, The Ultimate Civil Rights Strategy, Bell acknowledged that the Master’s tool, the rule of law, might be repurposed in a
third way to dismantle the Master’s house.486 The Celestial Curia Sisters, immortals who resemble the Greek Muses, 487 left open
the hope that thisthird way might work: “My Curia Sisters,” Geneva [Crenshaw] said, “I . . . confess[] confusion. You warn
us that our legal programs are foredoomed to failure, and yet you urge us to continue those very
programs because they will create an atmosphere of protest . I must reiterate my fear that this approach will
simply perpetuate the pattern of benefit to whites of legal reforms achieved by civil rights litigation intended to help blacks.” [The
Curia responded,] “The benefit they bring to all is proof of how potent a weapon your civil rights
programs can be in seeking a restructured society. Future campaigns, while seeking relief in
traditional forms, should emphasize the chasm between the existing social order and the
nation’s ideals. Thus, Sister Geneva, litigation as well as protests and political efforts would pursue
reform directly as well as create a continuing tension between what you are and what you
might become. Out of this tension may come the insight and imagination necessary to recast the nation’s guiding principles
closer to the ideal—for all Americans.”488 Tension understandably leaves us uncomfortable. We crave certainty.
Yet with sharply divisive legal and policy issues like race, tension is what helps us escape our
confirmation bias echo chamber and make better —dare we say—more objective decisions.489 Critical
Legal Process seeks to embrace the continuing tension the Curia identified—between our ideals and our reality—to find a third way
to improve legal doctrine. In this sense, Critical Legal Process, like both Bell and Wechsler, cares more about the struggle, the
journey, and the process than the eventual destination or outcome. In their own way, both Bell and Wechsler admitted
that their tasks ultimately were impossible . In light of the overwhelming power disparity and structural permanence
of racism, real racial progress seemed impossible to Bell.490 [FOOTNOTE BEGINS] 490 Bell admitted this during an interview about
Faces at the Bottom of the Well. The interviewer quoted this intentionally italicized passage from the book (which eventually
became Bell’s Racial Realism Rule): Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as
successful will produce no more than temporary “peaks of progress,” short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial
patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it,
not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance. DERRICK A. BELL, FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: THE
PERMANENCE OF RACISM 12 (1992). Bell responded, “Yes. Yes . . . [I]f I had to put down my whole 35 years of working in this, . . . it’s
reflected . . . [in] that paragraph . . . [b]ecause if you read nothing else, I think that reflects my experience. Now am I right? I’m not
sure. But that is my experience.” Bell, supra note 142. As George Taylor recognized, “[a]t the heart of Derrick Bell’s work lies a
conundrum. He argues that racism
is permanent, and yet at the same time he insists that the struggle against
racism remains worthwhile and valuable.” George H. Taylor, Racism as “The Nation’s Crucial Sin”: Theology and
Derrick Bell, 9 MICH. J. RACE & L. 269, 269 (2004).[ FOOTNOTE ENDS] Although Wechsler believed that legal doctrinal reform could
limit racism, Wechsler also agreed that perfect legal doctrine was impossible.491 Wechsler probably would also
concede that it is impossible to eradicate racism. Both Bell and Wechsler found meaning and significance in —
as American realist Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. stated—wearing your heart out in pursuit of the
unattainable.492 Wechsler’s famous Neutral Principles address, to which Bell responded, was dedicated to Justice Holmes.493
Wechsler called himself a “jobbist . . . [c]oncerned with competence and . . . intellectual integrity in thinking about law and working
about law.”494 Holmes explained about his “imaginary society of jobbists” that “[t]heir job is their contribution to the general
welfare and when a man is on that, he will do it better the less he thinks either of himself or his neighbors, and the more he puts all
his energy into the problem he has to solve.” 495 For all their considerable ideological disagreement, Bell probably would agree with
Wechsler that he too was a jobbist. When it comes to our continuing “American Dilemma”496 of race relations and remediation of
past discrimination, we all need to be jobbists. Although Bell and Wechsler disagreed over the content of Brown’s neutral
principle,497 both were undoubtedly courageous people. Perhaps Wechsler’s truly neutral principles of law and Bell’s definition of
courage share an overlapping vision. Bell defined courage as “a decision you make to act in a way that works through your own fear
for the greater good as opposed to pure self-interest. Courage means putting at risk your immediate selfinterest for what you
believe is right.”498 Despite his cynicism, Bell acknowledged that people still respected courage and principle: I think that there is,
even in our bottom-line society—you know, take care of number one . . . there is a real respect and a regard for individuals who are
willing to act on principle, whether it turns out to be right or . . . wrong or misguided.499 To Wechsler, a truly neutral principle of law
would satisfy Bell’s definition of courage. Eschewing outcome-determinative self-interest for the greater good of principled legal
doctrine makes for the courageous rule of law. Weneed the courageous rule of law. Perhaps, like Audre
Lorde claimed, the Master’s tool will never dismantle his house .500 Perhaps the rule of law will
provide only temporary relief but never genuine change. Only time will tell. In the meantime, we can find
solace in Derrick Bell’s wise words: “[W]e must not forget that it is our duty to keep looking for an answer,
realizing that we may never find it. Our salvation is not in the discovery, but in the search.”

IOT-driven autonomous vehicle interoperability powers green mobility, which

mitigates existential warming and environmental degradation
Bahr et al, 8-26-21 – Roy Bahr, SINTEF Digital AS, Oslo, Norway, along with Reiner John (AVL
List GmbH, Graz, Austria), Patrick Pype (NXP Semiconductors, Leuven, Belgium), Gerhard Mitic
and Kai Kriegel (Siemens AG, Munich, Germany), Vincent Lorentz, Stefan Waldhör, and Steffen
Bockrath (Fraunhofer IISB, Erlangen, Germany), Hans Erik Sand (NxTech AS, Fredrikstad,
Norway). “Automotive Intelligence Embedded in Electric Connected Autonomous and Shared
Vehicles Technology for Sustainable Green Mobility,” Front. Future Transp., 26 August 2021,
https://doi.org/10.3389/ffutr.2021.688482

Abstract

The automotive sector digitalization accelerates the technology convergence of perception,

computing processing, connectivity, propulsion, and data fusion for electric connected
autonomous and shared (ECAS) vehicles. This brings cutting-edge computing paradigms with
embedded cognitive capabilities into vehicle domains and data infrastructure to provide holistic intrinsic and
extrinsic intelligence for new mobility applications. Digital technologies are a significant enabler in achieving
the sustainability goals of the green transformation of the mobility and transportation sectors .
Innovation occurs predominantly in ECAS vehicles’ architecture, operations, intelligent functions, and automotive digital
infrastructure. The traditional ownership model is moving toward multimodal and shared mobility services. The ECAS vehicle’s
technology allows for the development of virtual automotive functions that run on shared hardware platforms with data unlocking
value, and for introducing new, shared computing-based automotive features. Facilitating vehicle automation, vehicle
electrification, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is accomplished by the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI),
cellular/wireless connectivity, edge computing, the Internet of things (IoT), the Internet of intelligent things (IoIT), digital
twins (DTs), virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Vehicles become more
intelligent, connected, functioning as edge micro servers on wheels, powered by
sensors/actuators, hardware (HW), software (SW) and smart virtual functions that are integrated
into the digital infrastructure. Electrification, automation, connectivity, digitalization,
decarbonization, decentralization, and standardization are the main drivers that unlock
intelligent vehicles' potential for sustainable green mobility applications. ECAS vehicles act as
autonomous agents using swarm intelligence to communicate and exchange information, either
directly or indirectly, with each other and the infrastructure, accessing independent services
such as energy, high-definition maps, routes, infrastructure information, traffic lights, tolls,
parking (micropayments), and finding emergent/intelligent solutions. The article gives an overview of the
advances in AI technologies and applications to realize intelligent functions and optimize vehicle performance, control, and decision-
making for future ECAS vehicles to support the acceleration of deployment in various mobility scenarios. ECAS vehicles, systems,
sub-systems, and components are subjected to stringent regulatory frameworks, which set rigorous requirements for autonomous
vehicles. An in-depth assessment of existing standards, regulations, and laws, including a thorough gap analysis, is required.
Global guidelines must be provided on how to fulfill the requirements. ECAS vehicle technology trustworthiness,
including AI-based HW/SW and algorithms, is necessary for developing ECAS systems across the entire automotive ecosystem. The
safety and transparency of AI-based technology and the explainability of the purpose, use, benefits, and limitations of AI
systems are critical for fulfilling trustworthiness requirements . The article presents ECAS vehicles’
evolution toward domain controller, zonal vehicle, and federated vehicle/edge/cloud-centric based on distributed intelligence in
the vehicle and infrastructure level architectures and the role of AI techniques and methods to implement the different
autonomous driving and optimization functions for sustainable green mobility .

Introduction

Climate change, global warming, ecological and environmental degradation are global
existential threats. Consequently, the new European Green Deal (European Commission, 2019a) roadmap entails a growth
strategy to transform Europe into a modern, resource-efficient, and competitive economy. The roadmap aims to transform the
economy to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. The transformation can be done by “turning climate and
environmental challenges into opportunities across all policy areas and making the transition just and inclusive for
all” (European Commission, 2019a).

The European Green Deal is an essential part of the EC's strategy to implement the UN’s 2030 Agenda (United Nations, 2015a) and
its sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2015b). To implement this strategy, the European Union has adopted a mobility
action plan based on the Vision Zero and Safe System approach (European Commission, 2019b) (zero accidents, zero pollution, and
zero congestion). The Green Deal defines four critical elements for sustainable mobility and the automotive industry: climate
neutrality, zero pollution Europe, sustainable transport, and the transition to a circular economy. The circular economy action plan
(European Commission, 2020) has detailed measures to make sure that sustainable products are the norm in the EU. This plan puts a
primary focus on “digital technologies” such as electronics, ICT, and energy storage systems (e.g., batteries, supercapacitors, fuel
cells, etc.), which can result in an increase in the lifetime, availability and usage of future vehicles based on AI-enabled technologies.

Digital technologies are a significant enabler for attaining the European Green Deal’s sustainability goals in many different sectors,
including mobility and transportation. Digital
technologies such as edge computing, IoT, AI, cellular/wireless connectivity,
DTs, VR/AR and DLTs can accelerate
and maximize the impact of policies that deal with climate change
and protect the environment by developing new sustainable electronic component and
systems technologies for future vehicles. Expanding automotive intelligence at the vehicle and
mobility system level allows the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and Internet of Energy (IoE)
(Vermesan et al., 2011) to become the key enabling technologies to realize future autonomous
driving scenarios that embed cognition and autonomous functions.

The alternative triggers an authoritarian backlash – ensures the perm solves

best
Karen Stenner and Jessica Stern, 2/11/21, Foreign Policy, "how to live with authoritarians,"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/11/capitol-insurrection-trump-authoritarianism-psychology-
innate-fear-envy-change-diversity-populism/, mm

Even after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, 60 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters
still approved of Donald Trump's performance as president. Though this level of popular support baffles many Americans, it
follows in the tails of an approval rating that while generally hovering around a modest 40 percent remained remarkably steady
throughout Trump's blunderous presidency and near-constant assault on democratic norms and institutions. Knee-jerk Beltway
attempts to explain away this loyal adherence tend to revert to suggestions that Trump supporters are uneducated or impoverished
or both mostly angry at being 'left behind' by the new economy. Now, after a mob of Trump supporters quite literally laid siege to
U.S. democracy, it's clear that there are more significant and enduring factors at play. Growing evidence suggests that
Trumpism and right-wing populist movements like it must prompt a serious reckoning with vulnerabilities
not just within the U.S. political system but within liberal democracy more generally. It may take years to arrive at a complete
understanding of Trump's surprising mass appeal, but prior research and preliminary studies already suggest a more nuanced view
of how authoritarians and malignant nationalists rise. Rather than tangible economic grievance, decades
of cross-national
empirical research show that feelings and perceptions of sociocultural threat are the principal drivers
of surging authoritarian sentiment among the electorate and the demagoguery that rises up to
service it. In a modern, multicultural society, certain citizens simply become overwhelmed by growing complexity and rapid
change. These individuals fear a loss of their social order , status, and familiar way of life. Whether rational or not,
this trepidation provokes intolerance of threats to the collective order, in which they are unusually invested. Trump's support,
then, is derived in large part from those who believe he understands and speaks to these kinds of fears. This
finding is not meant to excuse Trump , the overt racism of many of his supporters, nor the very real harm they have
caused. It is simply derived from decades of research . About a third of the population in Western countries is
predisposed to authoritarianism, which is about 50 percent heritable. Authoritarians have an inherent preference for oneness and
sameness; they favor obedience and conformity and value strong leaders and social homogeneity over freedom and diversity. That
diversity can take any form: whether based on racial or ethnic lines or moral and political difference. Authoritarianism is also
associated with some cognitive limitations. Comparative data suggests that the United States may be
somewhat overstocked with authoritarians , though they may simply be more easily identifiable in the country's high-
arousal political environment. This predisposition to favor oneness and sameness exists on a spectrum, from very low to very high
authoritarianism. Importantly, the
predisposition which is stable and enduring but normally latent is activated and
expressed when triggered by perceived political or social disorder. Once authoritarianism is understood in
relation to suppressing difference especially in the face of threats to oneness and sameness a whole array of seemingly disparate
Trumpian stances assume a more universal character: Whether in Washington or Warsaw, Western liberal democracy's ongoing
struggle with populism is united by fear. People with innate authoritarian tendencies can be found on both the right and left of the
political spectrum, although they are somewhat less common on the left. This leads us to a critical point: Authoritarianism is not the
same as conservatism, although they are modestly correlated. Authoritarians' fundamental aversion to diversity complexity and
variety is distinct from traditional conservatives' aversion to change which is more about novelty and uncertainty. When the status
quo is a modern liberal democracy, traditional conservatives by nature ought to defend any established regime of institutions and
laws designed to protect individual rights. Authoritarians, by contrast, can welcome vast social change and blithely overthrow
established authorities and institutions if some charismatic strongman is promising them greater oneness and sameness on the
other side of their revolution. This distinction may seem counterintuitive given the modern U.S. political system where erstwhile
conservatism has largely become synonymous with Trumpism. But it also means that, under the right conditions, conservatives can
be a liberal democracy's strongest bulwark against the dangers posed by authoritarian social movements. Still, the rapid
demographic transformation of the United States likely provokes both authoritarians opposed to diversity and traditional
conservatives averse to change. More nonwhite than white babies have been born in the country since 2013, and the United States
will be majority nonwhite by 2043. In concert with the declining life expectancy of white American men, this trend away from a
white majority has helped give rise to 'white genocide' and 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theories among white supremacists.
Multiculturalism, changing gender norms, and rapid globalization can also provoke both groups some become overtly racist and anti-
immigrant or enraged at the acceptance of LGBTQ rights and behaviors they view as morally deviant. Since classic authoritarian
defensive stances are invoked to defend a whole regime of oneness and sameness, perceived threats in one domain can provoke
defenses in other or all domains. For example, the strongest predictor of a Brexit 'leave' vote ostensibly rooted in racial and ethnic
intolerance was support for the death penalty and for the public whipping of sex criminals. In a recent study[ by the Vanderbilt
political scientist Larry Bartels, over half of Republicans agreed 'the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we
may have to use force to save it. 'More than 40 percent concurred that 'a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the
law into their own hands. 'But it's not just Republicans: Significant proportions of both Democrats and Republicans appear willing to
endorse violence or violate democratic procedure to defend their values, especially where the president is concerned. A 2019 survey
by political scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland found around18 percent of Democrats and 13
percent of Republicans thought violence would be justified if the opposing party won the 2020 election. In 2014, when Barack
Obama was president and Republicans controlled Congress, 30 percent of Democrats supported the president closing Congress and
governing without it 'when the country is facing very difficult times.' Still, Bartels's study reveals that the strongest predictor of anti-
democratic attitudes among Republicans was not partisanship or political expediency; it was ethnic and racial antagonism. This
vitriol was often explained as being rooted in concerns about the political power of immigrants, African Americans, and Latinos, as
well as these groups' claims on government resources. An alternative explanation is that this grievance is partly a rationalization on
the part of many white Americans and that their expressed racial antagonism is a product of and proxy for underlying authoritarian
inclinations. All people have an innate bias toward those like themselves; studies confirm that humans are wired to be tribal. For
authoritarians, this bias is greatly magnified. And when put under pressure or given leaders' approval, people may nurture and act
on their biases against the 'other.' Prejudice evokes emotions like disgust, fear, pity, and envy but of all these, envy proves the most
dangerous. An uptick in envy helps explain why violent hate crimes in the United States are on the rise. The social psychologist
Michael Hogg of Claremont Graduate University has argued that dramatic social disruption can lead to highly
aversive identity confusion, causing people to demarcate and identify with in-groups as opposed
to people different from themselves. In these situations, he says, people may be drawn to
extremist groups with exclusionary ideologies and 'strong, directive leadership.' Strongman authoritarians fit the bill. Some
Trump supporters feel humiliated by rapid social change. Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, found
that the most important driver of electoral support for Trump in 2016 was a perceived status threat among high-status groups,
which she delineates as white people, Christians, and men. Specific anxieties included declining dominance as a percentage of the
overall U.S. population, African Americans' perceived rising status, and insecurity about U.S. global economic power which
collectively left them feeling 'under siege.' A recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows that voters' attitudes about gender and
race are even more divided today than they were four years ago. All of this paints a grisly picture. But are there any relevant policy
lessons for the Biden administration? Joe Biden's electoral victory rested in part on his ability to embrace change and diversity while
also representing more traditional values. Now in office, he will need to walk a very fine line to avoid triggering destructive fears
among those in the electorate predisposed to authoritarianism .In terms of policy, the Biden administration's emphasis on making
permanent the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program seems a promising start, since it has overwhelming public
support probably because undocumented immigrants who arrived as children and never knew another home feel more like 'us' than
'them.' It might also be very fruitful for the administration to promote, early on, an emotionally compelling narrative about the
critical role played by (loyal, self-sacrificing) immigrant health care workers in saving American lives during the pandemic. But most
importantly, those who are predisposed to favor freedom and diversity over authority and conformity must recognize that the
authoritarian preference for oneness and sameness is largely innate and unlikely to change. A polyglot, multiethnic populace of
mixed morals and lifestyles will almost inevitably prompt flare-ups of both racial antagonism and political or moral intolerance,
activating a latent longing for obedience and conformity even autocratic rule that will continue to threaten democracies periodically.
The new U.S. administration should promote equity and justice while avoiding a loud and provocative
display of stances and messaging that unnecessarily aggravates authoritarians. The progressive
policy agenda shouldn't be amended; it should simply be promoted more subtly. Given the ongoing
threats of right-wing extremist violence, this may seem unreasonable, if not wholly untenable. But it is achievable if the Biden
administration recognizes that even creating the mere feeling or appearance of oneness and sameness can be reassuring to
authoritarians. Critically, authoritarian predispositions are not a problem that can just be educated
away: In fact, liberal democracy's loud and showy celebration of freedom and diversity drives authoritarians not to the limits of
their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes. For this reason, a strong rhetorical focus on a unified
Americanness can play a vital role in reassuring and deactivating the innately intolerant .

Covid-19 proves the alternative will trigger a backlash by the right – armed
groups will hijack messages about economic dislocation to increase their
recruitment
Vanda Felbab-Brown, 1/21/21, [Director - Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors Co-Director -
Africa Security Initiative Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and
Technology], Brookings Institute, "How to counter right-wing armed groups in the United
States," https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/01/21/how-to-counter-right-
wing-armed-groups-in-the-united-states/, mm

Right-wing armed groups in the United States include a swirl of white supremacist, anti-immigrant,
anti-federal-government, pro-gun-ownership, and survivalist groups who envision a coming civil
war in the United States. So-called accelerationists and Boogaloo Bois seek to advance it. These varied movements are separate
from each other but sometimes intermesh, a trend accelerating during the Trump presidency. Some individuals are members of
multiple groups at the same time, while rejecting others. The
number and membership in right-wing armed
groups increased when Barack Obama was elected president, with their recruits outraged by the election of a
Black president with a strong liberal agenda. Some white supremacist groups go back decades. Others were formed more
recently: For example, the Proud Boys — who describe themselves as “western chauvinists” opposed to “white guilt,” and who
espouse anti-Muslim and misogynist views — were established in 2018. Many of anti-federal-government groups originated in the
Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and the associated County Supremacy movement, which resisted federal government ownership
of land in the western United States and denounced the authority of the federal government, considering elected county sheriffs the
highest legitimate authority. Self-styled anti-immigration militias have operated on the U.S.-Mexico border since the early 1990s.
Survivalist groups were given particular boost in 2011 with the formulation of the so-called American Redoubt ideology that
predicted a U.S. civil war and encouraged migration to Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Indeed, ideological formulation has been one
of the sources of these groups’ growth. With its demagogical conspiracy theories against leading members of the Democratic Party,
QAnon has infused the armed-group ecosystem with mass mobilization, for example — offering followers social membership and a
cult-like quasi-religion. In addition to formulated ideologies, other
sources of strength of right-wing armed
groups have included U.S. involvement in wars, economic dislocation, and political complicity and law enforcement
weakness that generate a sense of impunity. Going to back to the Vietnam War and even World War II, U.S. wars have left behind
veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and social dislocation. Some have become an important source of recruits
for right-wing armed groups. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the past 20 years similarly swelled the ranks of current
right-wing armed groups. Such well-trained veterans are of unique value to the groups, increasing their capability and capacity for
violence and helping these groups build political capital. Theeconomic dislocation caused by the COVID-19
pandemic and government response measures have become a third source of strength for right-wing armed
groups, as it has for jihadists and other militants around the world. Armed right-wingers used it to violently
challenge government “violations of personal freedoms. ” The most prominent example is the storming of the
Michigan state capitol by the heavily-armed Michigan Liberty Militia to compel Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to call off
the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. By forcibly assisting the reopening of stores in defiance of local COVID-19 ordinances,
armed groups have exploited COVID-19 to build political capital with disgruntled and
impoverished businesses and politicians. Opportunities to build such capital will increase — along with violent local clashes
— if the Biden administration implements a new COVID-19 lockdown to lower the devastating virus toll before vaccines can
generate adequate community immunity. Right-wing armed groups have also offered their “anti-crime” and protection services to
county governments, as well as armed “election-monitoring,” illegal as such acts are, to right-wing politicians.

Revolution causes transition wars – the left will lose and this rolls back the
alternative
Swift 14 [Richard Swift is a Montreal-based writer and activist and was a long time editor
with New Internationalist magazine. He is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy.
S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism, edited by Richard Swift, and Chris Brazier, New Internationalist,
2014. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umichigan/detail.action?
docID=3382541.] rvak

To embrace such a strategy, the Left needs to rethink the goal that is still cherished by many of a
violent overthrow or ‘smashing’ of the state. This has become a dangerous and self defeating
fantasy. The days of storming the Bastille and the Winter Palace are things of the past. In
modern societies where groups have engaged in terrorist assaults on the state – the Red
Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany and a score of others, the results have been
disastrous. not only for themselves but also because they provided the excuse for repression of
a broader radical movement. The clandestine culture in which such groups exist tends to shape them into small authoritarian cults. Militaristic thinking
quickly dominates any sense of the political. If a struggle deteriorates into a civil war, as
sometimes happens with the failed states of the Global South in places like Syria and Libya, the
chances of a healthy political outcome are slim to none . The modern state has invested heavily
in a sophisticated police and intelligence apparatus that has shown itself willing to go to extreme
lengths to defend state interests. It will, if threatened, kill, torture, and imprison hundreds of
thousands if necessary. If one state in the state system appears to be in danger others will prop it
up by invasion if necessary. The case of Syria, where the regime lost all legitimacy and most popular support, shows how the coercive apparatus can hold on for long periods
through the simple application of bloody terror. Today, even the most ‘civilized’ of states are developing cutting-edge

crowd-control technologies, including microwave energy blasters, blinding laser beams, chemical agents and deafening sonic-boom machines. Then there is
the ‘invisible pain ray’, a non-lethal ‘active denial system’ to control local space through crowd
dispersal by applying what the US Air Force calls the ‘goodbye effect’.13 You can be sure that
there are many police officers eager to test out these new toys .
Alt fails---transition wars and domestic pressure means the alt abandons
fidelity to the environment.
Smith '19 [Noah; 4/5/19; Bloomberg Opinion columnist, former assistant professor of finance
at Stony Brook University; "Dumping Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet,"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-05/capitalism-is-more-likely-to-limit-
climate-change-than-socialism]

It has become fashionable on social media and in certain publications to argue that capitalism is
killing the planet. Even renowned investor Jeremy Grantham, hardly a radical, made that assertion last year. The basic
idea is that the profit motive drives the private sector to spew carbon into the air with reckless abandon.
Though many economists and some climate activists believe that the problem is best addressed by modifying market incentives with
a carbon tax, many activists believe that the problem can’t be addressed without rebuilding the
economy along centrally planned lines.

The climate threat is certainly dire, and carbon taxes are unlikely to be enough to solve the problem. But eco-
socialism is probably not going to be an effective method of addressing that threat. Dismantling an
entire economic system is never easy, and probably would touch off armed conflict and major
asdasd upheaval. In the scramble to win those battles, even the socialists would almost
certainly abandon their limitation on fossil-fuel use — either to support military efforts, or to
keep the population from turning against them. The precedent here is the Soviet Union, whose
multidecade effort to reshape its economy by force amid confrontation with the West led to
profound environmental degradation. The world's climate does not have several decades to
spare.

Even without international conflict, there’s little guarantee that moving away from capitalism
would mitigate our impact on the environment. Since socialist leader Evo Morales took power in Bolivia,
living standards have improved substantially for the average Bolivian, which is great. But this has come at
the cost of higher emissions. Meanwhile, the capitalist U.S managed to decrease its per capita
emissions a bit during this same period (though since the U.S. is a rich country, its absolute level of emissions is much higher).

In other words, in
terms of economic growth and carbon emissions, Bolivia looks similar to more
capitalist developing countries. That suggests that faced with a choice of enriching their people or
helping to save the climate, even socialist leaders will often choose the former. And that same
political calculus will probably hold in China and the U.S., the world’s top carbon emitters — leaders who
demand draconian cuts in living standards in pursuit of environmental goals will have trouble
staying in power.

The best hope for the climate therefore lies in reducing the tradeoff between material
prosperity and carbon emissions. That requires technology — solar, wind and nuclear power,
energy storage, electric cars and other vehicles, carbon-free cement production and so on. The
best climate policy plans all involve technological improvement as a key feature.

Growth is locked in --- a transition would have to literally remake everything

Koch and Büchs 19 [Max Koch, Faculty of Social Sciences, Socialhögskolan, Lund University,
Milena Büchs, Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of
Leeds, “Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing”, Futures Volume
105, January 2019, Pages 155-165,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328718300715#!]

Economic growth, as an attribute of market capitalism, has structural properties – it is needed

to stabilise modern societies as it provides employment, public sector provision through tax
revenues, rising wages, and hence social stability (Petridis et al., 2015: 178, Rosa et al., 2017).
Economic growth is organised around and shapes a range of tightly coupled structures,
including institutions, norms, discourses, culture, technologies, competences, identities, etc.
Historically speaking, growth is a fairly recent phenomenon which only picked up in the 19th
century together with the industrialisation of Western economies. In a co-evolutionary process,
a range of institutions developed which are now coupled to a growth-based capitalist economy,
including the nation state, representative democracy, the rule of law and current legal, financial,
labour market, education, research, and welfare systems. These are based on philosophies
which emerged to justify and give meaning to these institutions, for instance on individualism,
freedom, justice, sovereignty, or power. The embeddedness of the growth-based capitalistic
economic system in these co-evolved institutions and ways of thinking makes it difficult to
transition to a degrowth system because the change of the economic system would need to
involve a parallel transformation of those coupled systems . In Luhmann’s words, the
constitution of the current system “defuturises” (Luhmann, 1976: 141) the future, it reduces the
“openness” of the future; “path dependency” or even “lock-in” are related expressions that
capture this idea. Two examples which directly link to people’s wellbeing can illustrate this
point: the relationship between welfare states and growth, and between growth and people’s
mind-sets and identities.

The transition would be violent which is separate offense for us AND means
that it would inevitably fail
Koch and Büchs 19 [Max Koch, Faculty of Social Sciences, Socialhögskolan, Lund University,
Milena Büchs, Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of
Leeds, “Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing”, Futures Volume
105, January 2019, Pages 155-165,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328718300715#!]

3.2. Implications of rapidly transforming social systems

The social practices lens is also useful for thinking about possible wellbeing implications of rapid
social change more generally, and a transition away from a growth-based economy specifically.
While the concept of social practices inherently implies the possibility of change (with its focus
on agency and creativity), it equally strongly highlights the structural aspects of practices which
provide stability and orientation. During times of rapid social transitions, social norms and
‘mental infrastructures’ often lag behind, creating disorientation, social conflict, and negative
impacts on wellbeing (Büchs & Koch, 2017: ch. 6).

Stability of structural dimensions of social practices offers orientation and some extent of
predictability of how oneself and other people are likely to act in the future, providing a
framework within which flexibility and change are possible. This orienting function of structural
dimensions of practices is likely to be an important condition for people to form reasonably
stable identities and relationships – key ingredients for wellbeing. Examples from classical and
contemporary sociological and psychological research suggest that different speeds of changing
social structures can establish misalignments and disruptions of social practices which can, in
turn, negatively influence health and other wellbeing outcomes. For instance, in his classical
study, Durkheim presents suicide at least partly as an outcome of a failure of cultural resources
to provide meaning and orientation in the context of other, more rapid social changes
(Durkheim, 2006; Vega & Rumbaut, 1991: 375). This idea also links to Bourdieu’s concept of the
“hysteresis effect”. Here, Bourdieu emphasises that, especially during phases of social transition,
people’s habitus and “objective” social circumstances can become disjointed : as a result of
hysteresis, dispositions can be “out of line with the field and with the ‘ collective expectations’
which are constitutive of its normality. This is the case, in particular, when a field undergoes a
major crisis and its regularities (even its rules) are profoundly changed” (Bourdieu, 2000: 160).
This can contribute to a deterioration of people’s wellbeing as it makes them feel “out of place”
or let them be perceived that way, “plung[ing] them deeper into failure” (Bourdieu, 2000: 161)
because they cannot make use of new opportunities or are mistreated or socially excluded by
others.

Empirical research which partly builds on the idea of hysteresis has shown that wide-ranging
organisational change can have a range of negative effects on people’s health and mortality
(Ferrie et al., 1998; McDonough & Polzer, 2012). One study found that across 174 countries,
several measures of wellbeing and social performance, including life satisfaction, health, safety
and trust, voice and accountability, were highest in periods of economic stability, but lower in
times of GDP growth or contraction (O’Neill, 2015); and other studies concluded that life
expectancy can be negatively affected by both rapid economic growth and contraction (Notzon
et al., 1998; Szreter, 1999).

Several scholars have recently highlighted the potential for social conflict inherent in (rapid)
social change. For instance, Maja Göpel (2016: 49) remarks: “Unsurprisingly, the navigation or
transition phase in shifting paradigms as well as governance solutions is marked by chaos,
politicization, unease and power-ridden struggles”. Wolfgang Streeck has issued similar
warnings (Streeck et al., 2016: 169). It is not difficult to see how such scenarios bear the
potential of undermining some of the fundamental conditions that are necessary for the
satisfaction of basic needs as discussed above, and hence the danger of generating substantial
wellbeing losses for current and near-future generations.

In the current context, it is very difficult to imagine that we might be able to observe a rapid
and radical cultural change in which people adopt identities and related lifestyles that value
intrinsically motivated activities over pursuing satisfaction and status through careers and
consumption. Even more worryingly, political events in Europe, the United States and elsewhere
since the ‘Great Crash’ of 2008 indicate that times of negative or stagnant growth can provide a
breeding ground for populist, nationalistic and anti-democratic movements. Economic
insecurity, a perceived threat of established identities through migrants, and deep mistrust
against ‘elite’ politicians are amongst the main explanations for previously unimaginable events
such as the Brexit vote, Trump presidency, and recent electoral successes for far right-wing
parties in a range of European countries.
Neolib is resilient – global resistance proves
Igor Guardiancich 17, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public
Management of the University of Southern Denmark, 3/3/2017, “Absorb, Coopt and Recast:
Global Neoliberalism’s Resilience through Local Translation”,
http://www.euvisions.eu/neoliberalisms-resilience-translation/

One powerful message permeating the book, and which gives a forceful explanation to Colin Crouch’s punchy title is that: “ rather
than a mass-produced, slightly shrunk, and off-the-rack ideological suit, neoliberalism is a
bespoke outfit made from a dynamic fabric that absorbs local color ” (5). Even under a full-out
attack against some of its basic assumptions, such as the one unleashed in the immediate wake
of the global financial crisis, neoliberalism proved resilient beyond its many architects’ wildest
dreams. Its capacity to absorb, coopt and recast selected ideas of oppositional social forces has
been the most valuable asset guaranteeing its survival. Again, the comparison of the responses to the crisis in
Spain and Romania show such adaptability in full.¶ The socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
tried to salvage the social-democratic legacies of the Spanish economy by engineering a
Keynesian rescue package. Only later, when the disaster of the cajas became apparent and the
emergency intensified, did conservative PM Mariano Rajoy embrace more deregulation in the
labour market (inspired by the Hartz IV reform) and extensive cuts in the public sector under the strong external pressure of the
European Central Bank and of international financial markets.¶ In
Romania, local policymakers further radicalized
in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers’ crisis, thereby outbidding the IMF on austerity and
structural reforms. Instead of shielding lower-income groups, the opposite strategy of upward
redistribution was chosen. By heroically withstanding the external attempts at moderation, the Romanian economy
retained an unenviable mix of libertarian achievements (flat-tax rates), experimental neoliberalism (privatized pensions) and
mainstream neoliberal orthodoxy (sound finance, labour market deregulation, social policy targeting, privatization of all public
companies). Pure laissez-faire ideas such as the replacement of the welfare state by a voluntary, private, Christian charity system
were not unheard of.¶ Hence, through an insightful analysis of the ideational underpinnings of its local interpretations, this book
shows us that, despite the challenges, neoliberalism is alive and kicking. Ban guides us through half a century
of policymaking in Spain and Romania, and embeds his analysis within the related nuances of contemporary liberal economic
thought. The research is a valuable addition to a growing literature on the origin of current ideational frames and comfortably sits
alongside contemporary classics, such as Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Ext – Cap Sustainable
Yes sustainability -- Tech Innovation drives dematerialization
McAfee 19, Andrew. More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper
Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next. Scribner, 2019.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SdXDFeq9gbuG7zVAP-vzCXgbALIm9W9d/view?usp=sharing
(Cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School
of Management, former professor at Harvard Business School)//Elmer

Partial excludability is a beautiful thing. It provides strong incentives for companies to create
useful, profit-enhancing new technologies that they alone can benefit from for a time, yet it also
ensures that the new techs will eventually "spill over"—that with time they’ll diffuse and get
adopted by more and more companies, even if that's not what their originators want . Romer
equated tech progress to the production by companies of nonrivalrous, partially excludable ideas and showed that these ideas cause
an economy to grow. What's
more, he also demonstrated that this idea-fueled growth doesn't have
to slow down with time. It's not constrained by the size of the labor force, the amount of
natural resources, or other such factors. Instead, economic growth is limited only by the idea-generating
capacity of the people within a market. Romer called this capacity "human capital" and said at the end of his
1990 paper, "The most interesting positive implication of the model is that an economy with a larger total stock of human capital will
experience faster growth." This notion, which has come to be called "increasing
returns to scale," is as powerful as
it is counterintuitive. Most formal models of economic growth, as well as the informal mental
ones most of us walk around with, feature decreasing returns—growth slows down as the
overall economy gets bigger. This makes intuitive sense; it just feels like it would be easier to experience 5 percent growth
in a $1 billion economy than a $1 trillion one. But Romer showed that as long as that economy continued to
add to its human capital—the overall ability of its people to come up with new technologies and
put them to use—it could actually grow faster even as it grew bigger . This is because the stock of useful,
nonrivalrous, nonexcludable ideas would keep growing. As Romer convincingly showed, economies run and grow on ideas. The
Machinery of Prosperity Romer's ideas should leave us optimistic about the planetary benefits of digital tools—hardware, software,
and networks—for three main reasons. First,
countless examples show us how good these tools are at
fulfilling the central role of technology, which is to provide "instructions that we follow for
combining raw materials." Since raw materials cost money, profit-maximizing companies are
particularly keen to find ways to use fewer of them. So they use digital tools to come up with beer
cans that use less aluminum, car engines that use less steel and less gas, mapping software that
removes the need for paper atlases, and so on and so on . None of this is done solely for the good of the earth
—it's done for the pursuit of profit that's at the heart of capitalism—yet it benefits the planet by, as we've seen, causing us to take
less from it. Digital tools are technologies for creating technologies, the most prolific and versatile ones we've ever come up with.
They're machines for coming up with ideas. Lots of them. The same piece of computer-aided design software can be used to create a
thinner aluminum can or a lighter and more fuel-efficient engine. A drone can be used to scan farmland to see if more irrigation is
needed, or to substitute for a helicopter when filming a movie. A smartphone can be used to read the news, listen to music, and pay
for things, all without consuming a single extra molecule. In the Second Machine Age, the global stock of digital tools is increasing
much more quickly than ever before. It's being used in countless ways by profit-hungry companies to combine raw materials in ways
that use fewer of them. In
advanced economies such as America's, the cumulative impact of this
combination of capitalism and tech progress is clear: absolute dematerialization of the
economy and society, and thus a smaller footprint on our planet.
Cap is sustainable, inevitable, and key to solve the environmental crisis –
alternatives fail and ensure environmental collapse
-at: timeframe, thermodynamics, rebound effects

Bosch and Schmidt 19 (Stephan, Institute of Geography, Chair for Human Geography,
University of Augsburg, and Matthias, Institute of Geography, Chair for Human Geography,
University of Augsburg, “Is the post-fossil era necessarily post-capitalistic? – The robustness and
capabilities of green capitalism”, Ecological Economics, Vol. 161, July) DB

Concerning the second dimension of criticism, Section 4 illustrates how the

rejection of green capitalism overlooks
promising approaches to surmounting the environmental crisis . On the one hand, we argue that in
face of the given narrow time slot as well as the prevailing political strategies, it is more
realistic and pragmatic to primarily assess the efficiency of market-oriented solutions. Even
though in principle we take sufficiency to have the best effectiveness regarding the solution of
ecological and social problems, we still do not count on people's willingness to live in greater
moderation within due time. On the other hand, we therefore presume that there are no other suitable
economic frame conditions for surmounting the crisis than those offered by the capitalist social
order. This perspective is based on the assumption that innovations, which above all emanate from thriving
economies (Wangler, 2013), are highly relevant for overcoming the environmental crisis. As growth,
innovation, and the development of new industries are to be seen as directly related to the
export sector as well as the utilisation of comparative advantages (Bathelt and Glückler, 2012), we
therefore also strictly object to the concept of autonomy . Moreover, we take innovation and the aspects of
growth, entrepreneurship, and democratic processes of negotiation related to it (cf. Gailing et al., 2013; Walter and Gutscher, 2013;
Raven et al., 2016), to be essential for the implementation of regenerative energy systems and social welfare (Iversen, 2005; Nasirov
et al., 2017). Our presumption that innovations occur more likely and more frequently within a capitalist, than in alternative social
orders (e.g. Harris, 2013: socialist markets), is derived from Schumpeter's notion of competitive capitalism, which he distinctly sets
apart from trustified capitalism. Competitive
capitalism is about fertile destructive impulses emanating
from enthusiastic entrepreneurs who are ready to take risks, and act solution-oriented . These
impulses may revolutionise the economic process: “This process of Creative Destruction is the
essential fact about capitalism” (Schumpeter, 2009). Based on Schumpeter's ‘theory of economic development’ (cf.
Herzog and Honneth, 2016; Schumpeter, 1994; Schumpeter, 2009) – which, according to Marques (2008), represents the original
idea of innovation-driven capitalism – we
analyse capitalism's robustness to the downfall of fossil energy;
moreover, we investigate its potential contributions to ecologic sustainability . Yet we want to go
beyond Schumpeter's perspective, which fixes on the entrepreneur, and take a closer look at the role of state policy in Section 5. Our
argument is that creative entrepreneurs and markets alone will not suffice to specifically and quickly initiate the change of the
energy system driven by innovation. We state the thesis that an active role of the state is needed which relies on political continuity
when it comes to promoting environmental innovation and creates stable institutional frame conditions. In a last step, we will show
that during the deployment of regenerative energy systems, social aspects have hitherto been given too little attention by actors of
state and politics and that national objectives were uncoupled from local contexts. To achieve a successful low-carbon transition,
these deficits need to be corrected. In principle, this seems possible, as market-economically oriented regenerative energy systems
have often been the result of open-minded democratic negotiations. In Section 6, the findings of the study will be summarised. 2.
The crisis of fossil energies and capitalism Energy sources are a central element of humankind's materialistic history and elementary
changes in the relevance of energy carriers have always led to extensive economic and societal transformations (Bridge et al., 2013).
Exemplarily, the drastic increase in productivity during industrialisation cannot be explained without the revolutionary change of the
energy system towards fossil fuels (Osterhammel, 2011). Ever since, economic growth is accompanied by an increasing consumption
of finite energy resources and non-energetic primary materials (Altvater, 2005). Accordingly, questions of economic development
must always be regarded in the context of the energy system, as well as the circulation of energetic and non-energetic crude
materials within it (Meadows et al., 2004). Altvater (2007) takes the relationship between humans and nature to be crisis-laden
because a limited stock of energy resources within the Earth's thin crust forms the basis of the present economic system. This
limitation implied grave consequences for the global ecology. The apparently crisis-laden interrelation of nature and economy is also
highlighted in ‘Anthropocene or Capitolocene?’ edited by Moore (2016), in which the impacts of capitalism are regarded as
significant enough to be marked as their own geochronological era. The main point of criticism is capitalism's orientation to
industrial scaling and quantitative growth (Mathews, 2011), which likely will end abruptly once Earth's limited capacities will have
been depleted by the exponential growth of population and economy (Daly, 1995). Yet not only the finiteness of energy carriers, but
also the accumulation of extreme meteorological incidents, mass mortality of species, and sea level rise represent impediments of
stable economic growth (McCarthy, 2015). The scenarios concerning trends of the world's condition
developed by the Club of Rome illustrate that keeping a high wealth level can only be
accomplished if a radical change in societal attitude concerning the valuation of growth will
take effect (Meadows et al., 2004). Stopping environmental destruction while maintaining the present economic system appears
to be impossible, since fossil energy carriers provide globally acting companies with the opportunity to spatially separate production
and consumption as well as to externalise the manifold ecological expenses (Chisholm, 1990). Bridge (2010) rates the heated
debates about Peak Oil as ecologically motivated forebodings of a new energy order in which the modern industrial nations are
going to free themselves of their dependence on oil. For Neomarxist groups, the end of the age of mineral oil even represents an
apocalyptic turn of eras during which nature were going to take vengeance on the ecological arrogance of capitalism. According to
Bettini and Karaliotas (2013), the narration of Peak Oil thereby attains a symbolism that reaches far beyond mathematical
calculations of the scarcity of fossil energy sources, being extended to a general criticism of a system that is exclusively oriented on
growth. McCarthy (2015) sees the chance of a post-fossil capitalism especially in the commodification of wind, sunlight, geothermal
heat, and waves. This way, nature would again be introduced into the cycle of capital. Van den Bergh (2011) presumes that this may
be a practicable approach, perceiving criticism of market economy and capitalism as too radical and warns of one-sidedly
problematising growth without simultaneously pointing out realisable alternative ways. He
therefore prefers the ‘a-
growth-concept’, which assumes a neutral position on growth, trying to create social as well as
ecological sustainability by means of pricing policy, environmental agreements, and education
initiatives. The commodification of nature, however, is rejected by the degrowth movement, as
the comparison of the Montreal Protocol, which is based on regulations (ozone) with the Kyoto Protocol based on trade had shown a
greater effectiveness of regulative measures (Kallis, 2011). Concerning the market's capabilities, North (2010) additionally speaks
of the neoliberal enthusiasts' mindless faith in technology, who were mistakenly convinced that creative destruction is sufficient to
face the societal challenges posed by Peak Oil and the climate crisis. Sarkar and Kern (2008) limit the possibilities of the global
community's further development to the two options ‘eco socialism’ or ‘barbarism’. This
rhetoric stylises capitalism as
the image of the enemy: on the one hand, it represents the cause of the global ecological crisis
due to the exploitation of natural resources – and for that reason alone were not to be
maintained (Daly, 2005) – while on the other hand not offering a suitable social framework for mastering the crisis (Kallis et
al., 2009). Hence, the development of a symbiotic economy (Garcia-Olivares and Sole, 2015) rooted beyond obsessive economic
growth (Buch-Hansen, 2018) is promoted. Renewable energies were apt to meet these requirements since they can be developed
through collaborative bottom-up mechanisms on a communal level, therefore enabling the decentralisation and democratisation of
energy supply (Rifkin, 2013). In fact, this may be an option. However, in the following, we want to demonstrate that capitalism
is not only very robust to crises, but is also able to contribute to the solution of the
environmental crisis. 3. Robustness of capitalism 3.1. Space-time compression We will now show that the
possibility of increasing productivity does not end with the transition to a regenerative energy
system, but only needs to be embedded into new logistic-infrastructural contexts . In this, we
contradict Altvater (2007), Huber (2009) and North (2010), who claim that capitalism could
expand only on the basis of fossil fuels, since, due to the global transportability of oil, gas, and
coal, entrepreneurial actions are no longer bound to the local availability of energy resources,
but range globally. Furthermore, the usage of fossil energy carriers is not subject to daily or seasonal fluctuations.
Transportability and baseload capacity hence lead to space-time compression (Harvey, 1996), as products can be generated in ever
shorter intervals of time. Following this logic, the limitation of the fossil resource basis inevitably brings about the end of the
capitalistic system. It
remains undisputed that energy flow within a solar-based energy system is hard
to control (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). Most forms of renewable energies are intermittent sources,
whose contribution to the energy mix are subject to the rhythms of sun, wind, precipitation, and
tides (Fares, 2015). Adapting energy production to demand, a fundamental prerequisite of continuous economic growth, thus
becomes a major challenge. What Altvater (2007), Huber (2009) and North (2010) actually do not include in their considerations, are
the numerous technological innovations for the stabilisation of regenerative energy systems.
After all, with biomass and geothermal power, two energy carriers capable of providing base
load are at hand (Matek and Gawell, 2015), which may, in the form of regenerative combined power
plants, support the weather-dependent energy sources sun and wind (Palensky and Dietrich, 2011;
Ramchurn et al., 2011). The numerous energy storage technologies are also important, albeit only few
of these have reached industrial maturity . In principle, mechanical, chemical, electrical, or
thermal kinds of storage are being discerned (Hadjipaschalis et al., 2009). Compressed air and pumped storage
power plants with efficiency levels of up to 80% are especially promising (Anagnostopoulos and Papantonis, 2008). Research is also
conducted on the conversion of surplus regenerative power into methane or hydrogen (Jensen et al., 2007), by which the
bidirectional operation of the power and gas network is made possible, allowing for transportability as well as baseload capacity
within large spatial units. Space-time
availability may also be augmented by the development and
capacity expansion of high-voltage transmission lines (Walter and Bosch, 2013). Harriss-White and Harriss (2007)
have pointed out at an early point, that the existent grids, having been developed following a monopolistic logic, are outdated and
incapable of integrating decentrally-produced electricity with strong fluctuations. These deficits, however, are successively being
corrected. E.g., Germany's South, which is poor in wind but strong in terms of industry is being provided with direct access to the big
wind energy off-shore potentials in the North as well as to the storage power plants in Scandinavia (cf. Fig. 1). The possibilities of
intercontinental power transport from regenerative sources have been thoroughly investigated by DLR (2006) and Grossmann et al.
(2014). Both
energy storage and the development of the power grid thus will successively
reverse the present space-time limitations of regenerative energy systems. The two domains,
however, are not isolated from one another, but are coordinated via smart grids . Solomon and Krishna
(2011) emphasise that smart grids are superbly suitable for the implementation of market-based approaches, so that an innovation-
driven mass market for energy efficiency technologies could be anticipated. Smart
grids also provide the possibility
of no longer designing the mass production of renewable energy technologies on a fossil basis,
but by the usage of renewable energy. While the production of the first generation of
regenerative technologies was based on fossil energy, in future, the possibilities of energy
storage, the almost unlimited energy potential of a solar-based economy, and the combination
of both aspects through smart grids will ensure the flexible provision of regenerative energy at
every production site without limits of time . Yet in order to optimise the flows of energy and material in smart grids,
concepts of closed crude material cycles are needed, which, in the sense of the cradle-to-cradle approach (cf. Section 4), allow the
reintroduction of used materials (e.g. old wind power plants made of renewable resources) to the biosphere. Thus, the problem of
externalisation of ecological costs can be minimised. Summing up, the
increase of productivity and stable
economic growth within regenerative energy systems seems possible. Still, it remains to be emphasised
that large-scale energy projects also entail negative social consequences. E.g., Yenneti et al. (2016) have shown that the Charanka
solar park in Gujarat, India, was erected on areas that the local population's livelihood had depended on for decades. The refuse of
access to these areas, as well as the inhabitants' successive dispossession through state measures thus are direct results of the
Indian economy's ecological modernisation (Levien, 2013). In this context, Baka (2013) speaks of “energy dispossessions”, a
phenomenon which has also been observed with large-scale wind energy parks (Avila, 2018; Cowell, 2010). The socio-material
impact of economic modernisation on the local population, whose lives strongly depend on agricultural land use, are often
insufficiently respected (Yenneti et al., 2016), so that the dubious impression was given that environmental protection and economic
growth based on efficient technologies, competition, and state measures could go with one another without social side effects.
Remarkably, the controversial energy mega-projects especially in the global South, are not the cause of the development of new
power asymmetries and conflicts, but rather reproduce and harden long-standing social disparities and injustices (Avila, 2018).
According to Bradley and Hedrén (2014), a low-carbon transition hence misses its aims if it is only about modernising the energy
system without likewise transforming the underlying social structures. 3.2. Crisis as an element of capitalist social order We hold the
view that the occurrence of crises in capitalism is not due to it being a n ailing, doomed economic
order; nor is it a proof of capitalism's ineptitude for meeting ecological challenges. Instead, we
deem that crisis is a fundamental element of the capitalist social order that actually provides a
chance for readjusting economic processes. Harvey (2011) explains that anything blocking the
circulation and accumulation of capital may pose a threat to the capitalist system and induce a
fundamental crisis. The finiteness of fossil fuels is a crisis of this kind (McCarthy, 2015). Altvater (2007) is
convinced that capitalism will not be able to overcome this crisis; therefore, future technologic progress had to be embedded in a
non-fossil, non-capitalist framework. Kallis (2011) also emphasises that the approach to a steady state (cf. Daly, 1991, Daly, 2005)
will transform the institutional preconditions of property, work, banking, and distribution to such an extent that in the end, it will be
impossible to still identify them as capitalistic. With regard to Kallis' doubts concerning the institutional robustness of capitalism,
Schumpeter points out that precisely
the ups and downs of industrial development , which are the
outcomes of successful innovations' intensifying competition, enable progress (Herzog and Honneth,
2016). As crises therefore represent an immanent part of the capitalist system, an
environmental and resources-related crisis caused by the capitalistic process does not provide
sufficient evidence to suggest a possible downfall of the capitalistic social order. The crisis
might even be taken as proof of an economic cycle, if it is regarded as a period of depression
between the dwindling fossil and the emerging regenerative age . Böhm et al. (2012) and McCarthy (2015)
confirm that capitalism is capable of overcoming even fundamental crises, actually using these as
starting points of its further expansion. Concerning the environmental crisis, Harriss-White and Harriss (2007) also
concede that the deployment of renewable energies holds the potential of founding a new form
of capitalism that is characterised by a much lower degree of materialistic lavishness . Bettini and
Karaliotas (2013) emphasise that from a neo-liberal point of view, the accusation of capitalism bringing about a resources-related
and environmental crisis does not at all provoke self-doubts. Rather, it
caused the profitable marketing of
adequate approaches to solutions in the field of resource depletion and environmental
impacts to move into economic focus. Even Altvater (2007) points out that the externalised effects of
production and consumption on nature become relevant for companies once they jeopardise
profitability and accumulation. In that case, environmental problems and their solutions can
actually be made part of capitalist logic . Solomon and Krishna (2011) are convinced that in order to solve the
environmental crisis, it were not even necessary to achieve further technologic breakthroughs,
as the technologies needed for the remodeling of society towards energy efficiency were
already mature and cost-efficient. Even if capitalism might be sufficiently robust, Kallis (2011) still takes the crisis as a
chance to break up obstructive social and political lock-ins that have hitherto seemed unalterable and have lead into the crisis. Yet
he does not regard the ability of social and political transformation to be inherent in the traits
of market, but as a characteristic of a social order orientated towards degrowth . Certainly,
Kallis is right in saying that the market is hard to control, making a concerted transformation
towards sustainability difficult. Still his criticism only refers to that form of capitalism which
Schumpeter characterised as trustified capitalism and which does lead to ecologically
problematic lock-in effects. The criticism cannot, however, be applied to competitive capitalism,
which generates those basic innovations giving rise to the revolutionary crises described as so
fertile by Kallis (2011). Thus, an opportunity is provided for alternative social conditions to be
brought about – but within the capitalist social order – and for substantiating these new
conditions through further innovations. Innovations may emerge outside of competition and
market economy, but will then lack the required frequency and force, as growth represents
the most important incentive of innovation (Wangler, 2013). On the other hand, a continuous process of
innovation again leads to growth, which may revolutionise the present social conditions , as
Schumpeter states (Herzog and Honneth, 2016). Thereby, a new combination of the given means of production within new sites of
production emerges, generating new goods, methods, and markets. Productive resources are applied to hitherto untested usages
while being withdrawn from those usages they served before (Geels, 2011). What Kallis (2011) terms technological optimism with
regard to the ecological innovative power of capitalism, is therefore technological realism in the context of Schumpeter's
competitive capitalism. Without doubt, innovative boosts on the part of already established companies are also conceivable and
may give rise to the possibility of maintaining trustified capitalism with its ecologically precarious structures. An example hereof is
the innovation ‘Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage’, by which the ecological impact of the emission intensive electrical conversion
of coal is being reduced (Benson and Orr, 2008). Technological
progress may hence stabilise the existent
system of economy and policy that is accountable for the environmental crisis (Bettini and Karaliotas,
2013). In Schumpeter's view, however, the decisive economic order is competitive capitalism, which is
characterised by the aggressive economic demeanour of new, innovative enterprises
economically challenging the establishment (Herzog and Honneth, 2016). The start-ups of new
companies, which are inseparably connected with the processes of innovation, withdraw
production goods from the present capitalist system by underbidding, disturbing the former
economic balance that is so destructive for nature . Competition is therefore essential for
overcoming the environmental crisis. In that respect, the concept of ‘solidary economics’ and its
precept of surmounting the allegedly ruthless principle of competition and emancipating oneself
from the logic of the markets (Embshoff and Giegold, 2008), is counterproductive, as the renunciation
of competition impedes the breakup of crusted economic structures, which thus continue to
harm the environment. After all, the big energy providers' strategy was and is to hold on to the
fossil-nuclear power plant pool for as long as possible, suppressing alternative concepts of
energy supply (Gawel et al., 2012). A radical transformation of the energy system therefore cannot emerge from the existent
structures, as Schumpeter assesses (Herzog and Honneth, 2016). Instead, innovative processes emerge outside of the old major
companies until proceeding to attack the incumbent regime through the rededication of means of production (Geels, 2011).
Innovative marketing strategies of small and middle scale businesses supplanting cumbersome
large companies play an essential part especially in the field of renewable energies (Walsh, 2012). In
this, competition is a decisive element that cannot easily be superseded . 4. Capabilities of green
capitalism A competitive green capitalism develops great creativity by its high rate of innovation, which may also reinvent the
relationship between humans and nature. We now want to exemplify how this might be brought about. Schumpeter holds the view
that innovation is the result of the capitalistic entrepreneurial spirit, not the other way round
(Herzog and Honneth, 2016). Technological
and social progress hence are no independent variables
materialising out of thin air, but arise from the logic of the capitalist process . Meadows et al. (2004)
accept that innovations may relocate the limits of growth, making it possible to maintain the
living standard by continuously reducing the consumption of crude materials and energy .
However, one of the energy system's prevailing deficits is that depleted or not yet tapped resources are being (re-)obtained based
on non-regenerative energy (Schwartzman, 2008), causing capitalistic production to be increasingly energetically inefficient (Murphy
and Hall, 2011). Overcoming the energy crisis hence calls for the consideration of thermodynamic
principles (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971, Georgescu-Roegen, 1986; Martinez-Alier, 1987). Harriss-White and Harriss (2007) see the
deployment of renewable energies as a possibility of limiting the creation of entropy. Kaberger
and Mansson (2001) have shown that innovative resources-saving material cycles may be possible and
economical if they are based on the usage of the inexhaustible energy of irradiance . What is
promising about this approach is that, due to research and development, the utilisation of
solar energy becomes more and more efficient and lucrative (Schmid, 2016). Moreover, its
inexhaustible potential allows for the exploitation of material resources even from deposits
with extremely low crude material density. On a local level, the utilisation of solar energy may
actually lead to a reduction of entropy (Ebeling et al., 1998; Kranert and Cord-Landwehr, 2010), as it is the case
with the usage of waste heat of solar thermal power plants for the desalination of sea water (DLR,
2007). The integration of these capacities into smart grids and the associated remodeling of every production process to purely
regenerative sources have been detailed in Section 3. We further argue that innovation
surpasses conceivability. Even
Harris (2010) sees a particularly high
potential in unpredictable technological innovations to break
through economic routine, thus encouraging further entrepreneurs in issuing their own
innovations. Capitalism might thereby be provided with the chance to reduce its ecological
exploitation. But innovation exceeds strictly technological aspects and may as well comprise
social and institutional aspects (Arentsen and Bellekom, 2014). E.g., in the mobility sector, whose
pollutant emissions have significantly contributed to the environmental crisis, innovations have
led to new features of cargo and passenger transportation . This is illustrated by the example of car sharing as
an innovative life style (Prettenthaler and Steininger, 1999) or bicycle-sharing schemes in urban areas (Midgley, 2011). Another
representative case is the history of the ozone hole, which Meadows et al. (2004) describe as a history of civil success regarding the
correction of a severe overshoot. Quite in the sense of Schumpeter, Meadows et al. (2004) name the ‘industry's creative heads’ as
the crucial problem-solving determinant. Through
the three innovative boosts ‘better insulation’, ‘reduced
toxic substitute materials’, and ‘emission-free alternative substances’, it will be possible to
rebuild the original density of the ozone layer by the mid-21st century . Remarkably, this is
realised without abandoning the existent economic system . Furthermore, we argue that it is realistic to
assume growth-oriented, competitive markets in the future, rather than socio-material
conditions beyond them, which, as stated by Van den Bergh (2011) are completely uncertain as of now (e.g. Harris, 2013:
socialist markets). We therefore hold the view that it is more pragmatic to design future mass markets in an eco-friendly way. Kallis
(2011) rejects the possibility that the wonder of a dematerialised economy might occur, as improvements of efficiency were
overcompensated by growing consumption. While dematerialisation may be tantamount to a wonder, researchers still do
put effort into adjusting the materialised economy to ecological compatibility . One aspect is the
thorough redefinition of nature protection, because nowadays, nature protection is reduced to the attempt of limiting the
harmfulness of processes and products (Mulhall and Braungart, 2010). However,
due to the potential creation of
new mass markets for more eco-friendly and efficient processes or products, this strategy holds
the danger of actually augmenting unwanted effects through rebound effects. In this regard, Alcott
(2005) points to the Jevon's Paradox which says it is a great error to think that technologic
innovations were going to reduce the consumption of resources . Polimeni et al. (2015) name the example of
the Green Revolution: the remarkable increase of food production's area efficiency was not at all able to abate the problems of
hunger and area consumption, as consequently, the population greatly increased. Likewise, a mass market of efficient
and eco-friendly products would again lead to a massive amount of poison and waste, with
disposed crude materials hardly being recycled . The ecological costs then would have to be externalised, which
Sturm and Vogt (2011) regard as strong evidence of the failure of the market. The core problem hence lies in the fact
that products are being produced exclusively for the technosphere (McDonough and Braungart, 2013).
E.g., copper is almost universally applicable to and beneficial for technological systems, while in
biological systems, this material is extremely poisonous . Thus, the aim must be to design products in a way that
makes them equally usable in biosphere, i.e. subsequent to their technical usage. This calls for the development of a
combined management of nutrients for techno- and biosphere. Human ways of living, the
processes and products they are based on, may thereby be employed for the benefit of
nature. The focus must therefore be put on those innovations that break up the present
paradigm of environmental protection by realising products that create a useful material
connection between techno- and biosphere. An example of this kind of creative destruction is
the Austrian company Gugler, the first print shop worldwide that produces printing products
free from harmful ingredients and exclusively with substances that can be biologically recycled
(Gugler GmbH, 2018). E.g., the accruing sludge is returned to biosphere and the ash of burned printing products can be reused as a
fertilizer. These
conditions provide the possibility of designing economic activities to be
ecologically compatible despite a high resource throughput.

Cap’s sustainable---solves resource scarcity and climate change.

Rainer Zitelmann 21. German historian and author of “The Rich in Public Opinion.”
"Consumption Presumption: Are Human Beings Destroying the World?" National Interest. 2-12-
2021. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/consumption-presumption-are-human-beings-
destroying-world-178114

Some people claim that we need to cut our consumption or there will be no hope for the planet .
Such claims are based on the thesis that continued growth increases the rate at which the
earth’s finite resources are consumed and, moreover, leads to irreversible climate change . And
such warnings are by no means new. In 1970, for instance, the Club of Rome attracted a great deal of attention with the publication
of The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, which has to date sold more than
thirty million copies in thirty languages. The book warned people to change their ways and had a clear message: the world’s raw
materials, and in particular, oil would soon be used up. In twenty years, the scientists predicted, we would have used the very last
drop of oil. Of course, the Club of Rome’s models for the depletion of oil—and almost all other major raw materials—were wrong.
According to the scenarios presented in The Limits to Growth, we should now be living on a planet that has been devoid of natural
gas, copper, lead, aluminum and tungsten for decades. And we were supposed to have run out of silver in 1985. Despite the bleak
forecasts, as of January 2020, the United States Geological Survey estimated silver reserves worldwide at 560,000 tons.

More from Less 

Employing an extensive array of data, the American scientist Andrew McAfee proves in his book
More from Less that economic growth is no longer coupled to the consumption of raw
materials. Data for the United States, for example, show that of seventy-two resources, from
aluminum to zinc, only six are not yet post-peak. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the U.S. economy has grown
strongly in recent years, consumption of many commodities is actually decreasing .  

Back in 2015, the American environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel wrote an essay, “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates
the Environment,” showing that
Americans are consuming fewer and fewer raw materials per capita.
Total consumption of steel, copper, fertilizer, wood and paper, which had previously always risen in line with
economic growth, had plateaued and was now in constant decline. 

Such across-the-board reductions in natural resource consumption are only possible because
of much-maligned capitalism: companies are constantly developing more efficient production
methods and reducing the amount of raw materials they consume. Of course, they are not doing this
primarily to protect the environment but to cut costs.  

What's more, a constant stream of innovations has promoted the trend of miniaturization or dematerialization. Just
think of
your smartphone. How many devices has your smartphone replaced and how many raw materials did they
use to consume? 

Calculator 

Telephone
Video camera 

Alarm clock
Voice recorder

Navigation system 

Camera
CD-player/radio 

Compass

Nowadays, many people no longer have a fax machine or street atlas because they have
everything they need on their smartphone . Some even use their phones instead of a wristwatch. You used to need
four separate microphones in your telephone, cassette recorder, Dictaphone and video camera, today you just need one—in your
smartphone. 

Fighting climate change with nuclear energy 

The finite nature of the world’s natural resources is one argument against growth, climate
change is another. Let’s take China as an example: China currently emits more CO2 than any
other country in the world and is building a number of new nuclear power plants in order to
achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. With the new build program well underway, China’s first new-generation nuclear
power plant recently went into operation.

In the very near future, China

intends to start exporting power plants . The latest generation of nuclear
power plants is much safer than earlier models—and can play a pivotal role in the fight
against climate change. In the United States, Joe Biden is already evaluating the advantages of small modular reactor (SMR)
nuclear power plants. As the name suggests, SMRs are smaller than traditional nuclear fission reactors and offer a maximum
capacity of three hundred megawatts. In the United Kingdom, for example, a consortium led by Rolls-Royce has announced plans to
build up to sixteen SMR power plants.  

So far, two reactors of this type are in operation, both onboard the floating nuclear power plant  “\Akademik Lomonosov, which
supplies heat and electricity to the Siberian city of Pevec and its one hundred thousand inhabitants.  

Anticapitalists blame capitalism for resource consumption and climate change . But political
decisions—such as Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy—frequently have a negative impact on
climate change.  
Telling people to cut their consumption must seem like pure mockery to the hundreds of millions of people around the world who
are still living in extreme poverty. What they need is more capitalism and economic growth. Just like in China, where the number of
people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 88 percent in 1981 to less than 1 percent today. Andrew
McAfee’s book
has an optimistic message about how we don't have to turn back the clocks and cut our
consumption: capitalism and technological progress are allowing us to steward the world’s
resources, rather than stripping them bare.

Capitalism is sustainable and self-correcting---alternatives are a false diagnosis

and the wrong solution.
Allison Schrager 20, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 1/15/2020,
"Why Socialism Won’t Work," https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/15/socialism-wont-work-
capitalism-still-best/, Marsh

Capitalism is still the best way to handle risk and boost innovation and productivity.
With increasingly ubiquitous iPhones, internet, central air conditioning, flat-screen TVs, and indoor plumbing, few in the developed world would want
to go back to life 100, 30, or even 10 years ago. Indeed, around
the world, the last two centuries have brought vast
improvements in material living standards; billions of people have been lifted from poverty, and life
expectancy across income levels has broadly risen. Most of that progress came from capitalist
economies.

Yet those economies are not without their problems. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the gap between the
rich and poor has become intolerably large as business owners and highly educated workers in urban areas have become richer while workers’ wages in
rural areas have stagnated. In most rich countries, more trade has brought a bigger, better variety of goods, but it has also displaced many jobs.

With social instability in the form of mass protests, Brexit, the rise of populism, and deep polarization knocking at the capitalist economies’ doors, much
of the progress of the last several decades is in peril. For some pundits and policymakers,
the solution is clear: socialism,
which tends to be cited as a method for addressing everything from inequality and injustice to
climate change.

Yet the
very ills that socialists identify are best addressed through innovation, productivity gains,
and better rationing of risk. And capitalism is still far and away the best, if not only, way to generate
those outcomes.
Today’s socialism is difficult to define. Traditionally, the term meant total state ownership of capital, as in the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Maoist
China. Nowadays, most people don’t take such an extreme view. In Europe, social democracy means the nationalization of many industries and very
generous welfare states. And today’s rising socialists are
rebranding the idea to mean an economic system that
delivers all the best parts of capitalism (growth and rising living standards) without the bad (inequality, economic cycles).
But no perfect economic system exists; there are always trade-offs—in the most extreme form between total state ownership of capital and unfettered
markets without any regulation or welfare state. Today, few would opt for either pole; what modern socialists and capitalists really disagree on is the
right level of government intervention.

Modern socialists want more, but not complete, state ownership. They’d like to nationalize certain industries. In the United States, that’s health care—
a plan supported by Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren (who does not call herself a socialist) and Bernie Sanders (who wears the
label proudly). In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was trounced at the polls in mid-December, has set his sights on a
longer list of industries, including the water, energy, and internet providers.

Other items on the socialist wish list may include allowing the government to be the primary investor in the economy through massive infrastructure
projects that aim to replace fossil fuels with renewables, as Green New Deal socialists have proposed. They’ve also floated plans that would make the
government the employer of a majority of Americans by offering guaranteed well-paid jobs that people can’t be fired from. And then there are more
limited proposals, including installing more workers on the boards of private companies and instituting national rent controls and high minimum wages.

For their part, modern capitalists want some, but less, state intervention. They are skeptical of nationalization and price
controls; they argue that today’s economic problems are best addressed by harnessing private enterprise .
In the United States, they’ve argued for more regulation and progressive taxation to help ease inequality, incentives to encourage private firms to use
less carbon, and a more robust welfare state through tax credits. Over the past 15 years, meanwhile, capitalist Europeans have instituted reforms to
improve labor market flexibility by making it easier to hire and fire people, and there have been attempts to reduce the size of pensions.

No economic system is perfect, and the exact right balance between markets and the state may
never be found. But there are good reasons to believe that keeping capital in the hands of the private
sector, and empowering its owners to make decisions in the pursuit of profit, is the best we’ve got.

One reason to trust markets is that they are better at setting prices than people. If you set prices too high,
many a socialist government has found, citizens will be needlessly deprived of goods. Set them too

low, and there will be excessive demand and ensuing shortages. This is true for all goods, including
health care and labor. And there is little reason to believe that the next batch of socialists in Washington or

London would be any better at setting prices than their predecessors. In fact, government-run health

care systems in Canada and European countries are plagued by long wait times. A 2018 Fraser Institute study cites a median wait
time of 19.8 weeks to see a specialist physician in Canada. Socialists may argue that is a small price to pay for universal access, but a market-

based approach can deliver both coverage and responsive service. A full government takeover
isn’t the only option, nor is it the best one.

Beyond that, markets are also good at rationing risk. Fundamentally, socialists would like to reduce risk—
protect workers from any personal or economywide shock. That is a noble goal, and some reduction through
better functioning safety nets is desirable. But getting rid of all uncertainty—as state ownership of most
industries would imply—is a bad idea. Risk is what fuels growth. People who take more chances tend to reap

bigger rewards; that’s why the top nine names on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans are
not heirs to family dynasties but are self-made entrepreneurs who took a leap to build new

products and created many jobs in the process.

Some leftist economists like Mariana Mazzucato argue that governments might

be able to step in and become
laboratories for innovation. But that would be a historical anomaly; socialist-leaning governments
have typically been less innovative than others. After all, bureaucrats and worker-corporate boards have
little incentive to upset the status quo or compete to build a better widget. And even when
government programs have spurred innovation—as in the case of the internet—it took the private sector to
recognize the value and create a market .
And that brings us to a third reason to believe in markets: productivity. Some economists, such as Robert Gordon,
have looked to today’s economic problems and suggested that productivity growth—the engine that fueled so much of the progress of the last several
decades—is over. In this telling, the resources, products, and systems that underpin the world’s economy are all optimized, and little further progress is
possible.

But that is hard to square with reality. Innovation

helps economies do more with fewer resources—
increasingly critical to addressing climate change, for example—which is a form of productivity
growth. And likewise, many of the products and technologies people rely on every day did not exist a
few years ago. These goods make inaccessible services more available and are changing the nature
of work, often for the better. Such gains are made possible by capitalist systems that encourage
invention and growing the pie, not by socialist systems that are more concerned with how the
existing pie is cut. It is far too soon, in other words, to write off productivity.
Here, it is worth considering the lessons of a previous productivity boom: the Industrial Revolution. As the economist Joel Mokyr has shown, it took
new innovations like the steam engine more than 100 years to appear in productivity estimates. The same could be happening today with smartphones
and the internet. Meanwhile, even as that upheaval transformed the human experience, creating a more comfortable existence for most everyone, it
was also messy and disruptive. The early part of that innovative cycle—like others since—displaced existing workers while the gains flowed to the
owners of capital first, causing social instability.

This time around, the

effects may end up being less wrenching: The divisions between owners of capital
and workers are not as clear as they used to be . More Americans than ever own stock through
their workplace retirement accounts. Stock ownership is on the rise in many non-U.S. capitalist economies, too.
And several other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, also offer retirement accounts, making their citizens shareholders as well.
Unlike 200 years ago, workers’ interests are already more aligned with those of management .

Cap is good and sustainable – cycles of innovation and massive improvements

in QoL prove
Cooper 16 – (2016, Mark, PhD from Yale, former Fullbright Fellow, Senior Research Fellow for
the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School “Energy Justice in Theory and
Practice: Building a Pragmatic, Progressive Road Map,” T. Van de Graaf et al. (eds.), The Palgrave
Handbook of the International

Political Economy of Energy, pp. 687-92)

The Immense Leap in Material Well-Being Global

Energy Justice provides important data on several key energy-
intensive activities that deeply affect daily life (heat, light, power and transportation). In Fig. 28.1 , I
augment that data with measures on population, income and total energy consumption, as well as technological change and developments in the state.
Figure 28.1 identifies rates of growth in key activities that define the material conditions in which people live. I use a 100-year view to calculate the rate
of improvement, which is consistent with eff orts to analyze distributive justice. ** Fig. 28.1 Indicators of progress in human material conditions
( Sources : Based on data from: Benjamin, K. and Michael H. Dworkin, Global Energy Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 48, 312), heat, light
transportation, power; Douglas North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 89 US Bureau of
the Census, https://www.census.gov/ populaton/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php , UN 1999 where available, average of lower and
upper summary elsewhere. Wikipedia for 2000, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates ; J. Bradford De Long, Estimates of World
GDP, One Million BC–Present, Standard Chartered, Technology: Reshaping the Global Economy, January 19, 2015, p. 11, technologies. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty ) Lighting,
heating, power and transportation are energy-intensive activities
that receivea great deal of attention in the discussion of energy poverty and justice. Light, heat and power are
central to defining the standard of living and, hence, the energy justice analysis . The direct link
between energy consumption and income is also central to that discussion. Starting with the emergence of
capitalism and accelerating in the industrial era, these four services exhibited a dramatic decline
in cost, which made them affordable for an ever increasing number of people . I include three measures of
the overall outcome of the economic development process—population growth, output per capita and energy consumption per capita. North ( 2005 ,
p. 89) points to population for an obvious reason: Statistical
data … can get us part way in describing the magnitude of changes in the
landscape. They provide dramatic evidence of the revolutionary changes in the human condition . Man’s
subjugation of the uncertainties related to the physical environment is most clearly manifested in the explosive increases in population since the
beginning of the modern age in the eighteenth century …. [T]his dramatic change along with major development in knowledge, technological progress,
and scientifi c breakthroughs that contributed to this explosive development. The close correlation between GDP per capita
and population is clear. GDP per capita and its growth have been the primary focal point of the analysis of economic growth and
development for quite some time. The close correlation between GDP per capita and energy consumption per

capita has also been a focal point of analysis . 12 The graph also identifi es several technologies that are widely seen as ushering in
fundamental shifts in economic activity. An important and obvious point to be made is that these involve power and transportation technologies. Three
of the recent examples involve energy—steam, internal combustion engine and electricity. Substitutingmechanical power for
human and animal power constitutes a major leap. The shift to electricity, considered a General Purpose
Technology (Jovanovic and Rousseau 2005 ), 13 was one of the key factors in the second industrial revolution .

Finally, at the bottom, the graph shows key developments in the structure of policy making. The nation-state was a key
development that enabled the process of economic growth to gain traction (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012 ,
Figure 5). The Westphalian state was a key development. Eff orts to organize relations between states were the subject of a stream
of treaties, but the graph shows the major eff orts to organize multilateral relations in the twentieth century. It is important to keep in mind that the
graph is truncated. Prior
to the year 1400, the rate of growth in the factors that affect material well-
being was virtually nil. The data underscore the immense progress made in the material
condition of society in the past three centuries. The dramatic change in the rates of progress is
coincident with the emergence of capitalism and , in particular, the industrial revolution. The key
message for the purpose of this analysis is strikingly clear. If we accept the proposition that human
civilization dates back about 12 millennia, then the capitalist era is about 4% of human history .
The industrial era covers the second half of that period. Measured by population, per capita income,
heat, power, transportation, lighting, about 90 % of human progress has taken place in the
most recent 2 % of human history, the very short period of capitalist industrialization . 14 The
Virtuous Cycle of Progress and the Potential for Justice The progressive capitalist frame for a theory of justice launches from this dramatic change in the
human condition. Obviously, it postdates much of the thinking of the ancient philosophers and early modern (preindustrial) political theorists who
naturally make up a large part of the intellectual and cultural heritage of the Western concept of justice, as discussed at length the Global Energy
Justice . There has been a dramatic transformation of the terrain of justice in three ways. • The
capitalist industrial revolution has
not only produced a dramatic improvement in the human condition, it has also created the
possibility/ hope/expectation that there will be a massive and continuing improvement in the
material well-being of people. Mankind has been freed from endless poverty and expects
continuous economic growth and improvement in material conditions. • The improvement in material well-being
comes with (and is in part dependent on) an increasing interdependence of economic activity (a
refined division of labor and globalization). • Increasing wealth and improvements in communications (which are

made possible by changes in energy technology, i.e. electrifi cation) have allowed more and more people to
engage and participate more directly and forcefully in self-governance . In the capitalist industrial
era we no longer have to treat human history as a kind of zero-sum, depleting resource story.
The current generation should not be chastised for overconsuming scarce resources as long as
it produces the means to maintain and improve the prospects of future generations . For the past
quarter of a millennium, the groundwork for a much higher standard of living has been laid by
each successive generation. Perez ( 2002 ) argues that capitalist development needs to be progressive in the sense I use the term.
Technology is the fuel of the capitalist engine (Perez 2002 , p. 155). The potential for production and productivity grow

this considerable. What is needed for its realization is a new space for the unhindered expansion of markets, favoring economics of scale and
fostering a new wave of investment. this essentially means that adequate regulation … has to be established and an institutional framework favoring
the real economy over the paper economy needs to be put in place … So the rhythm of potential grow this modulated by the qualitative dynamics of eff
ective demand (Perez 2002 , pp. 114–116). Since market saturation is one of the main limits encountered in deploying the growth potential of a
technology revolution, ensuring consistent extension of markets is the way to facilitate the pursuit of those goals. Consequently, it is progressive
distribution and worldwide advances in development that can best guarantee a continued expansion of demand (Perez 2002 , p. 124). The impact of
progressive capitalism on the terrain of justice involves more than simple progress. It also reflects the structure and process by which capitalism creates
progress. Two key processes are involved. A discussion of these broad issues is beyond the scope of this chapter and has been off ered elsewhere
(Cooper 2015 ). Here I emphasize two points that are central to the discussion of energy justice. • First, the explanation asserts that capitalism

has given birth to recursive feedback loops, virtuous circles and cycles, of creative destruction and
construction that creates a spiral of progress . • Second, the division of labor advances relentlessly,

which ultimately increases human capital and promotes democratic equality. The stark contrast between
the twenty-fi rst-century digital mode of production that is emerging and the twentieth-century mode of production described by Perez ( 2004 , 2009 )
underscores this process in several ways. First,
the mass market production of the twentieth century was very
much driven by fossil fuel consumption. The digital mode of production is much more dependent
on electricity. Second, technologies are emerging to power more and more activity with
electricity. Third, the heterogeneity of products creates niche markets . Fourth, the new division
of labor is much more global and complex , shifting a great deal of activity and autonomy to the edge of the networks. The
virtuous cycles of economic progress are interconnected in the sense that they tend to produce
the key ingredients to solve the next great challenge that faces the economic system. Perez builds this
into her model of capitalism by linking Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction to the equally powerful process of creative construction. The result
is a spiral of development. While analysis of this process is also beyond the scope of this chapter, one aspect of the current phase of development is
critical to the discussion of energy justice. Industrial revolutions produce the ingredients necessary to solve the challenges that they faced. ^his is
certainly true of the third industrial revolution in the energy sector, the electricity sector in particular. Dynamic
technological
development has produced the tools for the transformation of the energy sector th at can solve
the problem of climate change, while dealing with the challenge of energy justice. The central station
model of base-load facilities combined with high cost peaking power and massive amounts of pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions, has been
undercut by dramatically declining cost for distributed renewables and storage. The Information and Communications Technologies revolution has now
made it possible to integrate and manage demand and supply rather than build central station, fossil-fuel-based powered facilities that passively follow
load. Economic analyses of the cost of addressing energy justice that were off ered as it became a topic of increasing attention a decade ago are
obsolete as a result of dramatic innovation and competition (Cooper 2014b ). An electricity sector centered on smaller scale, more flexible resources
should facilitate and lower the cost of addressing both energy poverty and climate change. this technological revolution not only delivers aff ordable
electricity, but it also does so in a manner that utilizes local resources and fosters local autonomy. As has always been the case, however, there is a
struggle between the incumbent and the new entrant technologies over the speed and ultimate confi guration of the new system and which values will
be expressed by the system. In short, the energy sector, in general, and the electricity sector, in particular, are at the “turning point” (Perez 2002 ) or
“critical juncture” (Robinson and Acemoglu 2012 )\ of the “quarter-life crisis of the digital mode of production” (Cooper 2013b ). Political economy is
about driving the economy in the right direction with policy. While
the outcome is uncertain, the technological
progress suggests that prospects are good for a successful deployment of the third industrial
revolution. 3 A Broad Frame for Justice Building on the intense discussion of energy justice presented in the two books noted in the introduction,
the theory of distributive justice off ered below is intended to provide a framework that makes the inclusion of progressive values and the policies that
address energy poverty more compelling in the process of institutional recomposition that is taking place. Needless to say, this was the purpose of the
Encyclical on climate change. The
analysis makes several basic points that lead to an important conclusion
— distributive justice is not an afterthought to a dynamic economic system, it is an

indispensable, core ingredient of success: • Markets have a critical role as the driver of
progress. • The state plays an equally critical role with policies to guide the economy toward a
stable growth trajectory and in a progressive direction by placing constraints on property and the accumulation of
power. • Egalitarian relationships are consistent with the need to advance the division of labor . •

Autonomy and choice for individuals plays a critical role in promoting effi ciency and democracy. • The
convergence and synergy between an inclusive market and an inclusive state is necessary for
progress to continue.

Venture capital investments prove---funding into climate tech has grown

almost 4000 percent since 2013.
Grace O'Donnell 21. Assistant editor for Yahoo Finance and a UX writer for Yahoo products.
"Climate tech: How ESG investing is evolving into ‘a profitable endeavor’." Yahoo Finance. 8-19-
2021. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/climate-tech-esg-investing-profitable-endeavor-
191604271.html

*Chart in the original article omitted

As economies across the globe square up to the challenge of slowing human-caused global
warming, venture capital firms hope to tackle climate change without repeating the mistakes of
a decade ago.

“I think some of the extreme

weather events are making some things a little more apparent to
people," Mike Winterfield, founder and managing partner of Active Impact Investments , said on Yahoo
Finance Live (video above). “But I think the second thing that's happened is it moved from, say, a group of do-gooders and
concerned environmentalists to people who were serious about business and wanted to leverage capitalism sincerely in a way to
make this a profitable endeavor, and I think that's when it dragged investors in.”

Venture capital-backed climate tech companies have raised $14.2 billion worldwide in 2021 as of
June 25, according to PitchBook data. That builds on a years-long wave: Between 2013 and 2019, according to
PwC, worldwide annual venture capital funding into climate tech grew 3,750% in absolute terms,
which was three times the growth rate of VC investment into artificial intelligence over that time
period.

[chart omitted]

The generaltrend is also positive: Environmental, social, and governance ( ESG) investing has
become a major secular theme across assets overall as investors adopt the framework for
everything from stocks to the CLO markets.

“I think there's
just a lot of tailwinds for the space,” Winterfield said . “This is where the talent
wants to work, when you look at millennials. This is where the regulations are going. This is where
consumer behavior and preferences are changing. This is where investor money is flooding. So I would
expect in the next 10 years that sustainability will become sort of a big go-to and big growth and
performance space in investing.”
Is climate tech the new clean tech?

This isn't the first time there have been high expectations for companies looking to tackle some of the world's most difficult
problems such as facilitating the energy transition, revolutionizing agriculture, and finding alternatives to the world's appetite for
plastic.

Between 2006-2011, Silicon Valley VC firms — fueled by rising fossil fuel prices, energy legislation, and increased consumer
awareness of climate change — poured $25 billion into the clean tech sector. By 2011, over half of that amount was lost, and the
number of new clean tech companies in subsequent years diminished substantially.

The boom and bust of clean tech has made investors question whether climate tech will be any different.

That said, there are a fewkey areas where climate tech differs . One area is climate tech's singular
focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions across economies. In other words, while clean tech primarily
dealt with the environmental impacts of the energy sector, climate tech is aiming to solve the main driver of
climate change in all sectors.
Climate tech has primarily gravitated toward transport and mobility, according to PwC's annual climate tech report, with 63% of
investment going to that sector. So while the energy sector produces far more global emissions, it has received less VC funding as
more mature technologies like solar and wind are being financed in other ways.
Another major tailwind for climate tech this time around is support from consumers and
governments, which lagged a decade ago.

“The need is bigger and more urgent than it has ever been before, and [so is] people's
understanding of that," Winterfield said.

Consumers willing to vote with their dollar have enabled startups like Beyond Meat (BYND) to
reach multi-billion-dollar valuations. That consumer demand has bolstered investors' confidence and has drawn talent
to the innovative tech companies, Winterfield noted.

“What we're seeing with a lot of the companies that we're investing in and that others are
investing in in the space right now is that they're already proving to perform,” he said. “They're
reaching high levels of profitability, cash flow. We're seeing acquisitions, IPOs happening in the space, and investors
are getting rewarded for moving into the space right now, and the level of talent and innovation that is moving into the space is
absolutely astounding.”

A growing political will to act on climate change has also spurred cautious optimism. While
Winterfield said that President Biden's recent actions on climate, as well as those taken in Canada, showed “a ton of promising steps
in the right direction,” investors have reason to be wary of government-led climate action.

“I think it
is the responsibility of the companies that we invest in to have a model that allows
them to be profitable even without government intervention ,” Winterfield said. “The government
intervention that has hurt us in the past at times has been essentially funding industries that are causing the problem. So you have
money coming out of both pockets.”

Capitalism is sustainable and self-correcting---alternatives are a false diagnosis

and the wrong solution.
Allison Schrager 20, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 1/15/2020,
"Why Socialism Won’t Work," https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/15/socialism-wont-work-
capitalism-still-best/, Marsh

Capitalism is still the best way to handle risk and boost innovation and productivity.
With increasingly ubiquitous iPhones, internet, central air conditioning, flat-screen TVs, and indoor plumbing, few in the developed world would want
to go back to life 100, 30, or even 10 years ago. Indeed, around
the world, the last two centuries have brought vast
improvements in material living standards; billions of people have been lifted from poverty, and life
expectancy across income levels has broadly risen. Most of that progress came from capitalist
economies.

Yet those economies are not without their problems. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the gap between the
rich and poor has become intolerably large as business owners and highly educated workers in urban areas have become richer while workers’ wages in
rural areas have stagnated. In most rich countries, more trade has brought a bigger, better variety of goods, but it has also displaced many jobs.

With social instability in the form of mass protests, Brexit, the rise of populism, and deep polarization knocking at the capitalist economies’ doors, much
of the progress of the last several decades is in peril. For some pundits and policymakers,
the solution is clear: socialism,
which tends to be cited as a method for addressing everything from inequality and injustice to
climate change.

Yet the
very ills that socialists identify are best addressed through innovation, productivity gains,
and better rationing of risk. And capitalism is still far and away the best, if not only, way to generate
those outcomes.
Today’s socialism is difficult to define. Traditionally, the term meant total state ownership of capital, as in the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Maoist
China. Nowadays, most people don’t take such an extreme view. In Europe, social democracy means the nationalization of many industries and very
generous welfare states. And today’s rising socialists are
rebranding the idea to mean an economic system that
delivers all the best parts of capitalism (growth and rising living standards) without the bad (inequality, economic cycles).
But no perfect economic system exists; there are always trade-offs—in the most extreme form between total state ownership of capital and unfettered
markets without any regulation or welfare state. Today, few would opt for either pole; what modern socialists and capitalists really disagree on is the
right level of government intervention.

Modern socialists want more, but not complete, state ownership. They’d like to nationalize certain industries. In the United States, that’s health care—
a plan supported by Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren (who does not call herself a socialist) and Bernie Sanders (who wears the
label proudly). In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was trounced at the polls in mid-December, has set his sights on a
longer list of industries, including the water, energy, and internet providers.

Other items on the socialist wish list may include allowing the government to be the primary investor in the economy through massive infrastructure
projects that aim to replace fossil fuels with renewables, as Green New Deal socialists have proposed. They’ve also floated plans that would make the
government the employer of a majority of Americans by offering guaranteed well-paid jobs that people can’t be fired from. And then there are more
limited proposals, including installing more workers on the boards of private companies and instituting national rent controls and high minimum wages.

For their part, modern capitalists want some, but less, state intervention. They are skeptical of nationalization and price
controls; they argue that today’s economic problems are best addressed by harnessing private enterprise.
In the United States, they’ve argued for more regulation and progressive taxation to help ease inequality, incentives to encourage private firms to use
less carbon, and a more robust welfare state through tax credits. Over the past 15 years, meanwhile, capitalist Europeans have instituted reforms to
improve labor market flexibility by making it easier to hire and fire people, and there have been attempts to reduce the size of pensions.

No economic system is perfect, and the exact right balance between markets and the state may
never be found. But there are good reasons to believe that keeping capital in the hands of the private
sector, and empowering its owners to make decisions in the pursuit of profit, is the best we’ve got.

One reason to trust markets is that they are better at setting prices than people. If you set prices too high,
many a socialist government has found, citizens will be needlessly deprived of goods. Set them too

low, and there will be excessive demand and ensuing shortages. This is true for all goods, including
health care and labor. And there is little reason to believe that the next batch of socialists in Washington or

London would be any better at setting prices than their predecessors. In fact, government-run health

care systems in Canada and European countries are plagued by long wait times. A 2018 Fraser Institute study cites a median wait
time of 19.8 weeks to see a specialist physician in Canada. Socialists may argue that is a small price to pay for universal access, but a market-

based approach can deliver both coverage and responsive service. A full government takeover
isn’t the only option, nor is it the best one.

Beyond that, markets are also good at rationing risk. Fundamentally, socialists would like to reduce risk—
protect workers from any personal or economywide shock. That is a noble goal, and some reduction through
better functioning safety nets is desirable. But getting rid of all uncertainty—as state ownership of most
industries would imply—is a bad idea. Risk is what fuels growth. People who take more chances tend to reap

bigger rewards; that’s why the top nine names on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans are
not heirs to family dynasties but are self-made entrepreneurs who took a leap to build new

products and created many jobs in the process.

Some leftist economists like Mariana Mazzucato argue that governments might

be able to step in and become
laboratories for innovation. But that would be a historical anomaly; socialist-leaning governments
have typically been less innovative than others. After all, bureaucrats and worker-corporate boards have
little incentive to upset the status quo or compete to build a better widget. And even when
government programs have spurred innovation—as in the case of the internet—it took the private sector to
recognize the value and create a market .
And that brings us to a third reason to believe in markets: productivity. Some economists, such as Robert Gordon,
have looked to today’s economic problems and suggested that productivity growth—the engine that fueled so much of the progress of the last several
decades—is over. In this telling, the resources, products, and systems that underpin the world’s economy are all optimized, and little further progress is
possible.

But that is hard to square with reality. Innovation

helps economies do more with fewer resources—
increasingly critical to addressing climate change, for example—which is a form of productivity
growth. And likewise, many of the products and technologies people rely on every day did not exist a
few years ago. These goods make inaccessible services more available and are changing the nature
of work, often for the better. Such gains are made possible by capitalist systems that encourage
invention and growing the pie, not by socialist systems that are more concerned with how the
existing pie is cut. It is far too soon, in other words, to write off productivity.
Here, it is worth considering the lessons of a previous productivity boom: the Industrial Revolution. As the economist Joel Mokyr has shown, it took
new innovations like the steam engine more than 100 years to appear in productivity estimates. The same could be happening today with smartphones
and the internet. Meanwhile, even as that upheaval transformed the human experience, creating a more comfortable existence for most everyone, it
was also messy and disruptive. The early part of that innovative cycle—like others since—displaced existing workers while the gains flowed to the
owners of capital first, causing social instability.

This time around, the

effects may end up being less wrenching: The divisions between owners of capital
and workers are not as clear as they used to be . More Americans than ever own stock through
their workplace retirement accounts. Stock ownership is on the rise in many non-U.S. capitalist economies, too.
And several other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, also offer retirement accounts, making their citizens shareholders as well.
Unlike 200 years ago, workers’ interests are already more aligned with those of management .

COVID proves sustainability—alternatives are worse—their answers are

influenced by cognitive distortions
Webber 20 (Douglas Webber is a professor of political science at the international business
school, INSEAD; 10-28-20; The Conversation; “Capitalism and the coronavirus crisis: the coming
transformation(s)”; https://theconversation.com/capitalism-and-the-coronavirus-crisis-the-
coming-transformation-s-149027)//ZW

The world economy is currently experiencing its severest contraction since the Great Depression
of the 1930s. Unlike
the Great Depression and the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009, this crisis cannot be
directly attributed to the dysfunctional workings of capitalism . But even if it is not a crisis of capitalism, it is a crisis
for capitalism. Chronic ills of contemporary capitalism – notably rising levels of socio-economic inequality and debt of all kinds – are being exacerbated
and intensify the danger of further political polarization and fresh financial instability. Capitalism will nonetheless survive this
crisis as it has done previous ones. The fundamental structures of capitalism typically don’t change
fast. But they can change and they do, especially at critical historical junctures, such as in response to wars and economic crises – or, potentially,
pandemics. State interventionism Compared with recent decades, in post-Covid-19 capitalism the state

will emerge as a more dominant actor . Even more than in the years after the GFC, central banks have been
resorting to increasingly unorthodox, expansionary monetary policies to stave off economic
collapse. To the same end governments have begun and will continue to pursue expansionary fiscal
policies and run up ever-higher budget deficits . Austerity policies have suddenly become unfashionable. Sectoral or
“industrial” policies have regained favour, with governments everywhere intervening to assist firms in those sectors, such as air transport or tourism,
which the crisis otherwise would destroy. Policies to “re-localize” production of critical goods in crises, such as medical equipment and supplies, are
suddenly in vogue, whereas state aid policies aimed at preventing distortions of competition are not. The intellectual champions of the free market
have fallen silent. Regardlessof how fast the world economy recovers from the crisis, longer-term
factors – possible new pandemics and pressures to mitigate or adapt to climate change or, in the “old” advanced capitalist economies, to create a
more level playing field against firms aided by the Chinese state – will
keep the pressure on governments to maintain or
strengthen existing levels of state intervention . To say that the state will be a more dominant
actor in post-Covid-19 capitalism is not to say , however, that previously divergent capitalisms are
converging on a uniform “statist” model . State economic intervention can manifest highly divergent forms. Here the 1930s may
offer some salient parallels. Higher levels of state intervention characterized countries that moved politically to the left as well as to the (far) right.
Numerous countries, such as in Sweden and New Zealand, where Labour and Social Democratic parties came to power in this period, or the US under
President Roosevelt, embarked on Keynesian deficit-spending policies that reduced mass unemployment, strengthened organized labour and expanded
collective social welfare provision. At the other end of the politico-ideological spectrum, fascist or Nazi regimes, such as Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s
Germany, also engaged in large-scale deficit-spending, while destroying liberal democracy, smashing the labour movement, implementing protectionist
economic policies, and mobilizing their societies for war. Growing polarization In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, the democratic-capitalist world may
well undergo a process of political polarization comparable to what occurred in the 1930s. Depending
on the shifting distribution
of domestic political power, countries may tend toward one or the other of two scenarios. In
one, which might be labelled “yellow capitalism” (combining the colours Social Democratic red and green), state
intervention would aim to redistribute income and wealth on a greater scale than is the case in most capitalist democracies today and to take more
sweeping measures to combat global warming. ‘Yellow capitalism" would be fundamentally internationalist ,
recognizing the fact that the most severe challenges facing humankind are global and can be managed effectively only through comprehensive
international cooperation. But
it would create scope for governments to protect their economies for
specific purposes, such as to combat climate change, for example through carbon tariffs. In this scenario,
private business would be much more tightly constrained by state regulation than at the peak of
neo-liberal capitalism after the Cold War. The core support for this incarnation of capitalism, which synthesizes the aspirations of the “old”
labour movement and “new” social, especially environmental, movements, would be found in the (especially younger) professional middle classes in
the big cities and towns and the unionized working class.
Even centrist political parties could support this kind of
political agenda. The other scenario (combining the colour black for nationalism and brown for right-wing populism) might be
termed “light-black capitalism”. Like “yellow capitalism”, it would also be highly interventionist, but
would be fiscally regressive rather than redistributive, as has been the thrust of President Trump’s tax policy in the US.
Climate change would be ignored in favour of maximizing (quantitative) economic growth. Domestic business would be increasingly protected from
international competition, while comprehensive immigration controls would offer the (ethnically defined) “people” some protection from the
competition of “foreign” workers. The core support for “light-black capitalism” would be in domestic-
market-oriented business, among residents of small towns, villages and the countryside as well as in declining industrial regions, among
“value conservatives” afraid that changes in dominant social values are destroying traditional norms and life-styles, and among “status anxious”
workers hostile to immigration. Rising risks Which
of these two incarnations of a state-interventionist capitalism
– “yellow” or “light-black” – becomes the predominant form in the post-coronavirus era will be
determined by the outcomes of political struggle and conflict in mostly national political arenas .
The only thing that is certain is that, for the time being at least, market-friendly incarnations of capitalism will wither. So far, in the coronavirus crisis,
citizens in most countries have rallied to their governments in a spirit of national unity akin to what has occasionally happened historically at the
outbreak of wars. However, we are currently still passing through the first stage – the public-health phase – of the coronavirus crisis. Expansionary
monetary and fiscal policies and the subsidization – on a massive scale – of short-time work have enabled most governments to postpone the arrival of
the second, the economic and financial, phase of the crisis. But unless the recovery of the world economy is very rapid, this next phase will materialize.
It will be all the more destructive now that a second wave of the coronavirus is upon is, requiring new lockdown measures that will exacerbate the
economic problems caused by those taken earlier this year. This phase of the crisis will likely witness greater, perhaps much greater, social and political
upheaval than the first. Regardless of how well or badly some national-populist governments have hitherto managed the crisis so far, the growing
socio-economic dislocation and insecurity that will increasingly characterize this second phase of the crisis could give movements based on this kind of
ideology a powerful new impetus. An upsurge of “light-black capitalism” would likely plunge the world economy into an even deeper recession. Even
more ominously, it would also increase the probability of large-scale military conflict. As the American economist Otto Mallery wrote during the Second
World War: “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”. In this regard too, the events and trends of the 1930s still provide us today with lessons
that we ignore

Growth is sustainable.
Harford, 20—economics columnist for the Financial Times, citing Diane Coyle, Bennett
Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor
Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, Chris Goodall, English
businessman, author and expert on new energy technologies, alumnus of St Dunstan's College,
University of Cambridge, and Harvard Business School, and Jesse Ausubel, Director and Senior
Research Associate of the Program for the Human Environment of Rockefeller University (Tim,
“Two cheers for the dematerialising economy,” https://www.ft.com/content/04858216-322e-
11ea-9703-eea0cae3f0de, dml)

If past trends continue, the

world’s gross domestic product will be about twice as big by 2040 as it is today.
That’s the sort of growth rate that translates to 30-fold growth over a century, or by a factor of
a thousand over two centuries.
Is that miraculous, or apocalyptic? In itself, neither. GDP is a synthetic statistic, invented to help us put a measuring rod up against
the ordinary business of life. It measures neither the energy and resource consumption that might worry us, nor the things that
really lead to human flourishing.

That disconnection from what matters might be a problem if politicians strove to maximise GDP, but they don’t — otherwise they
would have hesitated before imposing austerity in the face of a financial crisis, launching trade wars or getting Brexit done.
Economic policymaking has flaws, but an obsession with GDP is not one of them.

Nevertheless the
exponential expansion of GDP is indirectly important, because GDP growth is
correlated with things that do matter, good and bad. Economic growth has long been associated
with unsustainable activities such as carbon dioxide emissions and the consumption of metals and minerals.

But GDP growth is also correlated with the good things in life: in the short run, an economy that is creating
jobs; in the long run, more important things. GDP per capita is highly correlated with indicators such as the Social
Progress Index. The SPI summarises a wide range of indicators from access to food, shelter, health and
education to vital freedoms of choice and from discrimination. All the leading countries in the
Social Progress database are rich. All the strugglers are desperately poor.

So the
prospect of a doubling of world GDP matters, not for its own sake, but for what it implies — an
expansion of human flourishing, and the risk of environmental disaster.

So here’s the good news: we

might be able to enjoy all the good stuff while avoiding the
unsustainable environmental impact. The link between economic activity and the use of
material resources is not as obvious as one might think. There are several reasons for this.

The first is that for

all our seemingly insatiable desires, sometimes enough is enough. If you live in a
cold house for lack of money, a pay rise lets you take off the extra cardigan and turn up the radiators.
But if you win the lottery, you are not going to celebrate by roasting yourself alive.

The second is that, while

free enterprise may care little for the planet, it is always on the lookout for
ways to save money. As long as energy, land and materials remain costly, we’ll develop ways
to use less. Aluminium beer cans weighed 85 grammes when introduced in the late 1950s. They now weigh less than 13
grammes.

The third reason is a switch to digital products — a fact highlighted back in 1997 by Diane Coyle in her book The
Weightless World. The trend has only continued since then. My music collection used to require a wall full of shelves. It is
now on a network drive the size of a large hardback book. My phone contains the equivalent of a rucksack full of equipment.

Dematerialisation is not automatic, of course. As Vaclav Smil calculates in his new book, Growth, US houses are more than twice as
large today as in 1950. The US’s bestselling vehicle in 2018, the Ford F-150, weighs almost four times as much as 1908’s bestseller,
the Model T. Let’s not even talk about the number of cars; Mr Smil reckons the global mass of automobiles sold has increased 2,500-
fold over the past century.
Still, there
is reason for hope. Chris Goodall’s research paper “Peak Stuff” concluded that, in the UK, “both the
weight of goods entering the economy and the amounts finally ending up as waste probably
began to fall from sometime between 2001 and 2003 ”. That figure includes the impact of imported goods.

In the US, Jesse Ausubel’s article “The Return of Nature” found

falling consumption of commodities such as
iron ore, aluminium, copper, steel, and paper and many others. Agricultural land has become
so productive that some of it is being allowed to return to nature.

In the EU, carbon dioxide emissions fell 22 per cent between 1990 and 2017, despite the economy
growing by 58 per cent. Only some of this fall is explained by the offshoring of production. (For a
good summary of all this research, try Andrew McAfee’s book More From Less.)

Can we, then, relax? No. To pick a single obvious problem, global carbon dioxide emissions may be rising more slowly than GDP —
but they are rising nevertheless, and they need to fall rapidly.

Yet the fact that dematerialisation is occurring is heartening. We all know what the basic policies are that would tilt the
playing field in favour of smaller, lighter, lower-emission products and activities. Adopting those policies means we might actually
be able to save the planet, preserve human needs, rights and freedoms — and still have plenty of fun into the bargain.

Elites nuke the alt

Jensen 6 (Derrick Jensen 6, Eastern Washington University, Endgame: Resistance, p. 873)
when those who run the United States feel their power slipping, whether
Maybe nukes; I have absolutely no doubt that

through oil shortages, external invasion, internal revolt, or ecological collapse, they will have
no moral qualms about nuking anywhere they feel necessary, including places in the United
States they’ve bombed Nevada for decades now). Indeed, I have great fears that when
(hell,

they feel their power slipping- and slip it will no matter what anyone does- they may blow
up the entire planet before they give up their losing game .

It causes global war and collapse

Wallerstein 2k (Immanuel - Binghamton sociology professor, “Globalization or the Age of
Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World System “, International
Sociology, June, http://www.iwallerstein.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/TRAJWS1.PDF)
The major argument for patience has been the inevitability of reform . Things will get better – if not
immediately, then for one’s children and grandchildren. A more prosperous, more egalitarian world is on the horizon. This is, of course, official
liberal ideology, and it has dominated the geoculture since the 19th century. But it
has also been the theme of all the anti-
systemic movements, not least those which have proclaimed themselves most
revolutionary. These movements have particularly emphasized this theme when they have occupied state power. They have said to their
own working classes that they were ‘developing’ their economies, and these working classes must be patient while the fruits of economic growth
eventually improve their life situations. They have preached patience not only about standards of living but also about the absence of political
equality. As long as such anti-systemic movements (whether they were communist, social-democrat or national liberation movements) were in
their mobilizing phase against inegalitarian, militaristic, dictatorial, fascist, colonial or even simply conservative regimes, this theme was muted
and did not interfere with the ability of anti-systemic movements to secure extensive popular support. Once,
however, such
movements came to power, as they did extensively throughout the world during the period
1945–70 (the Kondratieff A-period of which we have been speaking), they were put to the test. And worldwide
they have been found wanting. The record of post-’revolutionary’ regimes has been that
they have not been able to reduce worldwide or even internal polarization to any significant
degree, nor have they been able to institute serious internal political equality. They have, no
doubt, accomplished many reforms, but they promised far more than reforms. And because the world
system has remained a capitalist world economy , the regimes outside the core zone have
been structurally unable to ‘catch up’ with the wealthy countries. This is not merely a matter of academic
analysis. The result of these realities has been a monumental disillusionment with the anti-
systemic movements. To the extent that they retain support, it is at most as a pis aller, as a reformist group better, perhaps, than a
more right-wing alternative but certainly not as a harbinger of the new society. The major result has been a massive
disinvestment in state structures. The masses of the world, having turned toward the states
as agents of transformation, have now returned to a more fundamental skepticism about the
ability of the states to promote transformation or even to maintain social order. This worldwide upsurge of anti-statism
has two immediate consequences. One is that social fears have escalated, and people everywhere
are taking back from the states the role of providing for their own security. But of course this institutes a negative
spiral. The more they do so the more there is chaotic violence, and the more there is chaotic
violence, the more the states find themselves unable to handle the situation , and therefore
the more people disinvest the state, which further weakens the ability of the states to limit
the spiral. We have entered into this kind of spiral at varying paces in the various countries of the world system but at a growing pace
virtually everywhere.

Even if growth is imperfect, the transition away fails.

Hubert Buch-Hansen 18. Associate Professor, Department of Business and Politics,
Copenhagen Business School. “The Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from
Critical Political Economy.” Ecological Economics 146: 157-63. Emory Libraries.

Still, the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and type of support it needs if
its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes. The number of political
parties, labour unions, business associations and international organisations that have so far
embraced degrowth is modest to say the least. Economic and political elites, including social
democratic parties and most of the trade union movement, are united in the belief that
economic growth is necessary and desirable. This consensus finds support in the prevailing type
of economic theory and underpins the main contenders in the neoliberal project, such as centre-
left and nationalist projects. In spite of the world's multidimensional crisis, a pro-growth
discourse in other words continues to be hegemonic: it is widely considered a matter of
common sense that continued economic growth is required .

It is also noteworthy that economic and political elites, to a large extent, continue to support the
neoliberal project, even in the face of its evident shortcomings. Indeed, the 2008 financial crisis
did not result in the weaken ing of transnational financial capital that could have paved the way
for a paradigm shift. Instead of coming to an end, neoliberal capitalism has arguably entered a
more authoritarian phase (Bruff, 2014). The main reason the power of the pre-crisis coalition
remains intact is that governments stepped in and saved the dominant fraction by means of
massive bailouts. It is a foregone conclusion that this fraction and the wider coalition behind the
neoliberal paradigm (transnational industrial capital, the middle classes and segments of
organized labour) will consider the degrowth paradigm unattractive and that such social forces
will vehemently oppose the implementation of degrowth policies (see also Rees, 2014: 97).

While degrowth advocates envision a future in which market forces play a less prominent role
than they do today, degrowth is not an antimarket project. As such, it can attract support from
certain types of market actors. In particular, it is worth noting that social enterprises, such as
cooperatives (Restakis, 2010), play a major role in the degrowth vision. Such enterprises are
defined by being ‘organisations involved at least to some extent in the market, with a clear
social, cultural and/or environmental purpose, rooted in and serving primarily the local
community and ideally having a local and/or democratic ownership structure’ (Johanisova et al.,
2013: 11). Social enterprises currently exist at the margins of a system, in which the dominant
type of business entity is profit-oriented, shareholder-owned corporations. The further
dissemination of social enterprises, which is crucial to the transitions to degrowth societies, is –
in many cases – blocked or delayed as a result of the centrifugal forces of global competition
(Wigger and Buch-Hansen, 2013). Overall, social enterprises thus (still) constitute a social force
with modest power.

Ougaard (2016: 467) notes that one of the major dividing lines in the contemporary
transnational capitalist class is between capitalists who have a material interest in the carbon-
based economy and capitalists who have a material interest in decarbonisation. The latter
group, for instance, includes manufacturers of equipment for the production of renewable
energy (ibid.: 467). As mentioned above, degrowth advocates have singled out renewable
energy as one of the sectors that needs to grow in the future. As such, it seems likely that the
owners of national and transnational companies operating in this sector would be more
positively inclined towards the degrowth project than would capitalists with a stake in the
carbon-based economy. Still, the prospect of the “green sector” emerging as a driving force
behind degrowth currently appears meagre. Being under the control of transnational capital
(Harris, 2010), such companies generally embrace the “green growth” discourse, which ‘is
deeply embedded in neoliberal capitalism’ and indeed serves to adjust this form of capitalism
‘to crises arising from contradictions within itself’ (Wanner, 2015: 23).

In addition to support from the social forces engendered by the production process, a political
project ‘also needs the political ability to mobilize majorities in parliamentary democracies, and
a sufficient measure of at least passive consent’ (van Apeldoorn and Overbeek, 2012: 5–6) if it is
to become hegemonic. As mentioned, degrowth enjoys little support in parliaments, and
certainly the pro-growth discourse is hegemonic among parties in government.5 With capital
accumulation being the most important driving force in capitalist societies, political decision-
makers are generally eager to create conditions conducive to production and the accumulation
of capital (Lindblom, 1977: 172). Capitalist states and international organisations are thus
“programmed” to facilitate capital accumulation, and do as such constitute a strategically
selective terrain that works to the disadvantage of the degrowth project.

The main advocates of the degrowth project are grassroots, small fractions of left-wing parties
and labour unions as well as academics and other citizens who are concerned about social
injustice and the environmentally unsustainable nature of societies in the rich parts of the
world. The project is thus ideationally driven in the sense that support for it is not so much
rooted in the material circumstances or short-term self-interests of specific groups or classes as
it is rooted in the conviction that degrowth is necessary if current and future generations across
the globe are to be able to lead a good life. While there is no shortage of enthusiasts and
creative ideas in the degrowth movement, it has only modest resources compared to other
political projects. To put it bluntly, the advocates of degrowth do not possess instruments that
enable them to force political decision-makers to listen to – let alone comply with – their views .
As such, they are in a weaker position than the labour union movement was in its heyday, and
they are in a far weaker position than the owners and managers of large corporations are today
(on the structural power of transnational corporations, see Gill and Law, 1989).

6. Consent

It is also safe to say that degrowth enjoys no “passive consent” from the majority of the
population. For the time being, degrowth remains unknown to most people. Yet, if it were to
become generally known, most people would probably not find the vision of a smaller economic
system appealing. This is not just a matter of degrowth being ‘a missile word that backfires’
because it triggers negative feelings in people when they first hear it (Drews and Antal, 2016). It
is also a matter of the actual content of the degrowth project.

Two issues in particular should be mentioned in this context. First, for many, the anti-capitalist
sentiments embodied in the degrowth project will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow. Today,
the vast majority of people find it almost impossible to conceive of a world without capitalism.
There is a ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic
system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher,
2009: 2). As Jameson (2003) famously observed, it is, in a sense, easier to imagine the end of
the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. However, not only is degrowth – like other
anti-capitalist projects – up against the challenge that most people consider capitalism the only
system that can function; it is also up against the additional challenge that it speaks against
economic growth in a world where the desirability of growth is considered common sense.

Second, degrowth is incompatible with the lifestyles to which many of us who live in rich
countries have become accustomed. Economic growth in the Western world is, to no small
extent, premised on the existence of consumer societies and an associated consumer culture
most of us find it difficult to completely escape. In this culture, social status, happiness, well-
being and identity are linked to consumption (Jackson, 2009). Indeed, it is widely considered a
natural right to lead an environmentally unsustainable lifestyle – a lifestyle that includes car
ownership, air travel, spacious accommodations, fashionable clothing, an omnivorous diet and
all sorts of electronic gadgets. This Western norm of consumption has increasingly been
exported to other parts of the world, the result being that never before have so many people
taken part in consumption patterns that used to be reserved for elites (Koch, 2012). If degrowth
were to be institutionalised, many citizens in the rich countries would have to adapt to a
materially lower standard of living. That is, while the basic needs of the global population can be
met in a non-growing economy, not all wants and preferences can be fulfilled (Koch et al., 2017).
Undoubtedly, many people in the rich countries would experience various limitations on their
consumption opportunities as a violent encroachment on their personal freedom. Indeed,
whereas many recognize that contemporary consumer societies are environmentally
unsustainable, fewer are prepared to actually change their own lifestyles to reverse/address
this.

At present, then, the degrowth project is in its “deconstructive phase”, i.e., the phase in which
its advocates are able to present a powerful critique of the prevailing neoliberal project and
point to alternative solutions to crisis. At this stage, not enough support has been mobilised
behind the degrowth project for it to be elevated to the phases of “construction” and
“consolidation”. It is conceivable that at some point, enough people will become sufficiently
discontent with the existing economic system and push for something radically different.
Reasons for doing so could be the failure of the system to satisfy human needs and/or its
inability to resolve the multidimensional crisis confronting humanity. Yet, various material and
ideational path-dependencies currently stand in the way of such a development, particularly in
countries with large middle-classes. Even if it were to happen that the majority wanted a break
with the current system, it is far from given that a system based on the ideas of degrowth is
what they would demand.

Transition causes more consumption, not less

Monbiot 09

George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2009, Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial
apocalypse?, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-
climate-change

I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a
yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of
a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can agree that the
immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that
keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight
on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our
minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current
settlement.

Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2
When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes.

From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can
surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all
others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the
biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no
longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence,
opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the
absence of political restraint.

From the second and third observations, this follows: instead of gathering as free collectives of
happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to
monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political
accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these
circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first
global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species' remaining
time on earth. To imagine that good could come of the involuntary failure of industrial
civilisation is also to succumb to denial. The answer to your question – what will we learn from
this collapse? – is nothing.

Reject try or die – there’s no evidence for a transition

Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh 10, Department of Spatial Economics, Faculty of Economics and
Business Administration, Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and
Tinbergen Institute, Environment versus growth — A criticism of “degrowth” and a plea for “a-
growth”, Ecological Economics, Elsevier

The main problem I see here that this is such a grand, imprecise idea which lacks a good,
thorough analysis that it will be impossible to obtain political support for it in a democratic
system. More importantly, it is void of a good view on systemic solutions and instrumentation,
making it unclear how to upscale radical changes in lifestyles and grassroots initiatives by small
subsets of the population (“niches”) to society as a whole. Alternative lifestyles, i.e. outside the
cultural norm, have always existed but have never been adopted by the large majority of
people. So why would this now suddenly be different? This does, of course, not mean such
lifestyles need not exist or do not deserve respect. They may influence slow change in dominant
lifestyles, but cannot be expected to be copied by the masses. Writings on this issue tend to be
normative and idealistic rather than analytical and realistic. They seem to be motivated more by
political ideology about justice and equity than about solving urgent and threatening
environmental problems (an “ecological imperative”). As a result, they do not necessarily
offer an effective approach to combat environmental problems . One can certainly be positive
about the underlying humanistic ideals of equality, solidarity, citizenship, locality and “good
life.” However, a drastic change in the economy upfront seems an overly risky experiment
and a diffuse, undirected strategy that is not sure to meet the desired environmental aims .
Moreover, it may well result in unintended social and economic chaos and instability. The main
historical, large-scale experiments aimed at moving away from market capitalism which we can
learn from, namely central planning by communist states as in the former USSR, Eastern Europe
and China, certainly do not offer a good record in terms of clean production and environmental
regulation — quite the opposite. Here, a lack of market mechanisms and other incentives
seems to have given rise to excessive waste and inefficiency , also in relation to
environmentally relevant categories of inputs and outputs.

Environment doesn't cause extinction

Science Daily 13
Science Daily, Citing research by Barry Brook, Professor at the University of Adelaide, leading
environmental scientist, holding the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the School of
Earth and Environmental Sciences, and is also Director of Climate Science at the University of
Adelaide’s Environment Institute, author of 3 books and over 250 scholarly articles, February 28,
2013, "Global Tipping Point Not Backed by Science, Experts Argue",
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130228093412.htm

A group of international ecological scientists led by the University of Adelaide have rejected a
doomsday-like scenario of sudden, irreversible change to Earth's ecology.

In a paper published Feb. 28 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the scientists from
Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom argue that global-scale ecological tipping
points are unlikely and that ecological change over large areas seem to follow a more gradual,
smooth pattern.

This opposes recent efforts to define 'planetary tipping points' ‒ critical levels of biodiversity loss
or land-use change that would have global effect ‒ with important implications for science and
policy-makers.

"This is good news because it says that we might avoid the doom-and-gloom scenario of abrupt,
irreversible change," says Professor Barry Brook, lead author of the paper and Director of
Climate Science at the University of Adelaide. "A focus on planetary tipping points may both
distract from the vast ecological transformations that have already occurred, and lead to
unjustified fatalism about the catastrophic effects of tipping points.

"An emphasis on a point of no return is not particularly helpful for bringing about the
conservation action we need. We must continue to seek to reduce our impacts on the global
ecology without undue attention on trying to avoid arbitrary thresholds."

A tipping point occurs when an ecosystem attribute such as species abundance or carbon
sequestration responds rapidly and possibly irreversibly to a human pressure like land-use
change or climate change.

Many local and regional-level ecosystems, such as lakes and grasslands, are known to behave
this way. A planetary tipping point, the authors suggest, could theoretically occur if ecosystems
across Earth respond in similar ways to the same human pressures, or if there are strong
connections between continents that allow for rapid diffusion of impacts across the planet.

"These criteria, however, are very unlikely to be met in the real world," says Professor Brook.
"First, ecosystems on different continents are not strongly connected . Second, the responses of
ecosystems to human pressures like climate change or land-use change depend on local
circumstances and will therefore differ between localities."

The scientists examined four principal drivers of terrestrial ecosystem change ‒ climate change,
land-use change, habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss ‒ and found they were unlikely to
induce global tipping points.

Growth sustainable - population and tech

Mead 3/23/14
Walter Russell Mead, IR Prof at Bard College, Senior fellow at CFR, Senior Editor at the American
Interest, The American Interest, March 23, 2014, "Kicking Malthus While He’s Down",
http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/23/kicking-malthus-while-hes-down/

Overpopulation has long been a favorite concern of doomsayers, but analysis of a few key long
term trends puts this anachronistic fear to bed. The Breakthrough Institute took a look at the
data, and found the Malthusian dread wanting.

In the 1960s, the notion of a “Population Bomb” terrified the world’s best and brightest, and
kicked off what has become a pernicious and increasingly unfounded belief that humans would
continue to grow exponentially until they outstripped the natural resources supporting them,
leading to a massive die-off unrivaled in scope. Sounds scary, right? But since its peak in the late
1960s, population growth has steadily declined.

Moreover, humanity has since then repeatedly proven its remarkable ability to innovate, to
think of new ways to do more with less. Energy efficiencies have steadily increased, and new
technologies (like desalination, or the ability to make a farm out of a desert). As the
Breakthrough Institute reports, technological progress means the world’s carrying capacity—its
ability to support human life—is no fixed variable:

It is sometimes suggested that there are hard biological limits to how much food the Earth can
produce, but ever since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago humans have been
consistently increasing yields through the use of new technologies. Indeed, it has been
increasing yields that have allowed the human population to grow to its current population of
seven billion. In this sense, the Earth’s carrying capacity is not bound by a finite set of planetary
boundaries, but rather is a function of human technology. [Emphasis added]

Read the whole thing. It’s more dirt on Malthus’s grave, and injects some much-needed
optimism in to our future outlook. Yes, there are plenty of environmental concerns that still
need to be addressed, and yes, we still haven’t perfected a balance between sustainability and
growth. But we’re making progress, and it isn’t thanks to the ascetic greens who purport to
have the planet’s best interest at heart. It’s the creative minds who will keep the Earth
producing.

The transition would be violent which is separate offense for us AND means
that it would inevitably fail- their own authors
Koch and Büchs 19 [Max Koch, Faculty of Social Sciences, Socialhögskolan, Lund University,
Milena Büchs, Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of
Leeds, “Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing”, Futures Volume
105, January 2019, Pages 155-165,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328718300715#!]

3.2. Implications of rapidly transforming social systems

The social practices lens is also useful for thinking about possible wellbeing implications of rapid
social change more generally, and a transition away from a growth-based economy specifically.
While the concept of social practices inherently implies the possibility of change (with its focus
on agency and creativity), it equally strongly highlights the structural aspects of practices which
provide stability and orientation. During times of rapid social transitions, social norms and
‘mental infrastructures’ often lag behind, creating disorientation, social conflict, and negative
impacts on wellbeing (Büchs & Koch, 2017: ch. 6).

Stability of structural dimensions of social practices offers orientation and some extent of
predictability of how oneself and other people are likely to act in the future, providing a
framework within which flexibility and change are possible. This orienting function of structural
dimensions of practices is likely to be an important condition for people to form reasonably
stable identities and relationships – key ingredients for wellbeing. Examples from classical and
contemporary sociological and psychological research suggest that different speeds of changing
social structures can establish misalignments and disruptions of social practices which can, in
turn, negatively influence health and other wellbeing outcomes. For instance, in his classical
study, Durkheim presents suicide at least partly as an outcome of a failure of cultural resources
to provide meaning and orientation in the context of other, more rapid social changes
(Durkheim, 2006; Vega & Rumbaut, 1991: 375). This idea also links to Bourdieu’s concept of the
“hysteresis effect”. Here, Bourdieu emphasises that, especially during phases of social transition,
people’s habitus and “objective” social circumstances can become disjointed : as a result of
hysteresis, dispositions can be “out of line with the field and with the ‘ collective expectations’
which are constitutive of its normality. This is the case, in particular, when a field undergoes a
major crisis and its regularities (even its rules) are profoundly changed” (Bourdieu, 2000: 160).
This can contribute to a deterioration of people’s wellbeing as it makes them feel “out of place”
or let them be perceived that way, “plung[ing] them deeper into failure” (Bourdieu, 2000: 161)
because they cannot make use of new opportunities or are mistreated or socially excluded by
others.

Empirical research which partly builds on the idea of hysteresis has shown that wide-ranging
organisational change can have a range of negative effects on people’s health and mortality
(Ferrie et al., 1998; McDonough & Polzer, 2012). One study found that across 174 countries,
several measures of wellbeing and social performance, including life satisfaction, health, safety
and trust, voice and accountability, were highest in periods of economic stability, but lower in
times of GDP growth or contraction (O’Neill, 2015); and other studies concluded that life
expectancy can be negatively affected by both rapid economic growth and contraction (Notzon
et al., 1998; Szreter, 1999).

Several scholars have recently highlighted the potential for social conflict inherent in (rapid)
social change. For instance, Maja Göpel (2016: 49) remarks: “Unsurprisingly, the navigation or
transition phase in shifting paradigms as well as governance solutions is marked by chaos,
politicization, unease and power-ridden struggles”. Wolfgang Streeck has issued similar
warnings (Streeck et al., 2016: 169). It is not difficult to see how such scenarios bear the
potential of undermining some of the fundamental conditions that are necessary for the
satisfaction of basic needs as discussed above, and hence the danger of generating substantial
wellbeing losses for current and near-future generations.
In the current context, it is very difficult to imagine that we might be able to observe a rapid
and radical cultural change in which people adopt identities and related lifestyles that value
intrinsically motivated activities over pursuing satisfaction and status through careers and
consumption. Even more worryingly, political events in Europe, the United States and elsewhere
since the ‘Great Crash’ of 2008 indicate that times of negative or stagnant growth can provide a
breeding ground for populist, nationalistic and anti-democratic movements. Economic
insecurity, a perceived threat of established identities through migrants, and deep mistrust
against ‘elite’ politicians are amongst the main explanations for previously unimaginable events
such as the Brexit vote, Trump presidency, and recent electoral successes for far right-wing
parties in a range of European countries.

Elites react with war – if goods don’t cross borders, then soldiers will.
Liu ’18 [Qian; November 2; Economist, Managing Director at Greater China, citing the
economist Thomas Piketty and political scientist Samuel Huntington; Project Syndicate,
“From economic crisis to World War III,” p. 1-2; RP]
The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in
the
current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with
rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict. The 2008-09
global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse.
Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including
quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-
start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires
structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labour markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and
education policies. Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they
have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now
seems to take more time than actual governing. Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep
its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment. The
lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies
was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing
before 2008. In the United States, housing prices are now 8% higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in
2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market
prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.
As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger
another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have
built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular
adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has
severely depleted their power to stabilise and stimulate the economy. If history is any
guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s
Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been characterised also by
public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to
fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war. For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert
Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign
competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World
War II had begun. To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path
to war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in
stoking conflict. According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income
inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until
a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this
correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high levels.
This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and
diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis,
anxiety over globalisation, political polarisation, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of
failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis. Voters have good reason to be
frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving their support are
offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For example, despite the world’s
unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being eschewed, as
countries – most notably, Donald J. Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies. Meanwhile,
proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen. Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility
that the next economic crisis could lead to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of
the political scientist Samuel Huntington, considering such a scenario could help us avoid it because it would force us to take
action. In this case, the
key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long
promised while
replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue.
The alternative may well be global conflagration.

Data proves all forms of violence – state, structural, and environmental – are
declining – because of capitalism
--this book does not cite Pinker, they cite a variety of sources with different datasets, focusing
on the post-Cold War period coinciding with the rise of neoliberal global capitalism including:

--interstate war: Therese Pettersson and Kristine Eck, “Organized Violence, 1989–2017,” Journal
of Peace Research, June 18, 2018,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022343318784101; Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter
Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand, “Armed Conflict 1946–
2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–637.

--state killings of civilians: from Jay Ulfelder’s work for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s
Center for the Prevention of Genocide, data set is based on one that Dartmouth’s Ben Valentino
created for the Political Instability Task Force

Cohen and Zenko 19 (Michael A. Cohen, former lecturer at Columbia University’s School of
International and Public Affairs, regular contributor for The Boston Globe on national politics
and foreign affairs, has written for dozens of news outlets, including as a columnist for the
Guardian and Foreign Policy, US Political Correspondent for the London Observer, former
speechwriter at the US State Department; and Micah Zenko, Whitehead Senior Fellow on the US
and Americas Programme at Chatham House, former Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, former research associate on the Project on Managing The Atom, Harvard University's
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, PhD Politics, Brandeis University; Clear and
Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better And Why That Matters To Americans, Yale
University Press, Kindle Edition, 2019, locations 57-712)
Introduction Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. —Bertrand Russell On a crisp January day in 2016, in the small hamlet of
Pittsfield, New Hampshire, several hundred voters were gathered for what is a quadrennial rite of passage in the Granite State: listening to a politician make his or her pitch to be the next president of the United
States. The speaker this day was Chris Christie, who was then the Republican governor of New Jersey and one of more than a dozen presidential candidates campaigning across the state. Christie discussed
everything from illicit drugs and immigration to the federal budget and the U.S. war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. “He was pretty good,” one woman unenthusiastically shrugged after he finished. But
as she struggled to say anything of substance, it seemed clear that Christie had not made much of an impression. When asked, though, if any specific policy issue took on particular importance, her face lit up: “ISIS.
I’m really worried about ISIS.” The thought of her kids and grandkids growing up in a world where groups like the Islamic State would be threatening their future seemed to cause her genuine and palpable
concern.1 The woman’s anxieties were sincere, but her fear could not have been more misplaced. The Islamic State had yet to launch even one direct terrorist attack within the United States, and if the group had
drawn up a list of potential targets, the chances that Pittsfield, New Hampshire—an hour’s drive north of Manchester—would be high on that list were decidedly slim. At a time of ever-widening income inequality,
stagnant wage growth, gun violence, and a raging opioid epidemic that in the previous year had claimed 422 lives in New Hampshire alone, this woman considered a shadowy terrorist group that had not killed a
single American on U.S. soil one of the biggest challenges facing the country.2 She was far from alone. Public opinion polling consistently shows that Americans have long exaggerated the danger that terrorism
represents to the United States. Since 9/11 the average number of Americans killed yearly in a terrorist attack is twenty-seven—and 90 percent of them were in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yet, in 2018, 81 percent of
Americans ranked “cyberterrorism” as the most critical threat facing the United States, followed by international terrorism at 75 percent.3 Eighty-three percent of voters expect that a major terrorist incident with
large numbers of casualties is likely to occur in the near future. Remarkably, in November 2017, more than half (52 percent) of Americans thought the United States was less safe then than it was before 9/11—as
if the trillions spent on homeland security and fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan had done nothing to make America less vulnerable to international terrorism. Seventeen years after September 11, the
outsized fears of another 9/11-style terrorist attack provided compelling—and depressing—evidence that terrorist groups had succeeded, beyond their wildest imaginations, in transforming American society.4 It
is not just armed jihadists that scare Americans. A 2012 poll showed that six out of seven Americans agree that “the United States faces greater threats to its security today than it did during the Cold War”—a time
when the United States found itself in the crosshairs of approximately ten thousand nuclear weapons, each with a destructive power up to fifty times that of the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.5
How Americans, such as this woman from a small town in the “Live Free or Die” state, became convinced that the United States faces such acute and harmful foreign threats is, at its core, the story of this book.
The American public is being fed, by politicians and pundits alike, a steady diet of threat inflation that has made them deeply fearful of the world outside their borders. They have become convinced that overseas
menaces are perpetually becoming more likely, lethal, and complex. The world is forever on fire; America is always getting weaker; and its citizens are facing a constant drumbeat of tremendous and unceasing
risks. The pervasiveness of threat inflation is such conventional wisdom that alternative—or even less threatening—descriptions of the world are largely nonexistent in foreign policy debates. As a result, most
Americans are simply unaware of the extraordinary and unprecedented political, economic, and social progress that has taken place in virtually every corner of the globe over the past three decades. On that
January day in New Hampshire, while alluding to the national debate on the balance between security and privacy, Christie declared ominously, “You can’t protect civil liberties from a coffin.” Pittsfield voters who
had watched the most recently aired Republican presidential debate would have heard former Florida governor Jeb Bush tell them that the Islamic State had formed “a caliphate the size of Indiana with .  . . 30,000
to 40,000 battle-tested soldiers that are organized to destroy our way of life.”6 They would have heard candidate and former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson claim that dirty bombs and cyberattacks are, “in
fact, an existential threat to us.”7 Those following the Republican primaries would have heard Donald Trump, the eventual Republican nominee and president of the United States, tell them that the only way to
keep America safe was to ban all Muslims from entering the country, torture suspected terrorists, and “take out” (murder) their families.8 As regular consumers of news, Republican voters might have heard South
Carolina senator Lindsey Graham tell Americans, “The world is literally about to blow up,” in January 2014 (spoiler: it did not).9 They might have caught Sen. John McCain, who, having been born in 1936, had lived
through conflicts that killed an estimated sixty million people and had fought in one of those wars, say in 2015, “We are probably in the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime.”10 Perhaps in the spring of
2017, they caught secretary for homeland security John Kelly claiming, “Make no mistake—we are a nation under attack” and “We are under attack every single day. The threats are relentless.”11 Or, in the
summer of 2018, they might have heard his boss, President Trump, warn that “people coming in from the Middle East” would come across the border by using “children to get through the lines.”12 This incessant,
default threat-mongering is neither a partisan issue nor a habit reserved for elected officials. Those Americans tuning in to CNN in October 2014 might have the chyron asking the hypothetical question “Ebola: ‘The
ISIS of Biological Agents?’ ”13 Maybe they saw local reporting on defense secretary Chuck Hagel saying, “Cyber threats . . . are just as real and deadly and lethal as anything we’ve ever dealt with,” or New York
senator Kirsten Gillibrand calling Iran an “existential threat” to America, or perhaps Arkansas senator Tom Cotton warning that the Islamic State, in coordination with Mexican drug cartels, could infiltrate the
border and “attack us right here.”14 Even if viewers missed all that, they would have found it far more difficult to avoid the nonstop news coverage of the latest terrorist attack in Paris, Barcelona, or London. Even
more important than what Americans hear from the nation’s leaders is what they do not hear. They do not hear that terrorism harms fewer Americans each year than falling televisions and furniture, bathtub
drownings, and lightning strikes do. Annually, more Americans lose their lives from these three rare killers—roughly thirty-three, eighty-five, and forty fatalities, respectively—than at the hands of wild-eyed
Islamic jihadists.15 These numbers pale next to the number of Americans killed each year prematurely by preventable, noncommunicable diseases (more than 2.5 million), suicide (44,100), and gun homicides
(14,400). In short, Americans do not hear that America is unusually safe and secure from foreign threats. Part of this is a function of geography, but it is also true that the United States faces no serious great-power
rival and no near-term political or economic competitor. So it should not be surprising that 86 percent of Americans view Russia’s military power as either an important or a critical threat to America, even though
Russia is hemmed in by NATO, has a moribund economy, and has no enduring military partnerships in South Asia, the Middle East (outside of Syria), or the Western Hemisphere. Nor should it be surprising that 87
percent of Americans are concerned about China’s military power even though China faces its own pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges—and its primary near-term interest is maintaining
Communist Party rule, not directly challenging the United States. Nor should it be surprising that 75 percent of Americans called the development of nuclear weapons by Iran a “critical threat”—even though Iran
has surrendered its nuclear fuel and has allowed invasive inspections of its nuclear facilities through at least 2030.16 Finally, we should not be surprised that half the American people believe that U.S. armed
forces are not the number-one military in the world, even though the United States spends more on national defense than the next nine nations combined, is allied or has mutual defense treaties with five of those
countries, enjoys long-term security partnerships in every region of the world (outside Antarctica), and is, quite simply, the world’s most dominant nation and more secure than any other great power in history.17

the world today

In addition, the Republican primary voters in Pittsfield—or those who voted for a president who regularly told them “the world is a mess”—almost certainly did not hear that

is cumulatively more peaceful, freer, healthier, better educated, and wealthier than at any
point in human history.18 Like most Americans, they would not have heard that in the year 2015 the proportion of people
living in extreme poverty (on less than two dollars a day) dropped to below 10 percent of the global population,
the lowest level ever and down from close to 50 percent in 1981 .19 They are likely unaware that AIDS deaths have
declined for more than fifteen years in a row, global life expectancy has increased by seven
years since 1990 alone, and child mortality rates (for children under five years old) has been
halved over that same period . Unbeknownst to them and the overwhelming majority of Americans, improvements in polio vaccines and delivery methods have practically
eradicated the disease (just eleven active global cases by July 2018), saving more than 650,000 lives since 1988.20 What is most remarkable about all these

positive developments is that they are uncontestable—the data are simply that strong. This fundamental
disconnect between what Americans have been encouraged to believe about the world and the reality of global affairs is the most critical foreign policy issue facing the United States today. The American people
are being sold a dangerous bill of goods that is distorting our foreign policy choices and leading politicians and policy makers to focus more on the threats that Americans perceive, rather than the ones that
actually exist. This strategic misdiagnosis has led to consistently mistaken foreign (and domestic) policy choices that are diverting resources and attention away from the actual dangers that Americans face in their
homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Every dollar spent bombing and then rebuilding Middle Eastern countries, modernizing a duplicative nuclear weapons arsenal, or building the next generation of combat
aircraft that are intended to fight yesterday’s enemies means less money for America’s greatest domestic challenges. This includes America’s underperforming schools; a health care system that performs far
worse than those of other affluent countries; crumbling roads, bridges, and water systems in places like Flint, Michigan; inadequate preparation for the inevitable and irreversible effects of climate change; and a
tattered social safety net that is a far cry from those enjoyed by other developed countries. Pointing out that foreign threats pose a relatively insignificant risk to Americans compared to vastly greater domestic

not to suggest that the United States should pull up the drawbridge and abandon
dangers and systemic harms is

its global role. If anything, at a time of relative peace and stability in the world, smart American
leadership and active involvement in global affairs are more important than ever. In the seventy-plus years since
the end of World War II, the United States, along with its allies and partners, has helped construct an international

system that limits large-scale interstate conflict; encourages democratization, adherence to the
rule of law, and respect for human rights; and advances human development . The challenge for
the next generation of U.S. policy makers is to solidify the gains that have been made and to
ensure that this extraordinary progress is not reversed . For that to happen, Americans must change the ways they think and talk about foreign
policy and national security—and the first step is to acknowledge that foreign-threat inflation and the corresponding policy choices that it encourages are a problem. Americans need to think about the world in a
whole new way, one that is more accurate and more uplifting than the dystopian view promoted by politicians and pundits. In the following six chapters, we will spell out how this paradigm shift might occur. First,

Great-power
there must be greater recognition that potential rivals and complex issues—frequently portrayed as dangers to Americans—are, in reality, relatively minor threats to Americans.

wars have disappeared, interstate wars have become vanishingly rare, and the world is a safer
and freer place than it has ever been in human history . Second, there needs to be better appreciation of the extraordinary
global progress that has been made over the past several decades —and why it benefits the American people. The world
today is healthier than would have been scarcely imaginable decades ago and is far richer and
better educated than ever before. It is also more united and interconnected through travel,
communications, economic links, and diplomatic relations. These trends make this current era
of relative peace, safety, and prosperity not a momentary blip but, more likely than not, the
future reality of global affairs. Third, it is imperative that Americans rethink what “national security” means and focus on the systemic dangers that diminish economic
opportunities and the American people’s basic quality of life. From noncommunicable diseases to gun violence to crippling political dysfunction, the things that actually injure and kill us receive rare moments of
national attention, while foreign terrorists and other outside threats perpetually occupy our minds. Political attention, policy changes, and expanded government resources can significantly—and cost-effectively—
reduce these risks, but that will happen only if Americans recognize the need to address them. Fourth, the loose collection of politicians, government officials, pundits, private security firms, think tankers,
academics, cable news hosts, and news editors that we call the Threat-Industrial Complex demands far greater scrutiny. These are the individuals—and institutions—who shape public perceptions about
international relations and promulgate a false narrative of danger and insecurity. Fifth, our modern era of threat inflation must be placed in a larger political and historical context: namely, as an enduring feature
of American politics and foreign policy debates since World War II. From “missile gaps” and the “domino theory” to the “evil empire” and “evildoers,” foreign threats have been consistently manipulated both in
times of actual danger and in times of genuine peace and security. Sixth, to dramatize our argument, we offer a case study and cautionary tale of how threat inflation occurs and its larger political consequences:
namely, the response to the tragedy of September 11. Public statements and policy decisions made by President George W. Bush and his administration set the tone, agenda, and political incentives of our
contemporary fear-mongering but also wasted opportunities in a disproportionate response to a relatively minor and manageable threat. Finally, we lay out recommendations for reversing this unbalanced
perspective and approach to foreign policy that will answer the question of what a U.S. domestic and global policy—properly informed by a more accurate understanding of the world—should look like. This book
is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of threat inflation or the final word about the nature and degree of foreign threats facing the United States and its citizens. As has been true for the past 240 years,
the degree to which foreign dangers threaten America and its citizens has changed dramatically over time and will continue to evolve in ways that nobody can predict today. Nonetheless, it is quantitatively true
that the current global environment is one of relatively few foreign threats, particularly in comparison to other great powers and to America’s historical experience. The fixation of American foreign policy and
national security should not be what former president John Quincy Adams spoke of nearly two hundred years ago: namely, the impulse to look “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Rather, it must be to
remain focused on ensuring that today’s hopeful present is America’s brighter future. A Safer and Freer World I think, what we need to do is to remind people that the earth is a very dangerous place these days.
—White House press secretary Sean Spicer, February 7, 2017 February 16, 2012, was, from all appearances, an unremarkable day. The political world was focused on the upcoming Republican presidential primary
in Michigan, in which the frontrunner, Mitt Romney, was facing a spirited challenge from former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. Journalists were mourning the loss of the New York Times reporter Anthony
Shadid, who had died on a reporting trip to Syria. New Yorkers obsessed over the Knicks’ budding superstar point guard, Jeremy Lin; the Simpsons marked its five hundredth episode; and Chinese President Xi
Jinping was in Iowa hoping, as the Washington Post put it, “to emphasize the idea of an enduring U.S.-Chinese friendship.”1 Yet, on Capitol Hill, the most senior officer in the world’s most powerful military,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, saw something else altogether: danger. Testifying before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on budget sequestration—the congressional
mandate passed in 2011 that required all federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to automatically cut their budgets by 5 to 10 percent in the following decade—Dempsey warned, “in my personal military
judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.”2 This is a surprising statement. After all, Martin Dempsey was born in March 1952, during the tail end
of the Korean War—which killed more than two million people, including 36,574 Americans. When he attended elementary school, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear holocaust than at
any other point during the Cold War. By the time he enlisted in the army in 1974, the Vietnam War had been going on for several years and before it ended would take the lives of more than three million people,
including 58,220 Americans. As Dempsey rose through the military ranks, he witnessed the strategic nuclear arms buildup of the 1980s, when the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of
nuclear-armed missiles pointed at each other. Later, on September 11, 2001, the most lethal terrorist attack in American history took the lives of nearly three thousand people. While all of these events directly
affected Americans, there were plenty of other dangerous moments in Dempsey’s lifetime, such as the Biafra separatist civil war in Nigeria that killed two hundred thousand, the Angolan civil war in which one
million people died, the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia that took the lives of approximately a quarter of that nation’s eight million people, the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s that killed more than one
million people, and the internationalized civil war in Congo that has led to three million war-related deaths since the mid-1990s.3 Yet, if Dempsey is to be taken literally, none of those moments compared to the
dangers facing the world on the morning of February 16, 2012. What made Dempsey’s statement particularly odd was an observation he made one year later testifying before Congress: “I will personally attest to
the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it’s ever been”—in other words, since the earth was fully formed 4.6 billion years ago.4 Though Dempsey’s comments were clearly hyperbolic—and easily
disprovable—they garnered little attention. In a political environment dominated by habitual threat inflation, they barely stand out. Indeed, two years after Dempsey’s testimony, the director of national
intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress, “looking back over my more than half a century in intelligence, I have not experienced a time when we have been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.”
Remarkably, he had made virtually the same statement—word for word—a year earlier when testifying before Congress.5 In January 2015, army chief of staff Gen. Raymond Odierno told the Senate Armed
Services Committee, “today the global environment is the most uncertain I have seen in my thirty-six years of service.”6 This assertion was especially well received by the committee’s chairman, Sen. John McCain,
who only days before had proclaimed, “we are probably in the most serious period of turmoil in our lifetime.”7 In November 2017, Air Force Lt. Gen. Steve Kwast went further back in time proclaiming, “There’s no
question that this generation . . . is living in the most dangerous time since the Civil War for the Republic.”8 There are specific bureaucratic and political reasons for such apocalyptic descriptions of the global
environment (the more vivid the threat, the more likely Congress will be to maintain military and intelligence-community funding). Such views, however, are mimicked across the national security community.
Indeed, in the elite world of foreign policy punditry (and national politics), the notion of grave, growing, and irreversible dangers facing the United States is the default (and unchanging) position. So we should not
be surprised that most Americans think the world is getting more and more dangerous.9 In the immediate aftermath of the bombing of a subway train and airport terminal in Brussels in March 2016, MSNBC news
anchor Brian Williams asked Senator McCain if the world was on the verge of World War III. McCain unsurprisingly said yes.10 Sen. Lindsay Graham, then in the running for the Republican nomination for
president, echoed these fears, claiming, “there is a sickness in the world that has to be dealt with, and the civilized world must come together to confront it.”11 Quite simply, this is the lingua franca of the Threat-

In virtually no element of our national discourse are

Industrial Complex. There is one problem: this image of the world is completely wrong.

Americans provided with a more inaccurate depiction of the world than when it comes to
matters of war, peace, and freedom. Americans live in a world that is safer and freer than ever
before in human history—and it is not even close. To state this is not to be insensitive to those
who are suffering real harms or being denied their personal freedoms. It doesn’t mean one is
naïve to the potential of current global challenges—some of which are neither illusory nor false
—to become serious threats in the future. But facts are facts, and the transformation in the
human experience over the past two to three decades is the most consequential global trend in
security affairs in any of our lifetimes—and it is largely unknown to the wider public . A Safer World The
data supporting the proposition that the world is safer than ever are so overwhelming that they can
barely be disputed. For example, interstate war, or war between states, was the defining characteristic of international relations for centuries. Today, such wars have
largely disappeared. Since 2012, there have been just two interstate wars: one between Sudan
and South Sudan in 2012 and one between India and Pakistan in 2014 and 2015 that led to
fewer than one hundred fatalities in total over both years .12 In the seven years before 2010, there
was one major interstate conflict—started by the U nited States in Iraq in March 2003.13 How about great-power conflict?
These protracted and bloody wars—such as the Thirty Years’ War, World War I, and World War II—

have been historically the most devastating and consequential conflicts. They’ve repeatedly led
to massive death tolls of soldiers and civilians, forced transfers of millions of people , and the redrawing of
national boundaries to the benefit of the victors. As the historian Timothy Snyder has documented in Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 10.5 million civilians (Germans, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians,
and Jews from various countries) were killed by Germany and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945.14 Put another way by the eminent British historian Max Hastings, approximately twenty-seven thousand
people lost their lives every single day of that conflict.15 That means that during World War II, between a given Monday and Thursday, there would have been as many deaths as there were battle-related deaths

in all of 2016.16 Despite the December 2015 claim by Chris Christie that the United States was “already in World War III,” the world has not seen such a total
global conflict in more than seven decades .17 All of this might sound like apostasy when you consider the daily fare on cable news segments, in social media
feeds, and in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. Foreign reporting in these outlets has been dominated in recent years by North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, stories of terrorist attacks in Iraq and
western Europe, a bloody civil war in Syria that has killed an estimated five hundred thousand people, the barbaric cruelty of the Islamic State, Russia’s meddling in its near abroad, and China’s campaign of

building military facilities on disputed territories in the South China Sea.18 For those whose lives are directly affected, these crises are serious matters. But alarmist coverage of these
global hot spots has deluded Americans into believing that the world is a chronically violent
place. It’s not. In fact, modern war is not only a rare occurrence, but when it does happen, it
tends to be less violent and of shorter duration. On average, conflicts kill about 80 percent
fewer people now than in the 1950s, when wars in Korea, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa took millions of lives.19 The vastly greater
harm today is the displacement of civilians caught up in the fighting between combatants . By June 2018,
sixty-eight million people around the world had been forced from their homes.20 To the credit of the United Nations, international organizations, and nongovernmental groups, the breadth and

depth of understanding about the underlying dynamics and drivers of conflict have expanded
dramatically, and there now exist far more tools for preventing and mitigating such armed
violence. Not surprisingly, conflict gets more attention than does the successful use of international and
regional conflict-prevention methods to prevent wars from occurring in the first place. The wars
that never occurred between Israel and Iran, Peru and Ecuador, Russia and its Baltic neighbors,
and Turkey and Russia after the shooting down of a Russian fighter in 2016 receive precious little
attention. Despite routine alarms of mounting tensions between China and its neighbors over
territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, conflict there has been avoided. This is true
of the overwhelming number of maritime and land disputes , which a majority of countries
have with their neighbors. Additionally, of the 430 bilateral maritime boundaries in the world, most are not defined by formal agreements between affected states.
Unfortunately, peace, even between bitter adversaries, is not an “event” worth recognizing,
much less celebrating; the dominant media narrative is that of an ever-threatening world .21 The
current era of relative peace and stability has also contributed to a notable decline in the
prevalence of state-directed mass killings of civilians.22 During the Cold War, approximately one in seven countries experienced a state-sponsored
mass killing. This number increased to nearly 25 percent immediately after the Berlin Wall came down and declined to between 5 and 10 percent by the 2010s.23 In fact, far fewer people have been killed in war in
the past quarter century than in any other quarter century over the past six hundred years. In 1800, one out of every two thousand people on earth—civilians and combatants—died from a combat-related death;

in 1900, it was one in every twenty thousand; by 2016, it was one in every one hundred thousand.24 The overall decline in global conflict has had
extraordinary ripple effects. William Tecumseh Sherman famously declared in 1879 that “war is hell,” but his words barely capture the full costs of warfare and armed violence. As
one would expect, warfare significantly limits life expectancy . The Syrian civil war, for example, reduced life spans there from 79.5 years before 2011 to 55.7 in

2015, an extraordinary twenty-year decline in just a four-year period.25 Children living in conflict-affected poor countries are twice as

likely to die before their fifth birthday as are children in other poor countries, and warfare
diminishes educational opportunities at all levels as well as overall quality of life . For example, children who grow up
in conflict-affected countries are less likely to be literate and far less likely to be enrolled in primary school.26 Beyond the immediate human costs, wars do

untold physical and environmental damage. In 2016, a time of relative peace and stability, all of the world’s armed conflicts combined cost the global economy
an estimated $14.3 trillion. That is nearly 12.5 percent of global GDP.27 The relationship between conflict and economic distress is self-perpetuating—just as war drains government coffers, economic slowdowns
also increase the likelihood of the outbreak and recurrence of conflict. Finally, conflict-prone countries are far less democratic, and, in fact, the presence of an autocratic government increases the risk of a civil war
starting within that government’s territory.28 As noted previously, this matters because civil wars—including those like Syria’s that became “internationalized” with external support—are virtually the only type of

Ironically, Americans tend to see the world as far more dangerous than it
armed conflicts that still occur in the world today.

is precisely because the world is safer. Conflicts that were once far more routine have become
more unusual and thus receive greater (and more vivid) media attention. This bolsters the
impression that we live in a world of constant conflict when compared to recent history . Yet it is often
forgotten exactly how bloody the final years of the Cold War were, particularly in comparison to today. The Cold War is mistakenly remembered as an era of relative quiet in which Washington and Moscow co-
managed global affairs. For example, in February 2016, Clapper said the reason there were more threats than at any point in his seventy-three-year lifetime was the disappearance of the superpower rivalry
between the United States and Soviet Union. “Virtually all other threats were sort of subsumed in that basic bipolar contest that went on for decades and was characterized by stability,” said Clapper.29 Yet, in the
decade preceding the end of the Cold War in 1991, there were more than two million battle-related deaths around the world. In the ten years immediately after, there were 651,000, and in the past ten years,
there were even fewer: 402,000.30 While the Cold War saw a bipolar (albeit unimaginably costly) peace between two nuclear-armed superpowers, it does not mean the rest of the world enjoyed peace and safety.
There were significant internationalized wars, genocides and mass killings, and lengthy and bloody civil wars dotting the globe, from Indonesia and Afghanistan to Vietnam, Nigeria, and throughout Central
America. There is also the inconvenient fact that the United States and Soviet Union possessed nearly seventy thousand nuclear weapons, many perched on intercontinental missiles pointed directly at each other.

In the event
The two adversaries also had tactical nuclear weapons deployed in twelve countries—many poorly secured or with the authority to use them resting with local military commanders.31

of a full-scale superpower conflict, human life as we know it would have likely ceased to exist. Since Americans
misremember what happened during the Cold War—and forget how real the threat of nuclear conflict was—they are far more prone to accept claims that the world is less stable and safe today. One more reason
Americans perceive the world to be so dangerous is that the overwhelming foreign policy focus of government leaders, Congress, and the media is on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Chronic political
instability, proxy wars, and occasional interstate wars have long come to dominate the region. Indeed in 2017 alone, eight of nineteen MENA countries experienced intrastate conflicts (noninternational conflicts
that resulted in twenty-five or more battlefield deaths).32 That is the exception, not the rule, in comparison to every other part of the world. Though the MENA region gets oversized media attention, it constitutes
less than 5 percent of the world’s population and is not representative of the overwhelming majority of the planet’s seven and a half billion residents. Painting a picture of the world solely using the chaotic and

violent imagery from the Middle East severely distorts one’s image of global affairs. More Freedom The world is not merely safer than ever before; it
has also become demonstrably freer over the past quarter century . Just as the Cold War is misremembered for being an era of
relative peace and stability, it is often forgotten that the world then was defined far more by authoritarianism and totalitarianism than by democracy. In most corners of the
globe, political freedom represented an aspirational, seemingly unachievable, goal. Today, even
in the face of troubling reversals and assaults on democracy, a greater percentage of people are
freer than before. They enjoy personal, political, and economic self-determination that would
have been unimaginable to most people living outside the United States and western Europe just thirty years ago. In November 1989, as the
Berlin Wall was being dismantled, there were just 69 electoral democracies in the world, or 41 percent of 167 countries in total. Today, according to the Freedom House Index, that number is 116 (out of 196
countries), or 59 percent.33 In the 1980s, Latin America was mired in economic stagnation, social injustice, persistent conflict (both civil wars and cross-border conflicts), and above all, an almost complete lack of
democratic governance. In Chile in 1973, a democratic election was overturned by a military coup, leading to dictatorship, widespread human rights abuses, and a full-fledged economic crisis. In Argentina, a
military junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, sparking a pointless war with the United Kingdom. Throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, Central America became a hotbed of human rights abuses, civilian
massacres, and economic deprivation, fueled by superpower competition between Washington and Moscow. Today, while economic and political progress across the region has been uneven and backsliding is
evident, all of Latin America—with the exception of Venezuela and Cuba—is today designated as “free” or “partly free” by Freedom House. Thirty years ago in Europe, half the continent was under the thumb of
totalitarian leaders, basic freedoms were restricted, and barbed-wire-topped walls prevented citizens from traveling outside their borders. With the exception of Belarus and Russia, every country in western and
eastern Europe is today considered a free or partly free democracy. In the Far East, South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan—countries once (wrongly) considered by Western academics as culturally inappropriate for
political liberalization—have become full-fledged democracies. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, which has experienced a decline or stagnation in democratization since 2005, the majority of people live in free or partly
free countries.34 Once again, it is the Middle East that remains outside the global shift toward greater political freedom, with only Tunisia and Israel being considered free countries and a handful ranked as partly

These gains have also led to greater political stability as there has been a marked decline in
free.35

the number of coup attempts across the globe over the past three decades .36 The Polity IV project, a widely respected
data source of global governance trends, assigns “polity scores” to states to quantify their governing authority on a scale of –10 to +10. It does this by coding democratic and autocratic traits, such as political
participation, competitiveness of political leadership positions, and constraints on the chief of state. A polity score of +10 would be a full democracy, such as Sweden, while a –10 would be a severe autocracy, such
as North Korea.37 In 1989, the average score for all governments was –0.5, the equivalent of an Afghanistan governance score by the latest rankings. By 2016, it had moved all the way to +4.3.38 Meanwhile, today
a country with a score of –0.5 would be somewhere between Afghanistan and the Central African Republic. Moreover, when changes in polity scores from 1949 to 2014 are tracked against changes in “human
rights scores” over the same period, a hopeful trend is apparent: as countries become more democratic, their respect for human rights also increases.39 Democratic progress, however, remains fragile, and
according to Freedom House—which tracks relative democratic rankings—global freedom has declined for the past twelve years. In aspiring great and midlevel powers such as China, Russia, and Turkey, there has
been a disturbing uptick in autocratic behaviors. In all three countries, there’s been the silencing and even murder of independent journalists, the overregulation and harassment of civil society organizations,
consolidation of political rule by authoritarian leaders, and more centralized control of security forces. Notable and troubling declines are also evident in the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, and Nicaragua. Moreover,

confidence in elected officials in strongly democratic countries—including the United States and in western Europe—has notably fallen in recent years as populist, nativist,
and xenophobic political movements have made inroads .40 The extraordinary democratic progress made in the years after the fall of the Berlin
Wall is now moving in the opposite direction. Struggles for more entrenched democratization and personal freedoms are constantly contested, messy, and even bloody affairs—and many young democracies go
through extended periods of political turmoil. Those who hold power generally seek to exercise it with the fewest possible restraints, and those restraints are growing. Indeed, if there is one area where the path of
human progress could potentially be slowed or even reversed, it is on the expansion of political freedom. The growing disinterest among U.S. policy makers toward the issue—and the cultivation of authoritarian

leaders by President Donald Trump—will undoubtedly make this situation worse. Yet the path of progress over the past thirty years cannot
be denied. Quite simply, the world is far more democratic and free today than it was during the
height of the Cold War. Why Does This Matter for America? While fewer armed conflicts and increased political freedom
is good news for the vast majority of the world’s seven and a half billion people , it is also great news for America. If
there is one relatively ironclad rule of international affairs, it is that democracies tend to have happier, healthier, and better-educated citizens. They almost never go to war

with other democracies, much less even threaten each other; and they are also far less likely to
find themselves in conflict with nondemocratic governments .41 A world that is relatively freer and
thus less conflict-prone is one that is indisputably better for the United States. It means the U.S. homeland is
less likely to be threatened or attacked by great powers with conventional or nuclear weapons.
It means treaty allies are not at war, and as a result, the U.S. military is not required to come to
their defense. Indeed, in 2015, only five armed conflicts (all internal) took place in countries that are U.S. treaty allies: Philippines (two of them), Colombia, Thailand, and Turkey.42 It means that
fewer countries host or sponsor transnational terrorist groups dedicated to attacking the United States, its citizens, or its overseas diplomatic facilities. It means there are fewer

disruptions to global flows of trade, tourism, and energy supplies that benefit the U.S. economy and American jobs. It means
fewer people grow up in societies where hopelessness, resentment, and alienation make them
susceptible to the appeals of violent extremists . Finally, it means governments are more likely to
cooperate on transnational challenges such as fighting climate change, preventing the spread
of infectious diseases, lowering the barriers to global trade and furthering human
development.43 Since terrorism dominates contemporary foreign policy debates, Americans might immediately ask, “What about 9/11?” Understandably, the September 11, 2001, attacks are
deeply imprinted into our national consciousness and will remain an inflection point for the division of historical eras, similar to the “Cold War” and “post-Cold War” eras. Yet it is important to understand just how
tragically lucky al-Qaeda was on 9/11 and why the attacks were such an anomaly. U.S. homeland security policies, intelligence cooperation, and commercial aviation security were hugely deficient, and this
combined negligence made America needlessly vulnerable. As we will detail later, the United States is vastly safer today from such a mass-casualty terror attack. There are still terrorist groups seeking to kill
Americans on American soil, yet they have been overwhelmingly unsuccessful in their efforts to do so. Since 9/11, 103 Americans have been killed within the United States by jihadist terrorists or affiliated terrorist
actors, which is almost the same number of Americans killed in hate-crime attacks since 2002.44 Since 9/11, 402 U.S. citizens have died in terrorist incidents while living abroad, but nearly 75 percent of them died
working as diplomats, contractors, aid workers, or journalists in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—the very places where the United States started wars and continues to conduct air strikes to destroy terrorist
safe havens.45 It is tragic but unsurprising that individuals bravely serving in places where conflict is occurring face severely heightened risks to their personal safety, but that does not mean Americans should feel
at increased risk of being killed by terrorists.46 Indeed, at the same time that Americans have become safer from terrorism, such attacks have increased globally. In 2002, there were fewer than 200 terror
incidents worldwide, which killed a total of 725 people; in 2017, there were 8,584 incidents, which took the lives of 18,753 people, one-quarter of whom were the perpetrators.47 Yet seventy percent of all these
fatalities occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria. The perpetrators are relatively weak, nonstate actors using violence to achieve their political objectives, while the victims are
overwhelmingly civilians (who themselves are overwhelmingly Muslims) caught between government security forces that cannot protect them and terrorist armies willing to kill them. Even in these five countries,
however, there have been notable improvements, especially within Pakistan, which has experienced a decline in civilian deaths from terrorism every year between 2012 and 2017, with 3,007 deaths in 2012 and

Contrary to General Dempsey’s apocalyptic warnings, the world that existed on February 16, 2012, was far less dangerous
540 in 2017.48

than at any point since he had been alive—and it remains so today. In the years after the end of the Cold War, many foreign policy analysts
predicted a very different world—a “coming chaos” of continuous ethnic conflicts and genocidal
civil wars.49 The political scientist Samuel Huntington warned of a potential “clash of civilizations,” while John Mearsheimer wrote ominously in the pages of the Atlantic that we would soon miss the
Cold War.50 The journalist Robert Kaplan predicted that the post-Cold War years would be defined by “anarchy” and regional wars sparked by ancient, tribal hatreds. U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned

that renewed ethnic tensions could turn the planet into a “pandaemonium.”51 Contrary to this drumbeat of doomsaying, globalization
failed to produce the xenophobia and unchecked ethnic and racial hatreds that were
confidently predicted.52 If anything, the end of the Cold War led to a period of expanded global commerce,
communications, and travel, as well as vastly higher living standards for the majority of people
on earth. Global and regional cooperation, not competition, is the defining characteristic of
international politics today. That includes national governments, corporations, industry
associations, nongovernmental organizations, and individual citizens . As we demonstrate in the following chapter, the world is not
just safer and freer; it is a far better place to live now than at pretty much any point in the history of the human race. Healthier, Wealthier, Better Educated, and More Interconnected When you

look at all the measures of well-being in the world, if you had a choice of when to be born and
you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be —what nationality, whether you were male or female. v/hat religion—but you had
said. ‘When in human history would be the best time to be born?'” the time would be now . —President Barack
Obama, September 7,201 a In 2013, a Swedish research firm wanted to know what the residents of the world's most powerful and influential nation knew about the world outside its borders.: What it found out is
not pretty. That its survey showed the American people lacked detailed knowledge about global affairs was unsurprising. More interesting, however, is the way Americans are wrong. Eighty-three percent believed
that less than half of the world's children had been vaccinated for measles. In fact. 85 percent of kids have received this life-saving vaccines. Americans underestimated the number of adults with basic literacy

skills (a majority guessed 00 percent; it is actually 30 percent). Most telling, however, was the response to a question about the proportion of people in the world
living in extreme poverty. Two-thirds said the global poverty rate had "almost doubled.*’ 29 percent said it has •‘remained more or less the same,* and a mere 5 percent picked
what was then the correct answer—that it has been cut in half. This survey is an incomplete snapshot, but it is backed up by other data. When Americans were polled in the fall of 2017
about their perceptions of the world, just 10 percent agreed that “the world is getting better;" while nearly four times as marry (63 percent) thought it was getting worse.! A 2010 poll found that 92 percent of
Americans believed that extreme poverty has either increased or stayed the same over the past two decades.! In short. Americans think the world is a pretty lousy place. That means they are missing the most

it has never been a better time to be a human being than right

important international story of any of our lifetimes—namely, that

now. Today, the seven and a half billion people who reside on our planet live longer lives; are
better educated; have greater access to health care, sanitation, and food; and are far less likely
to live in extreme poverty. These improvements, most of which have occurred over the previous
two to three decades, have reduced the potential for military conflict, created social and
economic opportunities for women and girls that previously never existed, and improved the
happiness and quality of life for billions of people . Indeed, these are the fastest and most extraordinary advances in human progress in the history of the
species. Recognizing and celebrating this unprecedented improvement in the human experience

does not mean that global development work has reached its conclusion . Neither does it
diminish the obstacles facing those who continue to lack access to health services or live in
countries where poverty eradication has stalled, which increasingly includes the U nited States. There
are still hundreds of millions of people around the world who remain in dire need . However,
to overlook positive social trendlines ignores the unquestioned successes of global
development endeavors and further cements the pessimistic view that little can be done to
improve the lives of others. If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the opposite is true—
the power to enhance people's lives for the better is overwhelmingly within our grasp . These vast
improvements in the health and well-being of people outside the United States—and the increased global interconnectivity among governments, markets, and people—matters a great deal for ordinary
Americans. The United States has global interests that range from protecting treaty allies and preventing nuclear proliferation to expanding export markets. Those interests are far better secured when

children across the world are in school learning, women are able to work and have greater
control of their bodies and their lives, and people's time on earth is longer, happier, and more
fulfilling. All of these factors are strongly correlated with greater political stability and lesser chances for conflict. Fewer states at war means reduced regional tensions that may otherwise compel a
government to obtain weapons of mass destruction and more stable and prosperous economies to purchase American goods and services. When the world is a better place for more people, it is also a better place

Why has the world become such a wealthier, healthier, freer,

for the United States. How the World Became Far Better for Far More People

and less violent place? It is no coincidence that it began to occur at the same time that the Cold
War was winding down. As communism was cast into the ashbin of history, once-closed-off
countries adopted policies that made them more economically dynamic and interdependent.
At the same time, new information technologies became increasingly ubiquitous—even in some
of the world’s poorest countries. Take the experience of China. Beginning in the early 1990s. Chinese leaders opened their country to foreign investment and global trade.
Economic growth became a national priority , and while the reigning Communist Party stubbornly clung to one-party rule, it began to loosen the political,
economic, and social restrictions that had impeded the country's development. Similar efforts at moving to a more-market-based economy began in India, the world's second-most-populous country. Between

The success of the world's two most populous nations in

1990 and 2010, GDP per capita increased by $7,300 in China and $1,350 in lndia.1

raising living standards has been a critical driver of global social and economic change. But the
advances in the human condition over the past several decades have hardly been restricted to
these two nations. In practically every country on earth, there have been significant and
notable improvements in reducing poverty, extending life expectancies, and improving health
outcomes. TO chart that growth, a good place to start is the Millennium Development Coals (MDGs). The MDGs are an initiative that will be familiar to few Americans outside the world of global
development. Indeed, even for most foreign policy professionals, the MDGs are not well understood or appreciated. But this landmark commitment—agreed to unanimously by all 193 countries in September

that have transformed the developing world and changed the lives of
2000—has been translated into eight sweeping goals

hundreds of millions of people for the better . Moreover, the MDGs offer a compelling lesson of how the international
community can continue to work together for the common global good—which will be essential
as world leaders face the growing and potentially calamitous threat of climate change . When the MDGs were
initially proposed, development trend lines were already moving in a more positive direction, but their global adoption brought more sustained political focus and consolidated numerous governmental and
nongovernmental resources. By definition, the creation of strategic goals only occurs when leaders and states agree that they want to accelerate progress. The MDGs represented concrete and actionable goals
that every country in the world supported. Moreover, they created metrics that allow us to assess the trajectory of human development—and the results speak for themselves. The first and most essential MDG
was aimed at eradicating extreme poverty and hunger—and for good reason. Reducing poverty, besides making life better, opens up innumerable economic opportunities: more food, more leisure, longer lives,
and perhaps, above all else, lowers economic anxiety and stress. It means children in developing countries are more likely to live past their fifth birthday. It means they go to school, rather than toil infields or
factories. And it means they will have access to healthcare that will ensure they will not be felled by preventable diseases and illnesses. Mothers who have confidence that their children will not just survive into
adolescence and adulthood but have an opportunity for success will get pregnant less often. With fewer kids to care for, women are more likely to enter the workforce, which increases overall household wealth.
Higher income means that even the smallest luxuries of life—which people in the devel- oped world take for granted, such as taking a vacation, buying a toy, or getting an ice cream cone as a treat for our children
—suddenly become available. Quite simply, a life not lived in poverty means far greater happiness.L Since 1990. the reduction in global poverty rates has been astounding-Over the past twenty-eight years, the
number of people in the developing world living on less than $1.25 a day (a traditional definition for extreme poverty) has been reduced by one billion! Back then, approximately half the developing world was
mired in such crippling poverty; today, it is fewer than one in ten, and it continues to drop year after year, with further reductions challenging but likely.! China accounts for much of this decline, having seen its
extreme poverty rate drop by 60 percent in just eighteen years. This means that by 2017 more than eight hundred million Chinese citizens had been lifted out of economic deprivation.. But China's evolution has
been replicated in countries across the globe. Iran's poverty rate has gone from 17.6 percent in 1986 to under 1 percent in 2014!£ El Salvador's fell from 36 percent in 1989 to 1.9 percent in 20 IS. and Ethiopia
went from 92 percent in 1981 to under 30 percent today.il The underlying cause for these rapid improvements has been the end of conflict: bloody civil wars in El Salvador and Ethiopia and. for Iran, the end to a

countries
brutal eight-year struggle with Iraq. It is yet another reminder that fewer wars and greater peace and stability bring enormous residual benefits. In other places, however, the story is simpler:

liberalized their economies and removed trade barriers that prevented them from selling their
products overseas. They attracted new investment and new businesses with the advantage of
lower labor costs. They sent workers overseas to send back remittances to family members, and
at home, they strengthened the social safety net to help give those who were mired in poverty a
helping hand. And perhaps above all, as more countries became democratic, it put pressure on
political leaders to keep the good economic times going—or face the potential prospect of
losing their own jobs. We can see positive results from Brazil, where the poverty rate dropped from 20 percent in 1990 to just 4.3 percent in 201 5!! In Namibia, it went from 69 percent in
1993 to 27 percent in 201S!land in Bangladesh, it dropped from 44 percent in 1990 to 24.3 percent in 2016.11 While these countries still face serious social and economic challenges, their success in reducing
poverty is staggering. As for hunger, the trend lines are similarly positive. In 1990, about one in five people in the developing world suffered from undernourishment. Since then, that number has been cut in half—i
At one time, famine was one of the world's worst killers. In the 1960s alone, it took the lives of more than eighteen million people. Biafra. Bangladesh, North Korea, and Ethiopia had all been witness to famines
that killed more than a million in each country. China is estimated to have lost thirty million people during the 19SOs and '60s in a famine caused, in part, by horribly misguided government policies. By contrast,
from 2010 through 2016. the number of people killed in famine was around a quarter of a million—a tragedy, of course, but also an indication of how far the world has come in preventing such deaths!! The MDGs

also established benchmarks for universal primary education and promoted greater gender equality b
y ensuring that young girls had the same opportunity to go to school as young boys. The benefits of such a strategy are self-evident: abetter-educated populace means that more people can read and write. When
more people are literate, that translates into a workforce that is more highly skilled and innovative, less unequal, and more productive. But the benefits of education are particularly important when it comes to
young women. Girls who are enrolled in school at a young age are more likely to get married later in life. They have fewer children and thus lower levels of poverty. They are at reduced danger of the most
common and acute diseases that have long ravaged the developing world. And girls who are given the chance to attend school along with their male peers are more likely to grow up to be women who arc socially
and per- sonally empowered to take control of their own destiny. Ask any development expert about the best way to lift up adeveloping economy, and virtually all of them will give you the same answer: make
sure girls are going to school.il Increasingly that is exactly what is happening. Primary-education enrollment rates in the developing world have jumped from 33 percent in 2000 to 91 percent today.!! That might
seem like a relatively small rise, but, in fact, it means that more than forty million more children spend their day in a classroom today than did fifteen years ago. In 1990. in sub-Saharan Africa, only 4 5 percent of
the population received a basic education; today, 80 percent do.il The jump in South Asia and Southeast Asia has gone from 75 percent to 95 percent; and in the Middle East and North Africa, from 63 percent to
95 percent 11 Today, the global literacy rate stands at 91 percent among young people and 86 percent for adults; in 1990. just 61 percent of the world could read or write!l For young girls, the story is even more
positive. In South Asia, in 1990, the girls' literacy rate was 49 percent, and an average of 74 girls compared to lOO boys were in primary school; today, the rate is 85 percent, and the enrollment ratio stands at 103
girls for every lOO boys!* Across all developing countries, girls are less likely than boys to repeat grades or drop out of school. This has helped to promote steady advances in female labor-force participation (for
both formal and informal work)!! Tt>day. a previously unimaginable percentage of young boys and girls around the world are being educated. This both improves lives and. once again, makes the world a safer

decreasing child mortality and

place, since countries with higher education levels are less likely to find themselves mired in armed conflict.il Two MDGs were aimed at

improving maternal health. This has led to notable increases in vaccination rates that have reduced
the number of children felled by preventable diseases by more than seven million This decline has helped
cut the under-five child mortality rate in half since 1990. That means that every year, 2 72,000 children who two or three decades ago would have died are
alive today !! Here, enhanced access to education has had an enormous impact, since increases in education levels for women strongly correlate with reduced levels of childhood mortality!! In the same period,
maternal mortality rates have dropped globally by 45 percent, with the sharpest decline occurring from 2000 to 200S.il This means that in 2017, more than 136.000 mothers who would have died a couple of
decades ago are alive and able to help raise their children. Finally, the increased availability of family planning op- tions cut the number of unintended pregnancies around the world by 44 percent between 1990

combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases has been similarly
and 2014.21 An MDG focused on

transformative. Since 2000. new HIV infections have dropped 45 percent around the world, and more than thirteen million AIDS-related
deaths have been averted!: Additionally, tuberculosis prevention and treatment saved an estimated
fifty-three million lives, increased measles immunizations prevented more than twenty million
deaths between 2000 and 2016, and polio has largely been eradicated. There were just eleven active cases of the disease as of July 2018.11 An oral polio
vaccine—delivered with just two drops—and the necessary funding to make it widely available had. as of 2014, saved the lives of more than 650,000 people over the previous twenty-five years!! In March 2018.
South Sudan announced that it had eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic illness that causes agonizing and incapacitating pain. In 1986, the disease afflicted three and a half million people in the developing world. In
2017, the number had fallen to thirty, and by May 2018, there were just three reported casesll According to the Carter Center, which has been at the forefront of the guinea-worm eradication effort, close to

Improved access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation has

eighty million cases of the illness have been averted over the past thirty

been another target of the MDGs. The expanded international commitment to these issues has helped more than a fifth of the current global

population (1.3 billion people) gain access to sanitation since 200011 In addition to saving the lives of 340,000 children who used to die from diarrhea because they were exposed to dirty water,
improved sanitation also keeps children in school instead of sick at home. Even better, children with access to clean drinking water are in better

shape physically, cognitively, and even socially !! Nutritional advances have come so quickly and been so significant that public health officials now express
concern over what is known as the 'double burden of malnutrition,'’ in which developing countries are simultaneously experiencing health perils generally associated with being overweight as well as those from

obesity now poses greater harm globally than lack of adequate nutrition does, a
undernourishment. Amazingly,

phenomenon that would have been unimaginable even a quarter century ago .!! What is perhaps most remarkable
about all this sweeping progress is that it was achieved at the same time that the planet's population grew by one and a half billion people, and global life expectancy increased by more than five full years since
the MDGs were announced in 2000!! Yet for all of the success of the MDGs (and also the full panoply of public health and human development changes), they are rarely mentioned in current foreign policy

debates. Long-term positive trends go largely unreported , with the focus instead, almost exclusively, on-hard" security issues, such as coercive “redlines,"
nuclear weapons, terrorism, and drone strikes. Highlighting polio eradication, for example, does not drive internet clicks, justify’ a larger Pentagon budget, or motivate voters to support a more interventionist
foreign policy. In the United States, good news about the world has little political salience, and it is sim- ply not deemed newsworthy. The development scholar Laura Freschi pithily captured why this phenomenon
matters. She observed in 2010 that more Americans believed that their president was a Muslim than had heard of the improvements in quality of life on our planet!! Global Interconnectivity While the global
development community deserves enormous credit for many of the advances chronicled above, they drafted off of historic geopolitical changes. When the Cold War ended, the most resonant image was the fall of
the Berlin Wall on November 9. 1939. The pictures of Germans chipping away at the barrier that hid separated them for thirty-eight years—and the pictures of supposed enemies joyfully embracing—were
poignant reminders of the universal desire for freedom. From that moment forward, hundreds of millions of people around the world—from Jakarta to Johannesburg and Managua to Minsk—began choosing their
own leaders, holding them accountable, and voicing their opinions without the government interference they endured while living under dictatorship. Yet, in the nearly thirty years since that epoch-making event,

it is the economic bonds built between peoples and countries that have played the leading role
in changing the human experience for the better. Communism, by its very nature, was an overwhelmingly closed economic system that purposely
avoided commercial and business ties with capitalist nations. Even countries outside the Soviet and Chinese orbits often pursued economic policies that protected failing native industries; suppressed talented
entrepreneurs, investment, economic innovation, and development: and. more generally, shut the door to the outside world. But with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the gradual shift in China toward an
export-driven economic strategy, all of that began to change. China transitioned along with its regional neighbors—Japan and South Korea and then Taiwan. Singapore, and Hong Kong. Even in noncommunist
countries like India and Brazil, the end of the Cold War ushered out protectionist policies in favor of those seeking foreign investment, encouraging entrepreneurship, and creating new and vibrant trade links.

Tariffs went down, and subsidies were slowly eased out, as countries worked to fashion
themselves into more attractive investment destinations for global businesses . The results are overwhelming. Foreign
direct investment in the developing world has gone from $20 billion a year in 1990 to Jo 53 billion in 2017, while private capital flaws went from $91 billion to $1.2 trillion during the same time.li

Emerging economies are today deeply reliant on international trade not only as a means of
development and job creation but also for attracting new capital investments and technical
expertise. The result is stronger and more diversified economies , higher productivity,
significant improvements in the welfare of women, and of course, reduced poverty .:*® Recent trends, such as a
decline inG-20 imports and new trade restrictions, suggest that this economic openness has slowed—the consequences of which have been hundreds of billions of dollars in lost global GDP.il In addition,

while the process of globalization has contributed to higher living standards, it can contribute to
greater income inequality and has given impetus to nativist and anti-immigrant movements in Europe
and the United States. These are issues of serious concern, and if they go unaddressed in Western democracies, it could undermine the economic progress made over the past quarter century.

Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly true that far more people have benefited from globalization
than have been harmed.42 From the perspective of global security, the benefits are even more clear-cut because when a country trades with
other states, it significantly diminishes the likelihood of conflict . Doubling a country's
international commerce can reduce its risk of interstate violence by up to 30 percent, while
countries with no regional trade tics are more than twice as likely as their highly integrated
neighbors to experience a civil war.43 Similarly, when a country experiences an increase in foreign
direct investment, it significantly improves the welfare of women and reduces the likelihood
that the country will participate in an armed conflict .44 Being an active participant in today's globalized economy does not eliminate the possibility of
a country going to war, as is evinced by America's ongoing military operations in Afghanistan. Iraq, and Syria. However, it is a fact that countries with increased economic interconnectivity are less likely to find
themselves mired in conflict. The Smartphone Story The foregoing numbers, while impressive, do not fully do justice to the impact of economic integration over the past few decades. Visualizing the spectrum of
changes that global interdependence has wrought is as simple as reaching into your pocket and pulling out your phone. That device that you use to talk to and text with your friends and family, get news, watch

the world has

soccer or basketball clips, find out what the president of the United States just tweeted, or play Words wick Friends offers one of the best possible explanations for how

become more connected, wealthier, and safer—and why it is likely to stay that way. Since there are many
smartphones, let's pick the one that is perhaps most ubiquitous: Apple’s iPhone. Since its introduction in 2007, the iPhone has improved productivity, sped up communications, and allowed for more people to live
and work remotely from their employers, customers, or clients. The iPhone is sold in more than 130 countries—a symbolic example of how the removal of trade barriers has spurred the rapid adoption of
transformative technologies in both rich and poor countries. Some 725 million smartphones were sold in 2012, increasing to more than l.S billion by 2010, of which more than 000 million went to emerging-market
customers from China. India, Brazil, and IndonesiaJi. Additionally, while mobile internet usage in Western countries is increasing fourfold annually, it is rising twenty-seven-fold in developing countries. There are
5.2 billion smartphone subscriptions globally, with 3.5 billion projected by 2023—and most of them will be in the developing world.iLIn many countries, there arc actually more cell phones than people. In places
like Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, the landscape is defined by omnipresent cell towers that now provide mobile services to more than 80 percent of the population.47 The iPhone contains
components that have been developed and manufactured in multiple countries, which exemplifies how patent protections, increased foreign investment, and globalized supply chains have spread economic
development across the globe. Take, for example, the iPhone X, which was released in fall 2017. Its accelerometer comes from the German firm Bosch, the display screen from the South Korea-based giant
Samsung, the electronic compass from the Japanese firm Alps Electronic Company, and various radio-frequency components from Sky works Solutions, a compary located in a suburb of Boston. Massachu- setts _li
The iPhone X was assembled at a Taiwanese-owned Foxconn plant in southern China, which is emblematic of the inflow of low-wage manufacturing jobs that have taken the world's most populous nation from
impoverishment to becoming among the most dynamic and steadily growing economies in the world. The iPhone and the internet access it provides have further empowered hundreds of millions of people in
developing nations. From Tunisia to Egypt's Tahrir Square and in multiple elections in fledgling democracies, ordinary citizens have used their cell phones to safeguard votes against electoral fraud and organize
activists and pro-democracy demonstrators. Mobile technology and social media apps have made it possible for citizens to compile damning information about their governments, report abuses to news outlets
outside their communities, and more easily publicize those abuses on a variety of social media plat- forms. This has even, ironically, become a problem for Apple itself- In 2012. after workers at the company's
Foxconn factories in China documented and publicized poor working conditions there. Apple agreed to independent audits of the facilities by the Fair Labor Association. Here in America, cell-phone cameras have
served as an invaluable tool for documenting and holding local police officers accountable for police shootings and gave critical impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement. Governments have also occasionally
used mobile technology to expand democratic participation. In 2014, Libya's election commission worked with the firm Reboot to digitize the country's voter registration system, making it possible for voters
(including diaspora Libyan citizens) to register for upcoming parliamentary elections on their phones. Considering that mobile penetration in Libya stood at nearly 150 percent, it was amove that made more sense
than asking Libyans to register in person. More than l.l million citizens living in Libya and thirteen other countries were successfully signed up. and the system is still being used today to manage voter rolls. Libya
remains fractured along ethnic and geographic lines, but the digital voting infrastructure remains in place if political leaders choose to reuse it in future elections. Communication technologies are, of course, a
double-edged sword, and governments have leveraged internet and mobile-phone penetration to spy on, influence, track, and harass their citizens. Journalists, activists, opposition-party leaders, and others have
found their phones unknowingly implanted with spyware—often with the assistance of Western cyber security firms—that allows security services to monitor political opponents. Governments have also, at times,
blacked or limited access to social media networks on the whims of political leaders. Yet technologically savvy and creative citizens are constantly developing workarounds to such spying—with encrypted
communications, like Tt leg ram and WhatsApp, as well as virtual private networks and other digital solutions that are not widely publicized. Government authorities have tried to control the flow of information
and communications for centuries, and one should be under no il- lusion that this will not continue for the foreseeable future, ftt never before have so many people been more empowered to learn, connect, and
collaborate in real time for relatively little cost. Moreover, one does not need a cutting-edge smartphone to take advantage of the mobile revolution. Basic mobile phones are increasingly essential in those places
where citizens do not have access to brick-and-mortar banks or any credit history. Mobile banking is benefiting hundreds of millions of new individuals each year by allowing them to document and save money,
safely transfer funds, and pay down loans±l In Kenya, 90 percent of households use mobile phones and mobile money, mostly through a text-message-based payment system called M-PESA.li Researchers found
that mobile banking makes it easier for breadwinners to provide for their families or for friends and family to send emergency funds immediately to each other when feeing a health crisis. Between 2003 and 2014,
more than 194,000 households were lifted out of poverty and 185,000 women were induced to enter the business world as a direct result of the soci- etal shift provided by M-PESA.1L Similarly, smartphones are
empowering a wide range of entrepreneurs in all sectors, from small business owners to farmers. For example, a free mobile app called MandiTrades allows farmers in India to receive real-time market information
to help manage their crops, upload information about their produce right from the field, and finally connect with markets for salesJ2 In India, where one of the biggest challenges to cell-phone proliferation is
getting the devices in the hands of women, wider access to smartphones will make it easier for women to find and apply for jobs outside the home and. as a result, increase their partic- ipation in the workforce.
Finally, that iPhone on which you pi a)1 Candy Crush Saga and Fortnitc is also saving lives. In Mozambique, for example, a free app alerts patients with HIV or tuberculosis when to take their medicine and reminds
them of upcoming appointments.!! Other programs send text messages and voice mails to new and expectant mothers, with basic advice on nutrition, health, and immunization schedules. In Bangladesh, the
Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action has reached more than five hundred thousand pregnant women and new moms” In Pakistan, targeted calls from provincial educational officials and local school council
members increased the school enrollment rates for young girls by 12 percent-11 More broadly, in classrooms around the developing world, tablets and cell phones are increasingly replacing books and notepads,

the direct
as students can now download reading assignments directly, helping to improve literacy and promote reading. There are hundreds, if not thousands, more stories that speak to

positive impact that mobile technology has had on global public health, the promotion of
democracy, the improvement of educational outcomes, and the expansion of economic growth .
But there is one behind-the-scenes component that makes all of this possible. What, for example, protects the patents used to develop the iPhone? The answer: international treaties (starting with the Paris
Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 18 84) that uphold patent rights and bolster international organizations (namely, the Patent Cooperation Treaty), which ensures that Apple's intellectual
property rights are protected. What makes it possible for you to get on a plane, fly to China, anduseaphone as if you were in your home country? Answer: several international agreements (starting with the
International Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables, also of 1884) and industry groups (particularly the International Cable Protection Committee), which govern and share best practices for

three hundred transoceanic cables stretching six

laying and maintaining undersea cables. This might seem minor, but keep in mind that these

hundred thousand miles are responsible for 95 percent of the world's internet, phone, and data
traffic. This overlapping web of reciprocal agreements and international understandings is
unknown to all but a few Americans. But the ability to connect people, ideas, and markets from
every corner of the earth is the direct result of an international system that is specifically
constructed to further global coopera- tion . That iPhone in your hand tells the story of an interdependent and interconnected world that would have been
unimaginable just a generation ago. Why should Americans care that the world has become a far better place for far more people than ever before? Because a world that is more

prosperous, healthier, better educated, and closely connected is a less chaotic and violent place
—and more likely to stay that way22 Countries that are more democratic are also more politically stable and more open to trade and foreign investment that is likely to
benefit American workers and consumers 1_1 Yet, despite all of these remarkable gains, there is significant work to be

done. Eight hundred million people still live in extreme poverty , 100 million children under age five do not get enough to eat, and 01
million are not attending school. Only half of the 30.7 million who are living with HIV in developing regions receive antiviral treatments, and 884 million people still lack adequate drinking water.!! These numbers

But the fact that sizable problems

are sobering, and they demand greater resources and a more concerted effort on the part of the international community.!!

remain cannot take away from the sustained progress that has been made . Domestic politics, in part, explain why
Americans remain unaware of these tremendous changes. Stating that the world is actually a pretty safe and much-better place to live is somehow a taboo, a sign of naivete, or deeply insensitive in light of the real
harms experienced by Americans. Yet politicians should recognize and celebrate the positive accomplishments that have improved the lives of so man)' people, and U5 citizens should come to expect this from
their elected leaders. All too rarely have U.S. '*national interests" included advancing the health, well-being, and economic opportunities of humanity. But the top foreign pol- icy priority for whoever sits in the
Oval Office or controls Congress should be precisely that—not just because it is the right thing do but also because it makes America safer.

Maoist insurgency fails in the US now

--ACS = American Corporate State

Flaherty, 5 USC BA in International Relations, researcher in political affairs (Kevin,

“Militant Electronic Piracy: Non-Violent Insurgency Tactics Against the American Corporate
State”, http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html) s/o to little rock gl and
westminster ab, we love you!
THE NATURE OF ARMED INSURGENCY AGAINST THE ACS Any violent insurgency against the ACS is sure
to fail and will only serve to enhance the state's power. The major flaw of violent
insurgencies, both cell based (Weathermen Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations etc.)
and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is that they are
attempting to attack the system using the same tactics the ACS has already mastered:
terror and psychological operations. The ACS attained primacy through the effective application of terror and
psychological operations. Therefore, it has far more skill and experience in the use of these tactics
than any upstart could ever hope to attain.4 This makes the ACS impervious to traditional
insurgency tactics. - Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus The ACS employs a full
time counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources that are unimaginable to most
would be insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe
actually is. Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists.
Whether or not political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political activity, they
are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS. The U.S. military classifies political activism as “low
intensity conflict.” The scale of warfare (in terms of intensity) begins with individuals
distributing anti-government handbills and public gatherings with anti-government/anti-
corporate themes. In the middle of the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to as Operations Other than
War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right hand side of the graph is global
thermonuclear war. What is important to remember is that the military
is concerned with ALL points
along this scale because they represent different types of threats to the ACS . Making distinctions
between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence services is no longer necessary.
After September 11, 2001, all national security
assets would be brought to bear against any
U.S. insurgency movement. Additionally, the U.S. military established NORTHCOM which designated the
U.S. as an active military operational area. Crimes involving the loss of corporate profits will
increasingly be treated as acts of terrorism and could garner anything from a local law
enforcement response to activation of regular military forces. Most of what is commonly referred to as
“political activism” is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary component of
political control. Letters-to-the-editor... Calls-to-elected-representatives... Waving banners... “Third” party political activities...
Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech zones... Political activism amounts to an utterly
useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise that is
sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency
teams routinely monitor these activities, attend the meetings, join the groups and take on
leadership roles in the organizations. It's only a matter of time before some individuals determine that political activism
is a honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate state knows that some small percentage of the
peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in activists will probably do
one of two things; drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways. If the clued-in activist drops his or her political
activities, the ACS wins. But what if the clued-in activist refuses to give up the struggle? Feeling powerless, desperation could
set in and these individuals might become increasingly radicalized. Because
the corporate state's
counterinsurgency operatives have infiltrated most political activism groups, the
radicalized members will be easily identified , monitored and eventually
compromised/turned, arrested or executed. The ACS wins again.

Violent revolutions result in atrocity by erasing the moral threshold for

acceptable collateral damage – which is problematic for the same
reasons as presumptively criminalizing all black people
--at: no innocents – even if no whites are innocent and all benefit from privilege – they are
not guilty to the same degree – advocating indiscriminate violence is inherently unjust and
inconsistent with the sanctity with which the NEG holds the lives of those criminalized,
killed and incarcerated by anti-blackness

Butler 3 (Paul Butler, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law School, researches
and teaches in criminal and race relations law and critical theory, former Research
Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, George Washington
University Law School, former federal prosecutor, U.S. Department of Justice, J.D. Harvard
Law School, B.A. Yale University, “By Any Means Necessary: Using Violence and Subversion
to Change Unjust Law,” 50 UCLA L. Rev. 721, 2003,
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Lorenz/DeathPenalty/Butler.doc)
It must be acknowledged that, if the object of violence is to take control of
5. The Utility of Violence¶

the government, no attempted American revolution has ever been successful . The United
States is the most powerful nation in the world, with the mightiest military force. It is
reasonable to expect that any minority group that sought to overthrow it would be
summarily crushed.¶ Our race rebels, however, have objectives more modest than a wholesale overthrow of the government. The end they seek is "only" the abolition of certain
discriminatory laws. If H. Rap Brown's famous description of violence [*754] as "as American as apple pie" n146 is correct, the rebels might be speaking a language that lawmakers understand. Some
historians have attributed President Richard Nixon's progressive urban policies, and his embrace of affirmative action, to his fear of racial violence, based on the urban riots of the late 1960s. n147 More
recently, in Cincinnati, African Americans successfully used civil disturbances to focus attention on their concerns. n148¶ Professor Alan Dershowitz predicts that "terrorism will persist because it often
works, and success breeds repetition." n149 To know whether terrorism is successful, one must know what its goals are. Neither terrorists nor scholars speak with one voice on this issue.

Professor Loren E. Lamasky has written about two possible goals of terrorism :¶ First, one can
hypothesize that terrorists typically act with the intention of bringing about those political
ends to which they declare allegiance; they are, however, in the grip of mistaken beliefs
about political causation ... . Second, one can maintain that terrorists generally aim at
expressing support for political outcomes without, however, intending thereby to bring
about those outcomes. It is the second of these hypotheses that seems better to fit the data .
n150 [*755] ¶ Professor Lamasky's second thesis seems applicable to race rebels. It would be

impractical to think that a legislature or court would act in favor of the rebels in response to
a violent attack. To the extent that their violence was part of a larger campaign that included the old ways of lobbying and litigation, perhaps the violence would encourage the power
brokers to act more quickly. n151 We would have to surmise, because no lawmaker is likely to admit that he was motivated by the threat of violence to reach a certain result.¶ Violence is

certainly, for the cause of the race rebels, a high-risk undertaking. Even if they have the
limited goal of supporting more traditional methods, the specter of a powerful political
backlash seems likely.¶ Does the fact that race rebels might fail make their cause less morally
justifiable? If, by contrast, the crit jurors are likely to succeed, is their cause more morally justifiable? In the next part I consider a construct of morality, based upon international human
rights law, that suggests answers to these difficult questions. IV. Moral Limitations on Changing Unjust Law¶ A. Heroic Black Outlaws¶ Imagine that some racial critics are considering either subversion
or violence to accomplish abolition of the death penalty and the end of the sentencing disparities in cocaine offenses. Should their exclusive concerns be utilitarian, or does morality matter? If morality
does matter, how can it be determined?¶ It seems clear that the most formal expression of American social morality - the criminal law - is an insufficient guide, at least for minorities. After all, some of the
most revered figures in African American history were outlaws, in the service of their vision of racial justice. Aboard the Amistad, Cinque and other Africans killed their kidnappers. n152 Harriet Tubman
[*756] helped slaves escape. n153 Rosa Parks violated the peace ordinances of Montgomery, Alabama. n154 Martin Luther King, Jr. led marches without legal permits. n155 Muhammad Ali refused to be
conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War. n156¶ Some critical race theorists, the "racial realists," have urged minorities not to respect the values held by the majority, or its law. Racism, they argue, is
deeply and inevitably embedded in every aspect of American culture, including law. n157 Racial realists believe that minorities, cognizant of their subordinate status, should have limited expectations of
the law and of the majority. Racial realists would be suspicious of any shared precepts of morality between the majority and the minority. The tactics they recommend for minorities are absolutely
instrumentalist. n158¶ Racial realism would empower racial critics to break the law by committing perjury or sedition because the only question realists ask about a law is whether it serves the interests
of minorities. A criminal sanction has no independent moral force when it undermines minority interests, as it does when it prevents lying to thwart the racist application of a law.¶ [*757] The problem,
though, with such an instrumentalist approach is similar to its utility: Anything goes. n159 There are no moral limits. I think this concedes too much. All of the important, and successful, struggles for
racial justice for African Americans have been inspired by strong moral claims. These claims were an important element in garnering the political support that was necessary to convert discriminatory
laws. n160¶ So, what should an advocate for racist justice do, when instrumentalism provides the most diverse arsenal, but when morality also matters (for its own sake, and for utilitarian reasons)? The
next part recommends that, to choose her weapons, the advocate consult the doctrine of just war. This theory, a construct from Judeo-Christian theology and international human rights law, allows
governments to use extreme methods, but within moral limits. As I explain below, the doctrine is undertheorized with regard to the use of force by nongovernmental actors. I recommend a construct of
the doctrine for insurgents, generally, and our crit jurors and race rebels, specifically.¶ B. The Doctrine of "Just War"¶ A moral theory exists to guide "citizens who must decide what is worth fighting for
and how to fight for it - whatever others may think." n161 It is the doctrine of "just war." Its "principle intention ... is to serve as a source for guidelines in making relative moral decisions." n162 One
reason that the doctrine may serve as a useful moral guide for race critics is that it is rooted in the same Judeo-Christian theology that inspired earlier race reformers, including abolitionists and
twentieth-century civil rights protestors. n163¶ [*758] Just war doctrine was the product of efforts by early Christians to reconcile their religion with their perceived need to go to war. n164 St.
Augustine's theory was that "once the cause was just, any means to achieve the end was permissible." n165 This construct is identical to Malcolm X's formula of "any means necessary." The doctrine has
evolved, however, so that, in addition to justifying war, it limits the ways it can be waged. The morality of war is judged in two ways: first by the reasons for fighting (jus ad bellum) and then by how the
war is fought (jus in bello). The war is either just or unjust, and it is fought either justly or unjustly. n166¶ To determine whether the reasons for fighting the war are just, five criteria are employed: (1)
whether war is the last resort; (2) whether the cause is just; (3) whether war is waged with the right intention; (4) whether success is reasonably likely; and (5) whether war is waged by a legitimate
authority. For a war to be fought in a just manner, two conditions must be satisfied: The means must be proportionate, and the targets must be military, and not civilian.¶ Just war doctrine has been
incorporated into international human rights law. n167 It provides a framework for analysis of the permissible use of force in international conflicts, including the need for humanitarian intervention
when citizens within a country are being oppressed by their own government. The doctrine also serves as an analogy to evaluate conflicts outside of traditional warfare. Legal scholars have used the
doctrine to analyze the morality of such disparate subjects as the "war" on drugs, n168 the death penalty, n169 and military intervention designed to avert an environmental disaster. n170¶ In this part I
use the doctrine to evaluate the morally permissible range of tactics of racial critics in changing unjust criminal law. The two principal issues are these: Is the racial critics' cause - reforming the death
penalty and [*759] cocaine sentencing laws - just? Are their tactics - subversion and violence - just? Each question must be answered in the affirmative before we can say that the crits' extremism is
morally justifiable.¶ First, however, we must confront the central problem of applying just war doctrine to the racial critics: They are not soldiers in the traditional sense; indeed, the war they would wage
is against their own country. In the next part I recommend an application of just war doctrine to nonmilitary actors.¶ C. Just War and Insurgents¶ In the United States, the most notorious contemporary
examples of insurgents are the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. To think of terrorists as moral agents may be difficult for anyone affected by the
events of that day. The problem, though, is that our moral analysis of terrorism now seems inconsistent. We play favorites: We approve of anti-slavery rebels but not Palestinian suicide bombers. A
coherent way of thinking about the morality of private actors who use violence to achieve political objectives seems key to understanding, and perhaps preventing, that violence. It may be naive to think
that terrorists are concerned about the morality of their work, but it is morality - strong religious, spiritual, or political convictions - that inspires terrorism in the first place.¶ Traditionally just war
doctrine applies to state and not private actors. This aspect of the doctrine seems undertheorized and likely to lead to anomalies. For example, if a state practices genocide against a minority group of its
citizens, some just war theorists would allow "humanitarian intervention" by foreign nations. n171 The minority group itself, however, would not be permitted to use force on its own behalf, because it is
not a state actor. This is a flaw in the doctrine, and in this part, I propose a corrective. n172¶ St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher, "expanded the 'defensive' just-war
theory between states to include defensive action within the state. He allowed that, under some circumstances, action against the state was not sinful." n173 According to Aquinas, action against the state
is not sinful where the government is tyrannical and not directed at the common good; in this case, action against the state is not [*760] sedition unless it results in less common good than existed under
the tyrannical government. n174 As one scholar has noted, however, in this context "tyranny" is hard to define. n175¶ Almost none of the legal scholarship on just war doctrine explores in detail the
question of how the doctrine applies to insurgents. Michael Walzer, the leading scholarly expert on the doctrine, notes that "guerilla fighters" can occasionally be justified in using force, but with certain
limits - for example, if they kill civilians, "they are able to make distinctions: they aim at well-known officials, notorious collaborators, and so on." n176 Walzer also notes that "to be eligible for the war
rights of soldiers, guerrilla fighters must wear 'a fixed distinctive sign visible at a distance' and must 'carry their arms openly.'" n177¶ Professor Walzer's description of insurgents focuses more on the
way they should fight than on how they should determine the justice of their cause. When is a state so oppressive that a minority of its citizens is entitled to go to war against it?¶ If we accept Aquinas's
thesis that it is morally justifiable to use violence to remove a tyrannical government, we must face the difficulty of defining tyranny. In Part III, we looked to American criminal law doctrine for
instruction on justifications of private violence. It permits an individual actor to use violence in some situations, including to defend herself or others from unlawful force. Private violence is also
sometimes allowed to protect property or to prevent crimes. If we apply this view of morality to insurgents, they would be justified in acting whenever the state threatens the lives of its citizens on the
basis of some impermissible criterion, including race, gender, or religion.¶ The concept of humanitarian intervention offers a more expansive approach to the issue of insurgents and just war, at least by
analogy. Humanitarian intervention is "the threat or use of force by a state, group of states, or international organization primarily for the purpose of protecting the nationals of the target state from
widespread deprivations of internationally recognized human rights." n178 Its supporters emphasize that such intervention is justified in limited contexts - for example, when a state threatens its own
citizens with genocide or deprivations of basic human rights. n179¶ [*761] By its very terms, the doctrine contemplates intervention only by state actors. If applied to insurgents, however, the standard
for intervention could remain the same. In other words, insurgents would be permitted to use force to combat their "deprivation[] of internationally recognized human rights." The other conditions of
just war would remain, including that the insurgents are legitimate representatives of the minority group and that they have a reasonable chance of success. n180 Just war doctrine, applied to insurgents,
would limit violence more than it would authorize it. Jus in bello requires that there be no injury to civilians. If the usual definitions of "terrorism" and "civilians" are invoked, this requirement seems to

Sometimes terrorists argue that, in

rule out virtually all terrorism, for terrorism is commonly thought of as politically motivated violence against civilians.

their particular conflict, there are no "noncombatants." An example of this argument is the
claim that even nonmilitary citizens of Israel are permissible targets for Palestinian
protestors because all Israelis benefit from and help maintain the subordination of
Palestinians. n181¶ The problem with this argument is the same as the problem with most
terrorism: It is indiscriminate. It grants insufficient weight to the value of human life when
it does not acknowledge that there are degrees of culpability. Surely, for example,
children are not as responsible as adults, and surely a poor laborer is not as responsible as a
high government official.¶ On the other hand, it is possible to defend a construct of "combatants," that
is, permissible targets of violence, that includes nonmilitary actors. The objective of just war
is to change the regime, or the way that it operates. To attack the foot soldiers, but to ignore the authorities
responsible for creating and implementing the oppressive policies, seems inefficient. The
suggestion that insurgents should distinguish among civilians and limit their targets to "well-known officials, notorious collaborators, and so on," seems reasonable. n182 Thus, just war applied to
insurgents would not eliminate the "combatant" restriction but would broaden the concept, in the manner described by Professor Walzer. "Combatant" could be defined as any person directly

in the
responsible for creating, administering, or defending the human rights violations, including genocide or race discrimination, that are the subject of the conflict. As discussed below,

context of the "war" against race-based capital punishment, combatants would include
those directly responsible for [*762] creating and implementing it. These people are culpable in
a way that the ordinary civilian is not. Even then, violence against them is not necessarily
moral: The other conditions of just war must also be satisfied.¶ I want to emphasize the purpose of applying just war doctrine to insurgents, because I understand that any moral construct that
tolerates political violence by nongovernmental entities is controversial. Just war doctrine accepts that violence - killing people - can be morally justified, if certain conditions are satisfied. One of the
necessary conditions is that the targets must be military. This condition seems inconsistent with other common constructs of morality, including those found in criminal and international law, and in

The heroic status that many now accord those who led slave revolts is evidence of
popular culture.

that view of morality. Yet definitions of combatants proffered by terrorists are overly
broad when they include those who are not directly responsible for the oppression of
others (even if they benefit from that oppression) . This view of combatants discounts
the sanctity of human life that must underlie any construct of morality (even if that
construct allows for the taking of life in certain cases) . The proposed application of just war doctrine to "terrorists" assumes that they, like
nation-states, are open to persuasion about their methods. Their embrace of violence does not mean they have abandoned their claim to morality. If just war doctrine is to remain relevant in the twenty-
first century, it should be applied to every actor - not just governments - that uses violence to accomplish political objectives. D. The Death Penalty and Cocaine Laws: Just Cause?¶ The first component of
just war analysis - jus ad bellum - requires analysis of whether there is a moral reason for war. In this part I analyze whether, under the five criteria of jus ad bellum, the racial critic's causes - ending
discriminatory administration of the death penalty and cocaine laws - justify extreme methods.¶ 1. Last Resort¶ The first requirement is that extreme tactics be the last resort. In the case of changing the
death penalty and cocaine laws, the critical tactics come "last" in the sense that the old ways of changing the law have been tried and they have not (yet) worked. How much time should one give them,
especially when the cost of that time is race-based incarceration and death? A requirement that "legal" methods be invoked first seems reasonable, but morality cannot require infinite patience
(otherwise no war would ever be just, because there might always be a possibility that nonlethal [*763] means would achieve the same objective). In the cases of both the death penalty and the cocaine
sentencing disparity, both the courts and the legislatures have been petitioned for relief, and those bodies of government have failed to grant it. The critical tactics, then, are ones of last resort.¶ 2. Just
Cause¶ The next factor requires consideration of the war's goal. What is the goal of the crits? The answer is simple, for unlike the wars on drugs or terrorism, this war has clear and attainable goals. The
crit tactics will be halted - peace will be declared - when the discriminatory provisions in the complained-of laws are corrected, by equalizing the punishment for powder and crack cocaine offenses and
by abolishing the death penalty (based on the presumption that it cannot be made nondiscriminatory). The racial critics act not out of personal aggrandizement, or anarchist sympathies, but rather from
the good faith intention to repair the criminal justice system. If, in a democracy, dissent is an act of faith, the racial critics are true patriots. There is no reason to believe that their extremist tactics would
persist when their complained-of racial inequities are repaired. Although the analogy is not perfect, the crit tactics are more like self-defense than acts of aggression.¶ 3. Right Intention¶ A just war can be
fought only to redress a substantial injury. This should be an easy requirement for the race rebels to meet. The whole point of their battle is redress of discrimination. They are not waging "war" with
grandiose goals of acquisition; they merely want African Americans to be free of certain official kinds of oppression from the government. "Self-defense" is the paradigmatic example of an injury that war
can morally redress. Civil rights advocates, both moderate and radical, have often invoked this concept as a metaphor to justify the use of radical tactics in the struggle for racial justice. Their argument is
that discrimination is a malign evil that is analogous to an attack by the discriminator. Just war doctrine allows a proportionate response.¶ 4. Reasonable Success¶ The next factor requires consideration
of whether there is a realistic chance of success for the crit jurors and the race rebels. How optimistic should advocates for racial justice be about achieving their goals?¶ Whether optimism for racial
justice - no matter what the tactics - is justified is an issue that has perplexed students of race in America for centuries. [*764] Martin Luther King, Jr. was optimistic, but only in the long run, and mainly,
apparently, for spiritual reasons. "The arm of the moral universe is long," he explained, "but it bends towards justice." n183 Derrick Bell, on the other hand, believes that racism is a permanent affliction of
life in the United States, and that the law therefore is of limited efficacy in improving the lives of minorities. n184¶ Civil rights advocates have achieved the end of some kinds of de jure discrimination,
most notably the Jim Crow laws that required "separate but equal" public accommodations for whites and Negroes. Professor Kimberle Crenshaw has observed that African Americans have successfully
used the law "to their benefit against symbolic oppression through formal inequality and, to some extent, against material deprivation." n185 Crenshaw predicts, however, that civil rights discourse "will
do little to alter the hierarchical relationship between Blacks and whites." n186¶ In this view, the law is more likely to require the removal of "White Only" signs than, say, to redistribute wealth. The
discrimination that our racial critics are concerned about, however, is more akin to symbolic than material subordination. They are not so ambitious as to seek the end of racism in the United States.
Rather the crits seek the conversion of two laws that they perceive as discriminatory.¶ The main legal hurdle the racial critics face is that their measure of discrimination is effects-based, as opposed to
the intent-based standard endorsed by current Supreme Court jurisprudence. n187 Can the racial critics reform the law at least to the extent of eliminating the current death penalty and cocaine
sentencing laws? There is, the evidence suggests, a reasonable chance that the answer is "yes."¶ An effects-based concept of discrimination is already contained in international law. n188 Thus, civil
rights advocates have argued that the United States is in violation of international human rights law because of the death penalty and drug sentencing disparities. n189 Racial critics have had limited
success in marketing an effects-based construct of discrimination even to [*765] conservatives. President George W. Bush has described the cocaine sentencing disparity as "discrimination." n190
Illinois's former governor, a Republican, commuted the death sentence of every inmate on the state's death row, in part because of concerns about race discrimination in these cases. n191 These
advances have not translated into systemic legal reform. They evidence, however, that the racial critics' goals, including their advocacy of a progressive construct of discrimination, are not so radical as to
be unattainable, or even unlikely. n192¶ 5. Legitimate Authority¶ The final issue is whether crit jurors and race rebels are "legitimate authorities." The formal answer is "no." As usually interpreted, just
war doctrine limits fighting to state actors, not insurgents. In Part IV.C, supra, I critiqued this aspect of the doctrine as undertheorized.¶ If just war doctrine is to apply to insurgent soldiers, one of the first
tasks is to define what "legitimate" means in this context. At minimum, there should be a consensus, among members of the affected group, that the law is unjust. Such a consensus seems to exist among
African Americans with regard to racial bias in the death penalty and the crack laws. Regarding the latter, every major civil rights organization that has spoken on the disparity opposes it; the U.S.
Sentencing Commission, the "expert" on federal punishment issues, has also advised against it. n193 While public opinion polls indicate significant support for capital punishment among African
Americans, it is doubtful that they are in favor of its discriminatory administration; the Racial Justice Act, for example, was supported by every member of the Congressional Black Caucus. n194¶ In
summary, our racial critics probably have selected a just cause. n195 This is hardly a surprise, for few Americans would now suggest that race discrimination is just (the issue of how "discrimination" is
defined is obviously more controversial, including in the cases of the death penalty and crack sentencing laws). The more difficult determination is whether the [*766] tactics employed by the racial
critics are just. The next part examines that issue.¶ E. The Rules of Engagement¶ The second component of just war doctrine - jus in bello - has two requirements: (1) proportionality and (2)
noncombatant immunity.¶ 1. Proportionality¶ The first requirement is that the violence used in the war be proportionate to the injury suffered. Proportionality means that "even if the intended object of
an attack is legitimate, the attack still may be unjust if its overall costs outweigh the benefits achieved by the attack." n196¶ Will radical tactics do more harm than good? The "good" each tactic seeks to
achieve is the end of the discriminatory cocaine and death penalty laws. Are subversion and violence permissible, if they will lead to the abolition of race discrimination in the death penalty and cocaine
sentencing laws?¶ 2. The Costs and Benefits of Subversion¶ The crit jurors risk two harms in lying to get on juries: (1) punishment for breaking the law and (2) white backlash. The harm of breaking the
law, in turn, has both a private and a public component. The private harm is that the crit jurors may be punished (indeed, they may even invite punishment, as do other practitioners of civil disobedience).
Because no one would be forced to be a crit juror, anyone who engaged in this form of protest must have decided that for her the benefit of the protest is worth the risk of punishment. The public harm of
the critical jurors is that their willful violations of the law may breed disrespect for it. I do not think that this harm outweighs the good, because it is too vague (most theories of criminal law assume, for
example, that people obey it not out of respect, but to avoid punishment). Moreover, crit jurors could take care to emphasize the justice of their cause, and their willingness to suffer punishment for
violating the law. n197 They would demonstrate that they reject only a part of the law, not the rule of law wholesale. This may lessen the net effect of public disapproval [*767] for breaking specific laws
(one does not hear credible arguments, for example, that the tactics employed by civil rights protestors of the 1950s and 1960s encouraged disrespect for the law).¶ The harm of white backlash is much
less speculative; indeed, it is likely that crit jurors would provoke some kind of negative reaction. The problem of white backlash is a persistent one in African American history. n198 There is backlash to
virtually every minority demand for rights. In this context, the backlash could range from prosecutors attempting to exclude African Americans from juries, to other actors in the trial process, including
witnesses and judges, also using subversion to achieve outcomes in criminal trials that they desire. The prospect of crit jurors probably would encourage prosecutors to strike African Americans from
jury pools (the prosecutors would use blackness as a proxy for being a crit juror, although nonblacks could be crit jurors as well). There is, however, considerable evidence that many prosecutors already
attempt to remove blacks from juries. n199¶ It is impossible to know whether crit jurors would encourage more of other kinds of false testimony than already exists in criminal trials. While the harm of
backlash is real, Professor Randall Kennedy has noted that "given the apparent inevitability of white resistance and the uncertain efficacy of containment, proponents of racial justice should be wary of

Whether violence is a proportionate

allowing fear of white backlash to limit the range of reforms pursued." n200¶ 3. The Costs and Benefits of Violence¶

response to discrimination depends on the kind of discrimination . Just war doctrine, as codified in international human
rights law, allows the use of violence to end or to deter greater violence. The use of military force to prevent the carnage in the Nazi concentration camps is a prototypical example of a just war.¶
According to the Baldus study, the state of Georgia kills some of its citizens on the basis of their race. Is violence an appropriate response to this race-based discrimination if the violence would help end

Under cost-benefit analysis, the answer might be "yes," if the killing takes the same
the discrimination?

or fewer lives than it saves. As a practical matter, this requirement would rule out
indiscriminate terrorist attacks by race rebels, because they could not limit their
destruction. If the race rebels can carefully calibrate [*768] their violence in such a way that it
did not exceed the number of race-based executions, and if the violence reasonably could
facilitate the end of capital punishment, then the race rebels' violence would be moral .¶ What about
violence to end the disparate punishment for cocaine offenses? It cannot be persuasively argued that the taking of life, even the lives of those responsible for the discriminatory law, is proportionate to

the injury. Race-based incarceration is horrible, but it is not a horror that warrants the
death penalty for its perpetrators. Just war doctrine would not allow the use of violence to end the crack sentencing regime.¶ In summary, lying is
a proportionate response to race discrimination. Violence can be either a proportionate or a
disproportionate response, depending on the discrimination. If the discrimination is "only"
race-based incarceration, violence is disproportionate. If the discrimination is race-based
killing, limited violence is a proportionate response .¶ 4. Noncombatants¶ The second rule of engagement is that an attack
cannot intentionally target noncombatants . n201 Those waging war must try to distinguish
between combatants and noncombatants. Civilian deaths are justified only if they are the unavoidable consequence of destroying an offensive military
target, not a means to an end.¶ Who are the combatants in the metaphorical war on discrimination? The

people who discriminate seems the obvious answer. This group could include legislators
and law enforcement officials. The criminal justice system writ large is a combatant in a
different sense. To the extent that extreme tactics are viewed as an attack on the legitimacy
of the criminal justice system, the system itself is an appropriate enemy . The tactic of lying to get on a jury may
injure the system in some sense, but war is, after all, hell. As long as it is only a combatant who is intentionally injured, the

war may still be considered just.¶ Is it possible for race rebels to employ forms of violence that limit intended injuries to the "soldiers" on the other side? For this
analysis, re-consider the hypothetical introduced earlier in this Article. Some racial critics "read" the Baldus study to mean that the government, through its use of capital punishment, kills some criminals
because they are black (these criminals are not killed because they committed crimes, because white criminals guilty of the same crimes are not sentenced to death). Imagine that, in response, race rebels
announce that for every two black people who are executed when a nonblack would not have been executed, they will kill [*769] one responsible government actor, for example an executioner or a
lawmaker who supports the death penalty, in the same state. The race rebels will continue their campaign of violence until the death penalty is abolished in that state.¶ Under the theory of just war
explained in this Article, this crit tactic is morally justified. The cause, the end of race-based killing by the government, is just. The violence is proportionate and directed exclusively at combatants. It is an
ugly prospect, but it is not as ugly as race-based killing by the state.¶ F. Summary¶ The crit jurors and the race rebels have selected just causes - ending the race-based punishment regimes inherent in the

Violence is an immoral response

crack cocaine and death penalty laws. The radical tactics of the crit jurors - subversive jury service - is morally justified as well.

to discrimination if it harms those who are not directly responsible . Violence is also outside the rules of engagement if its
objective is to change the cocaine sentencing laws; it is a disproportionate remedy. Violence directed against the people

who implement race-based capital punishment is justified under the just war construct, if the violence does
not take more lives than it saves, and if it is reasonably likely to help end discriminatory
killing by the government.¶ V. Radical Tactics Versus the "Politics of Respectability"¶ In Race, Crime, and the Law, n202 Professor Randall Kennedy advises African
Americans who wish to reform the criminal justice system to practice "the politics of respectability." n203 The basic tenet of this politics is that it is important for blacks to prove that they "are capable of
meeting the established moral standards of white middle-class Americans." n204 Kennedy notes that "for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be accompanied
at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile
environment." n205 Race, Crime, and the Law recounts how the politics of respectability have been practiced by a number of mainstream civil rights organizations, [*770] and credits the politics with the
political successes of those organizations.¶ A practitioner of the politics of respectability would counsel a minority group against radical methods, based on the fear that these methods would harm the
racial reputation of the group and encourage white backlash. As a descriptive matter, this counsel is entirely accurate. Racial reputation exists, and African Americans, among others, have a bad one. n206
White backlash exists, and minorities, especially blacks, have experienced its full brunt.¶ The prescriptive part of Kennedy's scholarship - the proposal that concern about their racial reputation and white
backlash should constrain the political activities of minorities - is less persuasive. Do racial reputation and white backlash matter enough that people of color should avoid radical tactics based on concern
for how whites will react?¶ The answer, based on African American history, must be "no." The reason is that the reputation of blacks has seldom been based on reality, as opposed to stereotypes and
racism. Because the actual conduct of Negroes has only tangentially been related to their reputation, it is naive to think that different conduct could improve their reputation. Indeed, if racial reputation
were based on facts, African Americans, given their history and triumphs in the United States of America, would presumably have one of the best of any group.¶ White backlash, similarly, has shown little
relationship to reason. It ignites in response to almost every effort by blacks to make progress, whether the progress be desegregation of the public schools, or the quest for affirmative action in
employment. In a review of Kennedy's book, I noted that "if African Americans adapted their political and self-help strategies in order to avert white backlash, they would scarcely achieve any progress at
all." n207 Likewise, in an earlier writing, Professor Kennedy himself observed that "given the apparent inevitability of white resistance and the uncertain efficacy of containment, proponents of racial
justice should be wary of allowing fear of white backlash to limit the range of reforms pursued." n208¶ The radical tactics that this Article describes do not court the sympathy of the white majority and
are not likely to inspire it. They are designed to move the majority, but probably more through inspiring fear (for self and for country) than sympathy. [*771] ¶ Conclusion¶ The issue is not whether
people will suffer and die. African Americans suffer and die now, because of race-based punishment. The issues, then, are whether and how that discrimination should end, and whether it matters if
others suffer and die, in the service of ending the discrimination. If subversion and violence can alleviate "legal" race discrimination, are those tactics worth engaging, if the injury they cause is less than

the politics of
the injury they defeat?¶ In this Article I have considered two radical tactics that could help change discriminatory laws in the United States. My conclusion is that

respectability should not limit the tactics that minorities choose in their quest for racial
justice, but morality should. Because morality matters, people of color, in seeking reform of
the law, should not deploy all of the weapons in their arsenal . Malcolm X's famous proposal of justice "by any means necessary" is
immoral.¶ Thus, under the "just war" construct, people who believe that some criminals in the U nited States are executed on

the basis of their race should not attempt to overthrow the government. They would
almost certainly lose, and this makes their radical method immoral . They should not
commit random acts of terrorism, even if these acts might be successful at persuading
legislators to end the death penalty. The fact that innocent people would be harmed means
that this kind of indiscriminate violence is immoral.¶ For the same reasons, racial critics of the federal cocaine sentencing laws must
not engage in rebellion against the government or commit terrorist acts that risk injury to innocent civilians. Critics of the cocaine laws must observe the additional limitation that they may not use any
tactic that would cause physical harm or death.¶ Just war doctrine allows the use of some radical tactics that minorities now do not commonly employ. In death penalty and crack cocaine cases, racial
critics may lie to get on juries so that they can thwart the discriminatory application of those laws. In death cases exclusively, just war doctrine would allow racial critics to use targeted violence against
officials who implement race-based capital punishment. Although any construct of morality that allows violence may strike some as odd, the objective of just war doctrine is to identify those cases in
which violence is permissible to accomplish an important end. n209¶ [*772] The application of just war doctrine to the problem of race discrimination in the United States results in a construct of

morality that is apt to trouble both moderates and extremists. Moderates will be concerned about the radical tactics that the just war doctrine allows, and extremists will
protest the restraints imposed on "any means necessary." Moderates will claim that I am exaggerating the
injury to people of color because it is black criminals, and not law-abiding African Americans, who are benefited most directly by the critical tactics I endorse. To extremists, on the other hand, I

may seem a victim of white hegemony because I accept that some blacks are punished and
killed for racial reasons, but even so I impose limits on what can be done to remedy this
discrimination.¶ Here is the imperfect compromise I have drawn. Every life matters,
including the life of every African American who has been convicted of a crime. Every
life, and especially every African American life, is diminished when some blacks - even the
"least" among us - are incarcerated or killed because they are black. The situation is
desperate. It has not, however, reached the state that Michael Walzer describes as "the supreme emergency," in which any
means necessary is morally justified to defeat extreme subordination . n210 I believe that slavery
was a supreme emergency. The incarceration of the majority of African Americans would be
another. We have not gone back to the former, and we have not yet reached the latter. In
either of these events, Malcolm X's formula would be morally justified. I hope that it never
is.¶ The result of pursuing justice in a moral way is that minorities must tolerate some race-based discrimination. Even when their cause is just, they are not allowed to achieve it by any means
necessary. They must be patient, even when impatience might win them quicker relief. This is a high cost. One wonders whether any construct of morality that counsels minorities to tolerate

The moral
discrimination is too majoritarian. Would whites ever adhere to a philosophy that required, even in the short term, their subordination to people of color? Perhaps not.¶

aspirations of people of color, however, can be higher than the standard set by the
majority. Why their aspirations should be higher is a difficult question. Perhaps virtue is
its own reward. Perhaps the obligation to act morally is based more on spiritual than on
human-made laws. At any rate, morality does not require that minorities tolerate
discrimination with infinite patience. It does not even require that people of color respond
to discrimination with moderation.¶ [*773] Race-based discrimination is evil. There is no
overestimating the hardship it causes. As long as racial subordination exists, its victims will
be tempted to seek relief in any way they can. In this sense, the protestor's familiar chant
"no justice, no peace" is not a threat. It is just a description of the world. Understanding this
should inspire us to end all race-based discrimination quickly, and through the simplest
means. War, even when it is just, is hell.
This isn’t 1950s Cuba – the government has F-15s, drones, and bombs they
wouldn’t hesitate to use
DeBoer ’16 [Fredrik; March 15th; Ph.D. from Purdue University; Fredrikdeboer, “c’mon, guys,”
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/03/15/cmon-guys/; GR]
I could be wrong about the short-term dangers, and the stakes are incredibly high. But in the end we’re left with the same old
question: what tactics will actually work to secure a better world? In a sharp, sober piece about the meaning of
left-wing political violence in the 1970s, Tim Barker writes “If you can’t acknowledge radical violence, radicals are reduced to mere
victims of repression, rather than political actors who made definite tactical choices under given political circumstances.” The
problem, as Barker goes on to imply, is those tactical choices: in today’s America they will essentially never break on the
side of armed opposition against the state. The government knows everything about you, I’m sorry to say, your
movements and your associations and the books you read and the things you buy and what you’re saying to the people you
communicate with. That’s simply on the level of information before we even get to the state’s incredible capacity to inflict violence.
Look, the world has changed. The relative military capacity of regular people compared to establishment governments has changed,
especially in fully developed, technology-enabled countries like the United States. The Czar had his armies, yes, but the Czar’s armies
depended on manpower above and beyond everything else. The fighting was still mostly different groups of people with rifles
shooting at each other. If tomorrow you could rally as many people as the Bolsheviks had at their
revolutionary peak, you’re still left in a world of F-15s, drones, and cluster bombs. And that’s to say nothing
of the fact that establishment governments in the developed world can rely on the numbing agents of capitalist luxuries and the
American dream to damper revolutionary enthusiasm even among the many millions who have been marginalized and
impoverished. This just isn’t 1950s Cuba, guys. It’s just not. In a very real way, modern technology effectively
lowers the odds of armed political revolution in a country like the United States to zero, and so much the worse
for us. This isn’t fatalism. It doesn’t mean there’s no hope. It means that there is little alternative to
organization, to changing minds through committed political action and using the available nonviolent means to create
change: a concert of grassroots organizing, labor tactics, and partisan politics. Those things aren’t exactly likely to work, either, but
they’re a hell of a lot more plausible than us dweebs taking the Pentagon. Bernie Sanders isn’t really a socialist, but he’s a social
democrat that moves the conversation to the left, and if people are dedicated and committed to organizing, the local, state, and
national candidates he inspires will move it further to the left still. You got any better suggestions? Listen, commie nerds. My people.
I love you guys. I really do. And I want to build a better world. Not incrementally, either, but with the kind of sweeping and
transformative change that is required to fix a world of such deep injustice. But seriously:
none of us are ever going to
take to the barricades. And it’s a good thing, too, because we’d probably find a way to shoot in the wrong direction. I can’t
dribble a basketball without falling down. American socialism is largely made up of bookish dreamers. I love those people but they’re
not for fighting. And even if you have a particular talent for combat, you’re looking at fighting the combined forces of Google,
Goldman Sachs, and the defense industry . Violence is hard. Soldiering is hard. In an era of the NSA and
military robots, it’s really, really hard. “Should we condone revolutionary violence?” is dorm
room, pass-the-bong conversation fodder, of precisely the moral and intellectual weight of “should we torture a guy
if we know there’s a bomb and we know he knows where it is and we know we can stop it if we do?” It’s built on absurd
hypotheticals, propped up by the power of anxious machismo, and undertaken to no practical political end. It’s
understandable. I get it, I really do. But it’s got nothing to do with us. The only way forward is the grubby, unsexy work of building
coalitions and asking people to climb on board.

Presuming success means individual actors do not see themselves as part of the revolution –
that prevents future unity
Thompson 05 – (Paul Thompson, Professor and Head of the Department of Human Resource
Management at the University of Strathclyde, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Work
and Organization, “Foundation and Empire: A critique of Hardt and Negri,” 7-1-2005, Capital &
Class, Vol. 29, Iss. 2, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030981680508600105)kab

Even within these terms, the multitude—‘all the subjugated and exploited’—is not a meaningful
political subject. Instead of the difficult task of actually mobilising labour, we are presented
with a picture of a multitude already formed and victorious. When faced with the reality that
potential revolutionaries in various struggles did not recognise either themselves or
others as part of an expanding chain of revolt, Hardt and Negri can only take
refuge in the banal argument that this was a failure of communication (p. 54-5). Which leaves us,
finally, with their own conclusion. For all the talk of postmodern republicanism, the underlying
logic of Empire is an infantile vanguardism. The labour, whether immaterial or multitudinous, in whose name the
book speaks is labour to which the communist militant, lauded in the postscript, imputes motives, labels struggles, allocates roles,
and proclaims unity of purpose and outcome. Intellectual
militants become the means of communication,
except that what they are communicating is a fantasy that exists only in their own heads. This is
absolutely consistent with the history of Negri and Italian workerism. For all its earlier insights, from its inception this current was
distinctive for its view that what labour actually thought was secondary to its position as a particular category of labour (the mass
worker, the social worker, immaterial labour, and so on). As Negri remarked of the social worker, ‘At the political and social level,
this subject presents a complete materialization of consciousness within the structure of its own existence. Class consciousness, in
other words, comes neither from outside nor from afar: it must be seen as completely internal to, a fact, a thing of class
composition’ (1982: 14).15 In 1981, Negri wrote that the new political generation was more revolutionary because it was without
memory (see Wright, 2002: 174-5). Furnished with a partly new language and context, Empire is Negri’s (and Hardt’s) offering to yet
another new generation. This paper has been a contribution to the recovery of memory about a flawed and failed doctrine.

Online surveillance prevents movements from even organizing in the first place
Aziz and Beydoun, 20—Professor of Law, Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar, founding
Director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights, Rutgers University School of Law AND
Associate Professor of Law, Wayne State University School of Law (Sahar and Khaled, “Fear of a
Black and Brown Internet: Policing Online Activism,” 100 B.U. L. Rev. 1153, 2020, dml)

As noted in Part I, activism and advocacy are as robust online as they are in traditional public forums. This is
especially true for the BLM and ancillary movements , which fueled the popularity of online activism in
the United States over the past decade.168 By describing “a broad and disparate group of [Black] organizations with concerns
about the criminal justice system [as a] movement with a unifying ideology,”169 BIE policing threatens online activism
in a myriad of ways. The speech published and activism performed on social media platforms
invites BIE surveillance and suspicion.170 In part, the FBI introduced BIE policing as a response to the
success of online advocacy addressing (anti-Black) police violence ,171 and it created new
mechanisms for the virtual dragnet that descends upon the profiles and pages of online
activists. Largely unaware that their online activism is being monitored —and even more unaware of the
existence of BIE policing—users freely post content and avail their unfiltered views about police
violence and more to suspecting FBI eyes. And, in doing so, they make the once-difficult task of
collecting data about subjects of interest very easy for the FBI and their virtual interlocutors.172 BIE surveillance
has spawned FBI prosecutions. Rakem Balogun, a Black activist from Dallas, Texas, was arrested and prosecuted
for domestic terrorism in December 2017.173 The IT professional and Second Amendment advocate was arrested shortly
after publishing posts on Facebook stating that he saw signs at a rally with the words “the only good pig is a pig [police
officer] that’s dead” and expressing his belief that “[t]hey deserve what they got”174 with regard to the killing of a Dallas police
officer.175 Balogun claims that he was “venting” online about his frustration with the wave of police killing unarmed Black women
and men.176 Despite their distasteful nature, Balogun’s statements presented no evidence of any inclination on his part to attack a
member of law enforcement. Nor did his statements indicate a direct connection with any organization or outfit that set out to
attack police officers. In short, Balogun
was punished because of his online speech and community-
organizing work, which called into question the recurring incidence of police killing Black
people.177 His Blackness activated the perceived menace of his online content and spurred the FBI to
label him a BIE.178 Balogun’s experiences illustrate the perils online activists face in the form of
intensified surveillance and BIE prosecution. However, in addition to online activism attracting the
attention of FBI agents, the looming fear of BIE surveillance also chills online advocacy. At the
extreme, it may even spur Black activists to completely divest from online advocacy. In an essay
critiquing how the First Amendment right to assembly is unequally extended and oftentimes denied to Black activists, Hansford
observes, “Perhaps even more effective than curbing freedom of assembly on the streets is
destroying these civil society organizations from the inside so that no one is
organized enough to take to the streets to begin with.”179 Although concerned
with assembly within traditional public forums, Hansford makes two observations salient to this Article’s focus on speech within
private virtual forums: First, intensified policing of Black activists online erodes their speech by chilling
virtual activism and pushing users to divest wholly from it.180 Second, BIE policing online aspires to
breed mistrust and division within Black activist organizations and communities .181 Mirroring
sentiments within the Muslim community regarding CVE, Black activists contend that BIE policing’s genuine objective is
to “monitor, disrupt, and divide” advocacy communities and organizations .182 Past surveillance
programs, like COINTELPRO,183 wielded phone tapping and wire surveillance to collect data on subjects of interest to
advance criminal cases, but they also stirred up dissension and discord within Black organizations and
communities. These aims, history reveals, are not separate but entwined objectives intended to
stifle movements that challenge the state and punishing individuals who are materially
connected to the movements or voicing support for overlapping demands for justice online.184
C. Vulnerable Targets Online activists within the Black and Muslim communities are a heterogeneous population. Twenty-five
percent of the Muslim population in the United States identify as Black,185 comprising the largest plurality of the broader faith
group. Thus, Black Muslims comprise one of the most vulnerable targets of online surveillance. Black Muslim online activists occupy
an intersection where they are simultaneously susceptible to CVE and BIE surveillance186 and to the monitoring of FBI agents and
informants deployed by each program.187 Furthermore, today’s political activism reflects the unique challenges faced by Black
Muslims and illustrates how Islamophobia shapes anti-Black racism inflicted by state actors (including the police) and private
citizens.188 Youth and young adults who engage in online activism are another disproportionately
vulnerable group.189 As examined in Part I, younger generations are more entrenched in the culture of
online activism and have been instrumental in spearheading online political campaigns and
movements. Despite their online acumen, young activists are especially vulnerable to the
virtual traps of CVE and BIE surveillance for two reasons. First, although young activists may be
broadly aware of the phenomenon of online surveillance, they are largely unaware of the
existence and architecture of CVE and BIE policing. This ignorance can be especially dangerous on several
fronts of the online landscape. It disarms young activists when engaging with unknown elements
online, particularly within the “direct messages” feature of social media platforms, where clandestine FBI agents or
informants can fluidly discuss topics that entrap or incriminate. Young activists unaware of CVE
and BIE surveillance are naturally ignorant of the “triggers” that induce FBI suspicion,190 and thus
they freely post without strategically filtering out language in their public content . Second, young
activists are more inclined to engage in more zealous online activism. For younger generations,
the internet and social media platforms are not necessarily realms for escape but extensions of
their on-the-ground daily experience and daily lives.191 Young activists use social media
platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, as vehicles for political venting and catharsis, which often
manifests in overzealous content that, for Black and Muslim youth, can attract the watchful eyes of FBI
agents. While political and popular debates about online speech rage forward, the prevailing reality for young Black and Muslim
activists is that unfiltered online advocacy can and does spur CVE and BIE investigations.
White supremacists would coopt the movement – they’ve stormed the capital
once, they’ll do it again
Culp & Bond-Graham ‘14 (Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman
College; a sociologist and investigative journalist, ANDREW CULP and DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM,
Left Gun Nuts, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/29/left-gun-nuts/)
The more radical variant of this argument is that “the people” need guns to wage an eventual revolution and liberate themselves
from the shackles of the state and corporate America. Gun control need not dampen the spirit of those still hoping for a revolution,
even if such a revolution is highly unlikely to happen in our lifetimes. What stands in the way of such leftist dreams are the vast
majority of current gun owners. Over-represented among current gun owners are white reactionary
men, the types who regularly expresses their desire to shoot on sight the “Muslim socialist” president of the United States, and
who “muster” along the U.S.-Mexico boarder with their weaponry to defend the nation against “alien” immigrants. As it stands,
toxic gun culture would coopt any new American revolution with a lethal cocktail of
supercharged masculinity, racism, and provincialism fantasized about in post-apocalyptic
scenes. If the United States ever comes to another civil war, the first thing to die under a
barrage of lead will be our hope for a more just and democratic society ; guns would empower
warlords with petty political agendas, not egalitarian-minded freedom fighters. The most likely cultural
shift away from reactionary gun ownership will not happen in cooperation with the Right and their politics, but against it. Gun
control is the best place to start. Disarming the Right will do more to advance goals toward a revolutionary democratic
transformation of America than trying to beat the Right-wingers (and the U.S. government!) in an arms race. Of course Left
insurrectionists who advocate the right to bear arms are more focused on the U.S. Government as the
singular impediment to their variant of utopia . This dream is sadly a classic example of radical
posturing done in the name of some distant hypothetical moment, and it ignores the actual
harm that guns cause each and every day. In the real world, guns kill upwards of 30,000 Americans every
year, virtually all of these deaths serving absolutely no political purpose in the fight for a more
democratic society. Most of these deaths are just tragic accidents or suicides, many of which would not end in death if guns
were not in the mix. Left fantasies about armed struggle are the same half-baked ideas as those held
by the secessionist Right. What varies for Leftists is the template of decolonial struggles; yet a leftist revolution in
the United States would not kick out a small minority of foreign occupiers , as happened in India and
Vietnam, but would be a fight amongst settler colonialists for political authoristy . This is why the worn
“Zapatistas defense” touted by the radical left is a bad analogy for the United States context – the Zapatistas started a peasant
rebellion that kicked outsiders off their landbase, a task for which wooden cutouts of guns turned out to be more effective than the
real thing.

Revolutionary suicide demands policy analysis and political engagement

Lloyd 15 (Dr. Vincent W. Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Religion, Syracuse University, specializes
in political theology and African American religious thought, former Visiting Scholar, James
Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, Emory University, former
Exchange Scholar, Divinity School, University of Chicago, Ph.D., M.A. Rhetoric, University of
California, B.A. Religion, Princeton University, “Theology and Real Politics: On Huey P. Newton,”
in Renegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics, eds. Joshua Daniel & Rick Elgendy, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015, http://www09.homepage.villanova.edu/vincent.lloyd/theology-real-
politics.pdf)

There are three main approaches to studying religion in the black power movement, emanating from
black theology, black pragmatism, and black humanism, respectively. Black theology emerged contemporaneously
with the black power movement, and it was similarly (though implicitly) positioned as a step
beyond the religious thought of the Civil Rights Movement, as exemplified by figures such as Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Howard Thurman. James Cone famously wrote that black theology is black power,
and black theologians more generally crafted their theological reflections in a way that would
support the political conclusions of the black power movement .16 As for the Black Panthers in
particular, at times they sound strikingly similar to black theologians: “The Black Panthers have
never intended to turn Black people away from religion. We want to encourage them to change
their consciousness of themselves and to be less accepting of the white man’s version of God –
the God of the downtrodden, the weak, and the undeserving .”17 Like SNCC in the late 60s and its iconic leader,
Stokely Carmichael, black theology as a movement leaned on fiery rhetoric and celebrity rather than on grassroots organizing. There is

strikingly little reflection in the writings of black theologians in the early 1970s on the
theological significance of political organizing, a major shortcoming for black theology as a lens
through which to examine Huey P. Newton. The hegemonic force in the academic study of black religion and politics today is
black pragmatism. In large part this is due to the charisma and intellect of Cornel West, the African American religious thinker who positions himself in
a trajectory of American pragmatists stretching from William James and John Dewey through Reinhold Neibuhr and Richard Rorty to himself. West’s
former colleagues at the Princeton Religion Department Eddie Glaude and Jeffrey Stout have analyzed black nationalism through the lens of black
pragmatism, concluding that black nationalism is a form of piety.18 Understood as a naturalized religious concept, piety connotes loyalty to one’s
forbearers. But black pragmatists take issue with black nationalism for its excessive piety, which they suggest turns into patriarchy and the worship of
power. Black nationalists need to recognize the “multiple traditions of American life” and to situate black culture as part of one among those multiple
traditions.19 When this approach is applied to Huey P. Newton, it does not seem particularly productive. The Black Panthers were explicitly opposed to
uncritical piety directed at African heritage, although they also did not embrace the “multiple traditions of American life.” The black pragmatist’s
suspicion of robust religious ideas and practices prevents her from encountering the religious ideas of Newton and the Panthers on their own terms.
Black humanism is the third major current of African American religious thought today, and some black humanists have embraced Newton as one of
their own. Anthony Pinn has included Newton in his canon of black humanist thought because Newton affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every
human being, and because Newton locates ultimate worth in the human, rather than in the divine.20 Indeed, Newton does seem to embrace such a
Feuerbachian reversal, inverting an all-powerful God with his embrace of “power to the people.” As Newton writes, “My opinion is that the term ‘God’
belongs to the realm of concepts, that it is dependent upon man for its existence.”21 Elsewhere, Newton adds, “the greater man becomes, the less his
God will be.”22 In his later, more speculative writings, Newton is even more explicit, describing a progression of mankind towards a “higher state”:
“‘godliness’, where man will know the secrets of the beginning and the end and will have full control of the universe.”23 The Panthers’ criticism of the
Christian church could be pointed, even crude. When Panther leader David Hilliard addressed the National Committee of Black Churchmen in 1970, he
angrily called them “a bunch of bootlicking pimps and motherfuckers,” and he threated that the Panthers would “off” some of the preachers if they
disagreed with the Panthers.24 On the black humanists’ reading, the culmination of the Panthers’ relationship with religion was their establishment of
the Son of Man Temple in Oakland in the mid-1970s. It featured lectures and arts events on Sundays, at which it took collection, there were Temple
committees to organize its work, bake sales and car washes for fundraising, and other familiar accoutrements of a religious organization. The Temple
described itself as a “place in which we come together to express our humanity,” and it was not a place to “honor one God or one reverend.” “This does
not mean that we negate any religion; we all have different philosophies and views of our world. We are all part of everything and it is part of each of
us…. We want our belief in the beauty of life to spread to freedom-loving people everywhere.”25 Over time, the Son of Man Temple’s resemblance to a
religious institution faded and it became a more conventional cultural center. While the black humanist’s approach to Newton seems plausible, it

misses the opportunity to more deeply engage with the religious ideas and practices
employed by Newton. The black humanist’s Feuerbachian premises commit her to religion as viewed through
the eyes of the secularist: religion as personal misdirected belief. But religious ideas and
practices cannot be so easily reduced with repression, distortion, and fantasy . The black theologian’s
approach fares little better, ignoring the Panther’s focus on community organizing , while the black pragmatist conflates

several flavors of black nationalism, boiling them all down to a flaccid account of piety. What follows is an alternative approach,

reading together narrative, aesthetics, political struggles, and political practice. Although
Newton and the early Panthers’ sometimes present seemingly discordant approaches to
religion, this is an indication of a rich theological imagination closely tied with engagement in
real politics, politics that critiques ideology/idolatry while exalting the skills of political
judgment. Newton’s political self-identity was constituted through struggle that exemplified such
political judgment. The founding of the Panthers was propelled by Newton’s dissatisfaction with,
on the one hand, black nationalist organizations, because their ideas were too detached from
the black community, and, on the other hand, non-profits organizations intended to serve the
black community. Because of their funding sources and structure, these non-profits created a class of program administrators more
interested in preserving their jobs and careers than in the wellbeing of the communities they ostensibly served. Newton’s intuition was that political
organizations ought to be by and for a community, not created by others to serve them and not propelled by ideas distant from their lived realities.
Newton’s political struggles continued within the Panthers. He sought to tack away from Carmichael’s turn to “African ideology,” with its concomitant
rejection of everything associated with Marxism (the Panthers would critically appropriate Marxist ideas). He also distanced himself from SNCC’s
reliance on college students as its core; college students were prima facie distanced from the mainstream black community. At the same time, Newton
sought to tack away from fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s focus on violent struggle and his hyperbolically proletarian ethos. Cleaver’s salty language
and distaste for religion also created distance from the mainstream black community, and when Newton was released from prison he attempted to pull
back the Panthers who had drifted in Cleaver’s direction. Refusing
the pre-packaged ideologies of both black
nationalists and Marxists, and refusing to privilege either the authority of higher education or
the authority of street culture, Newton took attunement to concrete realities as the essential
component to his own “ideology.” As Seale describes it, “Our ideology is to be constantly moving, doing, solving, and attacking the
real problems and the oppressive conditions we live under, while educating the masses of the people. This is what we try to, and this is how we move
to make the basic political desires and needs of the people realized.”26 Furthermore, rather
than fetishizing revolution as
messianic or deflating it to everyday political progress, Newton discerns an alternative. He
writes that “revolution is a process rather than a conclusion or a set of principles,” but he also
refuses to associate revolution with any particular aspect of a process that could be named.
“Any conclusion or particular action that we think is revolution is really reaction .”27 According to
Newton, revolution gives the subject (“man”) agency as he understands more about the world
and “gains more control over himself.” Paradoxically, this control over oneself is also what
Newton names, significantly, “revolutionary suicide.” This is also the title of his autobiography, associating himself with
the figure of the revolutionary suicide. Newton asserts that black people in America are already condemned to death, and the only way to reclaim
agency is through struggle. Struggle gives life, gives freedom, even if it inevitably results in death. The Christological resonance is obvious. According to
Newton, the only alternative is reactionary suicide: death without struggle, death without life, death without freedom. Revolutionary Suicide opens
with a dedication to Newton’s parents “who have given me strength and made me unafraid of death and therefore unafraid of life.”28 His father, we
learn, was a pastor, and the whole family was very involved in church life. Newton sang in the choir, attended Sunday School, and served as a youth
deacon. Participating in church life “gave us a feeling of importance unequaled anywhere else in our lives.”29 In the face of humiliations he endured at
school, church life opened an alternative: Even though I did not want to spend my life there, I enjoyed a good sermon and shouting session. I even
experienced sensations of holiness, of security, and of deliverance. They were strange feelings, hard to describe, but involving a tremendous emotional
release. Though I never shouted, the emotion of others was contagious. One person stimulated another, and together we shared an ecstasy and
believed our problems would be solved, although we never knew how… Once you experience this feeling, it never leaves you.30 Newton reflects, “One
of the most long-lasting influences on my life was religion.”31 Indeed, Newton contemplated becoming a minister until he took philosophy classes in
college. Despite the apparent significance of this religious upbringing, and of his father in particular, Newton follows the dedication of Revolutionary
Suicide with an epigraph, authored by “Huey P. Newton,” seemingly disclaiming his parentage. “By having no family, / I inherited the family of
humanity. / By having no possessions, / I have possessed all. / By rejecting the love of one, / I received the love of all. / By surrendering my life to the
revolution, / I found eternal life. Revolutionary Suicide.”32 The religion of his childhood has clearly transformed, but it has not been abandoned. Both
author and symbol, whose wisdom is worthy of citation as epigraph, Newton demonstrates a self-awareness of his political theological status as
simultaneously earthly body and divine. The Christomorphic form that Newton’s autobiography sometimes takes echoes the sanctification, and
sometimes deification, of Newton as part of an orchestrated campaign to both have Newton freed from jail and to use the struggle for Newton’s
freedom as an organization-building opportunity. In the last years of the 1960s there were “Free Huey” rallies held around the country, including one
that brought more than 5000 people to Oakland Auditorium to hear from Movement superstars Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, and H. Rap Brown.
Images of a Newton speaking, or preaching, to the masses were disseminated. So, too, was the most famous image of Newton, seated in a wicker chair,
wearing the Panther uniform of black leather jacket and black beret. In his left hand is a spear and in his right hand is a rifle; to his side are two African
shields. Less discussed in the large wicker chair in which Newton sits. The chair forms a giant circular halo around Newton’s head, complete with ribbing
along the edges. Newton became Huey P. Newton, with the middle initial always included elevating his name beyond the realm of human signifiers.
Panther co-founder Bobby Seale published his hagiography of Newton in 1970 using Newton’s full name frequently throughout, as the words and
wisdom of the founder are conveyed to Seale’s readers. For example, “Huey P. Newton wanted that light there on the corner, and worked to see that
the light was there”; “The cultural nationalists … wanted to sit down and articulate bullshit, while Huey P. Newton wanted to go out and implement
stuff”; “For that reason Huey P. Newton wrote Executive Mandate Number Three, concerning Gestapo cops busting down our doors.” In fact the
enterprise of writing a Huey P. Newton biography, according to Seale, was prompted by an explicitly Christomorphic remark by Eldridge Cleaver:
“Eldridge said that Huey P. Newton followed Malcolm X like Jesus Christ followed John the Baptist. That made a heck of a lot of sense to me. So Eldridge
got some tapes and a recorder and a typewriter and took me down to Carmel to a little cabin to work on the book.”33 In the lore of the Black Panthers,
recorded by Seale, Newton himself, and others, religious parables are re-told with new meaning. For example, after a discussion of “how brainwashed
the society was,” a white liberal friend of the Panthers asked his girlfriend to get him an apple. Eldridge Cleaver noted: [Y]ou let the omnipotent
administrator send down a pig angel. His name was Chief Gain or any chief of police in the country. You let him come down with a flaming sword. With
a weapon, you let him drive you out of the Garden of Eden. And you didn’t defend it, you and your woman… But if it had been Huey Newton in the
middle of the Garden of Eden and the pig angel came down after the omnipotent administrator had told Huey to go forth and exercise his
constitutional rights and replenish the earth – if it had been Huey P. Newton and this pig had been swinging the flaming sword at him, Huey would have
jumped back and said, “No, I’m defending myself. If you swing that sword at me, I’m shooting back.”34 In this riff, retold by Bobby Seale, Genesis is
understood as a common point of reference, and it is re-narrated for the Black Panther context. The black humanist would read Cleaver’s renarration
as, again, Feuerbachian, showing that the human – Newton being the greatest of humans – is capable of asserting his own will, and ultimately replacing
God. (Note how Newton ascends in the narration from “Huey Newton” to the pure icon, “Huey P. Newton,” when he asserts himself). But in light of the
Christomorphic imagery so often used to describe Newton – this story is told one paragraph after Newton is explicitly described as Christ – it seems
more reasonable to read Cleaver’s new narration as a New Testament, the Christ-Newton, armed with gun instead of sword, capable of retaining his
place in the Garden, overcoming the Fall. It is, after all, Huey P. Newton who can defeat the angel, not just any ordinary man. By following Newton, it is
possible to challenge those who would hold the wisdom of the world for themselves, prohibiting access by others – those who would set themselves up
as gods. Unlike other early Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton likes to talk about love. While love is largely absent from Bobby Seale’s writings, and
perhaps the closest Eldridge Cleaver comes to talking about love is his infamous remarks on “rape as an insurrectionary act,” love is a natural part of
Newton’s vocabulary. The Panthers, following Malcolm X, were highly critical of Martin Luther King’s love language, and Newton’s usage is quite distinct
from King’s. For Newton, love is not universal but particular: directed as a specific person or group of people. At the funeral of George Jackson, the
great symbol of prison injustice, Newton spoke of how Jackson “bequeathed us his spirit and his love.”35 By “us,” Newton meant something quite
specific: the Panthers, not humanity. Similarly, at the funeral of Bobby Hutton, an early Panther killed by police at age 17, Newton eulogized: “Like a
bright ray of light moving across the sky, Li’l Bobby came into our lives and showed us the beauty of our people. He was a living example of infinite love
for his people and for freedom.”36 Newton describes his initial exposure to a (secular) conception of “nonpossessive love” before his days with the
Black Panthers. A friend of his was an advocate of free love, arguing that “nonpossessive love did not enslave or constrain the love object” as does the
possessive love of the bourgeoisie. According to this friend, “Nonpossessive love is based upon shared experiences and friendship; it is the kind of love
we have for our bodies, for our thumb or foot.”37 For a time Newton attempted to put nonpossessive love into practice, but with poor results. Newton
encountered another pathology of love when he was in prison. On his account, sex was used, indirectly, as a mechanism of control by the prison
authorities. Once the prisoners “became addicted to sex,” “Love and vulnerability and tenderness were distorted into functions of power, competition,
and control.”38 It was not homosexuality that Newton decried (in fact, he spoke in support of the gay rights movement39); rather, it was the way that
power can distort love by relying on the wrong kind of vulnerability, forced vulnerability that precludes tenderness. In other words, Newton refused
both love that was ostensibly nonpossessive and love that was excessively possessive: both, he seems to conclude, are at the service of the powerful.
What remains is the difficult work of navigating what might be in between – work that requires virtue, not rules. What
Huey P. Newton
presents is less black humanism than black political theology grounded in real politics, black political
theology as critique of idolatry. Newton explicitly refuses the reduction of his religious views to humanism, writing: “I’m a very
religious person. I have my own definition of what religion is about, and what I think of God.”40 On the other hand, when an interviewer asks Newton
about his religion, he responds that in all religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) God is “the unknown, the unknowable.”41 But this God of
Newton’s is not hidden; this God’s erasure is what animates the
political theological vision of Newton and the
Panthers. Their commitment is to achieve the unknown, to struggle against those who would
name it – who would name God, or who would name revolution. They struggle together: they
organize. And they learn the law. Understanding the normative context is the prerequisite for
political intervention. In organizing and learning law they gain agency. Agency is lost when
actions are dictated by ideology, or idolatry; it is gained in the struggle against ideology, against
idolatry - a struggle without end. It is a struggle complemented by virtue, and by love. But what of Newton’s Christomorphic
presentation, sometimes self-presentation? Is Newton not dangerously close to becoming the God he refuses to name? Huey P. Newton had a stutter,
was perpetually nervous, and was a remarkably poor public speaker. Unlike the smoother talking King or Carmichael, or Bob Moses, who went so far as
to change his name so as to disidentify with his charismatic alter ego, Newton did not fit the part. And that, perhaps, is precisely why the
Christomorphic imagery is appropriate: because it is so clearly a performative contradiction. As such, the critique of idolatry is located right in the
center of Black Panther political theology. The very body of the redemptive man, whose home is Eden, continually refuses the seat of authority which is
thrust upon it, dramatizing the shortcomings of all ideology, the dangers of all idolatry. Reflection on the haloed image of Huey P. Newton is
preparation for critique, training in virtue – training in love. As Newton says of himself, “I’m not a leader, I’m an organizer.”42

No mindset shift – empirics and covid prove growth is here to stay

Barthold 20 [Corbin K. Barthold, Senior Litigation Counsel at the Washington Legal
Foundation, “(Still) Against Degrowth”, Forbes, April 29 2020,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wlf/2020/04/29/still-against-degrowth/?
sh=754860525228] @RA
Past progress does not guarantee future progress. Those who want to halt growth are well within their
rights to point this out. But the pro-growth optimists have something the anti-growth pessimists
emphatically lack—a solid track record. McKibben praises the year 1978, when “the top 1 percent of Americans
saw their share of the nation’s wealth fall to 23 percent.” Aside, perhaps, from its being a better time for someone bitten by
envy, what’s so admirable about 1978? Was an American with cancer more likely to survive then, or now? Conditions
have improved not just in America, but almost everywhere. Global poverty has plummeted,
at the fastest rate ever, since 1978. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by more than half, even as the
total number of people on earth has doubled. And the dastardly neoliberal system doesn’t just save
lives; it makes life better. McKibben is free to opine that “a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to
his palm is partway a robot already.” Much modern progressive thought stands on supposedly sophisticated people’s fear of
change. Normal people are not obliged to share such fears, and generally they don’t. Actually, change can be rather agreeable.
Remember when laptops and cell phones were “toys for the rich”? Nor
will normal people find much to like
about life in a degrowth world. Aaron Timms recently reported in The New Republic on his three-week stay at a
French degrowth “summer school.” The “students” there lived in a commune without refrigeration, air
conditioning, or Wi-Fi. They subsisted on leaves, legumes, grains, and bread. They entertained themselves by talking
“long into the night about capitalism and interspecies extinction.” At a seminar a Dutch man presented a vision of the
degrowth lifestyle. He lavished praise on the Amish and said that “it would be great to have more darkness.” Listeners from the
Global South were not impressed. A woman from Chile upbraided the speaker for idealizing the primitiveness of the past.
“People in the developing world are living in that past,” she said; “it’s called poverty.” “I’ve heard all my life about the need for
personal limits and personal sacrifice,” an Indian Ph.D. student added; “it feels like
a regression to go back to
that world.” The school’s only Chinese attendee told Timms that no one in China would accept the school’s living
conditions. “Everyone in the country wants to move to the city,” he said, “and everyone in the city wants to copy the West.” The
Chinese would know; they have tried degrowth on for size. Although capitalism has yet to produce the
kind of ruin Paul Ehrlich is always picturing, the Great Leap Forward, China’s sharp departure from capitalism,
did so to the last degree. Communal farming and rural industrialization— deindustrialization, really—
created the worst famine there has been. Equally tragic was the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to turn Cambodia
into an autarkic socialist agrarian utopia. This is not to say that every rigid environmentalist is an eco-fascist. (McKibben, for
his part, is laudably clear-eyed about the failures of Soviet autocracy and central planning.) It is simply to note that, on the few
occasions it has been implemented, abrupt, widespread, top-down degrowth has been a disaster. The world is too complex for
centrally imposed formulas. Planned degrowth would limit our options. It would purposely
restrict our energy supply, cutting our capacity to solve problems by literally reducing our
output of ideas. (“It is naïve,” West writes, “to dissociate ideas from energy—one cannot flourish without the other.”)
Unplanned growth, by contrast, is a gigantic problem-solving machine. Such growth is diversity itself. As Matt Ridley explains
in The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, innovation is the product of dispersed experimentation; the process is
“gradual, incremental, undirected, emergent and driven by natural selection among competing ideas.” Give humans energy and
freedom, and they will do the rest. Innovators must, in Ridley’s words, stay “one step ahead of the naysayers and the nihilists
and the protestors.” Maintaining
a one-step advantage will be that much harder amid the fear and
distrust, the suffering and disorder, that accompany a modern plague. COVID-19 is
spreading death and poverty. It may in time call forth political reactions and ideological zealotries of every sort.
And already there are those who see our closed shops and empty roads not as a calamity, but as
something very like a triumph. They believe their hour is come. Although the full significance of the coronavirus as
an agent of change cannot yet be known, we may be sure the antimoderns will gladly ride this catastrophe as far as it will carry
them. Our duress is, in their view, a
grand opportunity for deep and lasting reversals. But it is no such
thing. Growth, Walter Russell Mead reminds us, is why we are not as helpless now “as our ancestors
were in the times of the Black Death”; and it is likewise “going to be more important than
ever as the world recovers from the pandemic.” There is cause for hope. The great enrichment has been going for
more than two centuries. It has outpaced economic panics, global wars, and, indeed, other pandemics. Some aspects of the rise
have persisted even in the thick of such setbacks. Technological
change, Ridley points out, was remarkably
steady throughout the twentieth century, the Great Depression included. Although this or that
nation might for a time cast itself into the dark, as China and Cambodia once did, and as some would have us now do, Ridley
suspects that, overall and in the long run, we
“could not stop the march of technology even if we
wanted to.” It is “a far more spontaneous phenomenon than we realize.” The proponents of degrowth are,
at bottom, reactionaries. They are religious fanatics in a post-religious world. It is, to be sure, no sin to be ill at ease
in a deconstructed society, a place where standards are contingent, meaning is fabricated, and instincts run in every direction.
All narratives are happening at once, and none is definitive. This can cause a lot of discomfort. But there is
no going
back. The unlocked mind cannot be taped shut. Scientists and artists will continue to
question all assumptions, to rattle all faiths, and to alter perceptions. Free thinkers, J.B.S. Haldane said, are “the
wreckers of outworn empires and civilizations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.” They are the wielders of reason and
imagination, irrepressible forces that improve lives but corrode values. We
are doomed, if that is the word, to live in
a time of increase and anxiety, a paradoxical age when rich harvests sprout from rootless
stalks. This is more than tolerable. The past was no traditionalist arcadia, and revolution is no path to a bucolic
future. Many policies merit consideration; someone who wants to impose taxes on carbon, limits on entitlements, racial quotas
on college admissions, or restrictions on abortion shouldn’t have a copy of The Road to Serfdom or The Handmaid’s Tale
waved in her face. But gross
deviations, in whatever direction, would make any liberal country less free,
less varied, and far more miserable. It may be unsettling to accept that no story is complete, no truth absolute;
that there is no one cause for which to fight; that life is messy and confusing. But some psychological vertigo is a fair price to
pay for the benefits of living in an open society. Nietzsche, in one of his many fits of exuberance, announced that reality shows
us a marvelous wealth of types. He warned against the prig who draws his own face on the wall and exclaims, “Behold the
man!” Smartphones make us less human, says Bill McKibben. Behold the man. “Doing stuff with your hands is great fun,” says a
Dutch primitivist; “that’s what’s missing in our lives.” Behold the man. One might say, turning the intended (and rotten)
meaning of Rousseau’s famous phrase on its head, that we are forced to be free. There being no general will to tap, we need the
most dynamic kind of thinking of all, the kind that embraces uncertainty, contradiction, and difference. So check your
premises; do it often, and ask that others do the same. Accept that you usually can’t tell strangers how to live,
never mind how they’re supposed to want to live. Curiosity and genuine toleration are the keystone of good citizenship in an
evolving postmodern republic. The more spiritual among us can catch a glimpse of the cosmic in the fact that our ancestors,
our siblings, and, above all, our descendants need not see the world as we do. Freeman Dyson knew a thing or two; take it from
him. “Freedom,” he wrote, “is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by
their parents.”

Transition fails—growth bias overwhelms, authoritarian fill-in, and 2008 proves.

Burch-Hansen 18—(Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School).
Hubert Buch-Hansen. “The Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from Critical
Political Economy,” Ecological Economics, Volume 146, April 2018, pp. 157-163.

Political projects do not become hegemonic just because they embody good ideas. For a project to become
hegemonic, (organic) intellectuals first need to develop the project and a constellation of social forces with sufficient power

and resources to implement it then needs to find it appealing and struggle for it. In this context, it is worth noting that degrowth, as a social
movement, has been gaining momentum for some time , not least in Southern Europe. Countless grassroots' initiatives

(e.g., D'Alisa et al., 2013) are the most visible manifestations that degrowth is on the rise . Intellectuals – including founders of ecological economics
such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly, and more recently degrowth scholars such as Serge Latouche and Giorgos Kallis – have played a major role in developing
and disseminating the ideas underpinning the project. A growing interest in degrowth in academia, as well as well-attended biennial international degrowth conferences, also

Still, the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and
indicate that an increasing number of people embrace such ideas.

type of support it needs if its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes. The number of political
parties, labour unions, business associations and international organisations that have so far
embraced degrowth is modest to say the least. Economic and political elites, including social democratic parties and most of
the trade union movement, are united in the belief that economic growth is necessary and desirable. This consensus finds
support in the prevailing type of economic theory and underpins the main contenders in the neoliberal project, such as centre-left and nationalist projects. In spite of the world's

pro-growth discourse in other words continues to be hegemonic: it is widely considered a

multidimensional crisis, a

matter of common sense that continued economic growth is required. It is also noteworthy that economic and
political elites, to a large extent, continue to support the neoliberal project , even in the face of its evident shortcomings . Indeed, the

2008 financial crisis did not result in the weakening of transnational financial capital that could have paved the way for a paradigm
shift. Instead of coming to an end, neoliberal capitalism has arguably entered a more authoritarian phase (Bruff, 2014).
The main reason the power of the pre-crisis coalition remains intact is that governments stepped in and saved the
dominant fraction by means of massive bailouts. It is a foregone conclusion that this fraction and the wider coalition
behind the neoliberal paradigm (transnational industrial capital, the middle classes and
segments of organized labour) will consider the degrowth paradigm unattractive and that such social
forces will vehemently oppose the implementation of degrowth policies (see also Rees, 2014: 97) . While degrowth advocates

envision a future in which market forces play a less prominent role than they do today, degrowth is not
an anti-market project. As such, it can attract support from certain types of market actors. In particular, it is worth
noting that social enterprises, such as cooperatives (Restakis, 2010), play a major role in the degrowth vision. Such enterprises are defined by being ‘organisations involved at
least to some extent in the market, with a clear social, cultural and/or environmental purpose, rooted in and serving primarily the local community and ideally having a local
and/or democratic ownership structure’ (Johanisova et al., 2013: 11). Social enterprises currently exist at the margins of a system, in which the dominant type of business entity

The further dissemination of social enterprises, which is crucial to

is profit-oriented, shareholder-owned corporations.

the transitions to degrowth societies, is – in many cases – blocked or delayed as a result of the
centrifugal forces of global competition (Wigger and Buch-Hansen, 2013). Overall, social enterprises thus (still) constitute a social force with
modest power. Ougaard (2016: 467) notes that one of the major dividing lines in the contemporary transnational capitalist class is between capitalists who have a material
interest in the carbon-based economy and capitalists who have a material interest in decarbonisation. The latter group, for instance, includes manufacturers of equipment for
the production of renewable energy (ibid.: 467). As mentioned above, degrowth advocates have singled out renewable energy as one of the sectors that needs to grow in the
future. As such, it seems likely that the owners of national and transnational companies operating in this sector would be more positively inclined towards the degrowth project
than would capitalists with a stake in the carbon-based economy. Still, the prospect of the “green sector” emerging as a driving force behind degrowth currently appears
meagre. Being under the control of transnational capital (Harris, 2010), such companies generally embrace the “green growth” discourse, which ‘is deeply embedded in
neoliberal capitalism’ and indeed serves to adjust this form of capitalism ‘to crises arising from contradictions within itself’ (Wanner, 2015: 23). In addition to support from the

a political project ‘also needs the political ability to mobilize majorities in

social forces engendered by the production process,

parliamentary democracies, and a sufficient measure of at least passive consent’ (van Apeldoorn and Overbeek, 2012: 5–6) if it is to
become hegemonic. As mentioned, degrowth enjoys little support in parliaments, and certainly the pro-growth discourse is hegemonic
among parties in government.5 With capital accumulation being the most important driving force in capitalist societies, political decision-makers are generally eager to create
conditions conducive to production and the accumulation of capital (Lindblom, 1977: 172). Capitalist states and international organisations are thus “programmed” to facilitate

capital accumulation, and do as such constitute a strategically selective terrain that works to the disadvantage of the degrowth project. The main advocates of the
degrowth project are grassroots, small fractions of left-wing parties and labour unions as well as
academics and other citizens who are concerned about social injustice and the environmentally unsustainable nature of
societies in the rich parts of the world . The project is thus ideationally driven in the sense that support for it is not so much rooted in the material circumstances or short-term
self-interests of specific groups or classes as it is rooted in the conviction that degrowth is necessary if current and future generations across the globe are to be able to lead a

degrowth movement, it has only modest resources compared

good life. While there is no shortage of enthusiasts and creative ideas in the

to other political projects. To put it bluntly, the advocates of degrowth do not possess instruments that enable
them to force political decision-makers to listen to – let alone comply with – their views. As such, they are

in a weaker position than the labour union movement was in its heyday, and they are in a far weaker position than the owners and

managers of large corporations are today (on the structural power of transnational corporations, see Gill and Law, 1989) . 6. Consent It is also safe to
say that degrowth enjoys no “passive consent” from the majority of the population. For the time being, degrowth

remains unknown to most people. Yet, if it were to become generally known, most people would probably not find the vision of a

smaller economic system appealing. This is not just a matter of degrowth being ‘a missile word that backfires’ because it triggers negative feelings
in people when they first hear it (Drews and Antal, 2016). It is also a matter of the actual content of the degrowth project. Two issues in particular should be mentioned in this

for many, the anti-capitalist sentiments embodied in the degrowth project will inevitably be a difficult pill to
context. First,

swallow. Today, the vast majority of people find it almost impossible to conceive of a world without
capitalism. There is a ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now
impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2). As Jameson (2003) famously observed, it is, in a sense, easier to imagine the

end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. However, not only is degrowth – like other anti-capitalist projects – up against
the challenge that most people consider capitalism the only system that can function; it is also up against the additional challenge that it speaks against economic growth in a

world where the desirability of growth is considered common sense. Second, degrowth is incompatible with the lifestyles to which
many of us who live in rich countries have become accustomed. Economic growth in the Western world is, to no small extent, premised on the
existence of consumer societies and an associated consumer culture most of us find it difficult to completely escape. In this culture, social status, happiness,

well-being and identity are linked to consumption (Jackson, 2009). Indeed, it is widely considered a natural
right to lead an environmentally unsustainable lifestyle – a lifestyle that includes car ownership, air travel, spacious accommodations, fashionable clothing, an omnivorous
diet and all sorts of electronic gadgets . This Western norm of consumption has increasingly been exported to other parts of

the world, the result being that never before have so many people taken part in consumption patterns that used to be reserved for elites (Koch, 2012) . If
degrowth were to be institutionalised, many citizens in the rich countries would have to adapt to a materially lower standard of living. That is,
while the basic needs of the global population can be met in a non-growing economy, not all wants and preferences can be fulfilled (Koch et al., 2017). Undoubtedly, many

people in the rich countries would experience various limitations on their consumption opportunities as a violent
encroachment on their personal freedom. Indeed, whereas many recognize that contemporary consumer societies are environmentally
unsustainable, fewer are prepared to actually change their own lifestyles to reverse/address this.
Ext – Cap Inevitable
Even if not in an identical form capitalism resiliency makes its presence
inevitable—assumes all neg arguments about dissatisfaction and inequality
Waldman- Brown 18- PhD student in political economy at MIT’s Department of Urban
Studies and Planning, where she researches emerging technologies, manufacturing systems, and
the roots of rising inequality. She is a graduate of the Technology and Policy Program and a
Fulbright fellow. She holds a bachelor’s of science in physics and writing and humanistic studies
from MIT (“Why is American Capitalism so Resilient?,” Medium, 2/3/2018,
https://medium.com/@Annawab/why-is-american-capitalism-so-resilient-e3790058efce)//mcu

*** this was an essay for MIT’s course Political Economy. All ideas and interpretations are
heavily indebted to Professors Berger and Piore.

Nonetheless, policies have not particularly changed since Occupy and, according to many metrics, American
capitalism is
thriving. The global economy has mostly rebounded — despite the banking crisis, subsequent
public disillusionment, and a populist backlash against globalization. Even though Trump’s administration
hopes to restrict international trade, their push to de-regulate the national economy is solidly in-line with liberal principles. Today,
American unemployment is remarkably low and GDP growth is nearly back to pre-2008 levels. The romantic conception of the
entrepreneur is more popular than ever among young people worldwide. Drawing from various paradigms of economic thought ,
I
will argue that the resilience of capitalism has its roots in the flexibility of capitalist institutions,
the continued potential for technological innovation, and the prevalence of sociological
elements that favor the free market — including a lack of proletarian class consciousness and
the renewal of the capitalist mythos. Definitions of Capitalism First, it is important to clarify what I mean by
“capitalism,” as each political economy paradigm has a somewhat different definition. I will generally employ Polanyi’s definition for
this essay, since it is neutral and succinct: Polanyi (1944) does not define capitalism per se but rather the “self-regulating market,”
which “demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere.” Capitalism
maintains these two spheres as distinct and critical pillars of society — no matter how they may overlap at times. Marx
saw
capitalism as an inevitable, historical stage of societal organization which, as it progresses,
forces all of society into two distinct classes: the bourgeoisie with the means of production, and
the proletariat that has nothing to sell but its labor. The forces of production that form the technological base of
society will naturally cause capitalism to disintegrate into class warfare, and then the government will take over the means of
production and share profits among all the workers. Eventually, Marx believed that this government-controlled socialism will
transition into communism, in which everyone will be free to pursue their own desires in a sort of post-scarcity world. While the
Marxist defines capitalism by its oppressive features, the liberal paradigm (economically liberal, that is, not socially liberal) defines
capitalism by the freedom it engenders through the existence of a free market. The liberal tends to see capitalism as a form of
societal organization that comes instinctually to all humans who enter into society: Keynes (though not a typical liberal) describes
the “essential characteristic of Capitalism” as “the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving
instincts of individuals” (Keynes 1932). Friedman (1962) defines capitalism from an outside standpoint as “a society organized
through voluntary exchange.” He contrasts capitalism with the involuntary exchange necessitated by communist societies, which
control (or attempt to control) all commercial activity through centralized organization — entirely merging the economic and
political spheres. It is difficult to pin down a single explanation of capitalism for the cultural/sociological paradigm, though the
various definitions that exist all utilize the reference frame of society as a whole — and view capitalism as an ethos, beyond Marx’s
distinct social classes or the mere existence of a free market. Weber (1930) describes how some pre-industrial civilizations had
substantial free markets, but the fundamental “spirit of capitalism” did not come about until the Calvinists developed the idea of the
“calling”: “an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional
activity.”Capitalism
provides a spectrum of varying degrees of market control, whereas communist
nations must maintain all commercial activities under control of the state — and thus only the state is to
blame in case of failures. It is easy to tell when a communist nation is no longer purely communist: it develops a widely-accepted
free market, such as “communism with Chinese characteristics.” On the other hand, must a capitalist nation completely abolish its
free market in order to become non-capitalist? Soviet Russia had a thriving black market .
Even the smallest, most
highly-regulated market could allow for aspects of capitalist society to develop — as long as the
market maintains some degree of autonomy. Even if capitalism cannot regulate itself as well as liberals have
theorized, its flexibility and continued support across both government and society have
ensured its resilience. In addition, as the Occupy movement discovered, it is difficult to envision a viable
alternative to the free market that can provide America with the same freedoms. Very few of the
Occupy protestors wished the United States to follow the route of Cuba or Soviet Russia. Instead,
their varied and contradictory proposals included Scandinavian-style social services, fewer tax
breaks for the rich, and a higher minimum wage — not one of which requires the complete
dissolution of the free market. In fact, much of the Occupy anger about “crony capitalism” wanted an
even freer market, demanding less collusion between the government and corrupt capitalist
firms. Even the handful of resolute communists and anti-capitalists behind Occupy were generally
uninterested in class warfare, at least until riot police forcibly broke down many of the camps. Could American society
ever lose faith in capitalism itself? As Schumpeter points out, the freedom engendered by capitalism also encourages intellectuals to
share their views on the evils of the free market and its moral degradation — and provides a variety of paths through which to
“finance the mortal enemies of the leading class” (Schumpeter 1942). Whether or not the American dream was ever a reality,
technological unemployment and other factors have finally begun to poke holes in its public perception — and the prevalence of
new forms of media have allowed everyone to express their opinions. In the words of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), “a capitalism
that is no longer accompanied by an increase in the standard of living, especially of the poorest, loses its credibility.” America’s
millennial generation is the first in recent history to have fewer opportunities than their parents. Despite the general revival of
markets following the 2008 crisis and strong social support for entrepreneurship worldwide, inequality has continued to increase.
When the Occupy movement eventually fizzled out (spurred on by coordinated action from the FBI and law enforcement), many of
the same activists channeled their rage against the system into the Bernie Sanders campaign, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and
a variety of other social causes. A few probably voted for Donald Trump, believing his rhetoric around tax reform and enhancing
social mobility for the middle class — and, perhaps, out of some faith in his “mystic glamor” as a successful capitalist. The concerns
brought up by the groundswell of worldwide Occupy movements have not, for the most part, been properly addressed.
Nonetheless, as evidenced by the election of self-professed “billionaire” Trump, many working-class Americans blame their
joblessness on globalization and immigration rather than decrying the bourgeoisie or capitalism as an institution. Yet the
lack of
coherent economic proposals from the Trump administration will likely exacerbate current inequality, or
at best stall the issue by supporting outdated manufacturing jobs, restricting international trade,
and racking up national debt. As labor unions recede from public life, companies have regressed
to dangerous working conditions and lower wages — which could indeed lead to class warfare if
the working class were more keen on class solidarity . Despite the overall resilience of the free market, when
properly contained by government and societal protections, I do not think that American capitalism can continue in its current,
globalized form. I think the key issues with the strikingly prevalent liberal creed are its blind belief in the self-regulating power of the
free market, and its faith that the spirit of capitalism is an intrinsic human trait rather than a cultural construction. As automation
takes over the manufacturing and service jobs that were traditionally open to under-educated workers and globalization increases,
the American government will need to respond through more socialist means: providing better social services, retraining workers,
and artificially slowing down the pace of automation — just as English statesmen slowed down the process of enclosures to allow
time for the unemployed to find new occupations. There
are undeniable cracks in American capitalism , but
the institution itself is flexible enough to accommodate substantial revisions. The question is, how
long must we wait until America resolves to mitigate the free market’s destruction of society?

Capitalism is inevitable- it will grow and shift to self-correct social and

environmental problems
King 21- Matthew Wilburn King is an international consultant and conservationist based in
Boulder, Colorado and the president and chairman of the Common Foundation. Connect with
him on Facebook or LinkedIn. (Matthew King, “It's done so much for human well-being, but it's
far from perfect. Will capitalism as we know it evolve into something new?,” BBC, 5/26/21,
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210525-why-the-next-stage-of-capitalism-is-coming)//
mcu

In recent years, various ideas and proposals have emerged that aim to rewrite capitalism's social
contract. What they have in common is the idea that businesses need more varied measures of
success than simply profit and growth. In business, there's "conscious capitalism", inspired by
the practices of so-called "ethical" brands. In policy, there's "inclusive capitalism", advocated by both
the Bank of England and The Vatican, which advocates harnessing "capitalism for good". And in
sustainability, there's the idea of "doughnut economics", a theory proposed by economist and
author Kate Raworth, which suggests that it's possible to thrive economically as a society while
also staying within social and planetary boundaries. Then there's the "Five Capitals" model
articulated by Jonathan Porritt , the author of Capitalism As If The World Matters. Porritt calls for the
integration of five pillars of human capital – natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial
capital – into existing economic models. One tangible example of where companies are beginning
to embrace the Five Capitals is the B-Corporation movement. Certified companies sign up to a
legal obligation to consider "the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers,
community, and the environment". Their ranks now include major corporations such as Danone,
Patagonia, and Ben & Jerry's (which is owned by Unilever). This approach has become
increasingly mainstream, reflected in a 2019 statement released by over 180 corporate CEOs
redefining "the purpose of a corporation". For the first time, CEOs representing Wal-Mart, Apple, JP Morgan Chase,
Pepsi, and others acknowledged that they must redefine the role of business in relation to society and the environment. Their
statement proposes that companies must do more than deliver profits to their shareholders. In addition, they must invest in their
employees and contribute to the improvement of the human, natural and social elements of capital that Porritt refers to in his
model, rather than the sole focus on financial capital. In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance on the future of capitalism ,
the executive chairman of Best Buy, Hubert Joly, said that "what has happened is that for 30 years, from the 1980s to 10 years ago,
we’ve had this singular focus on profits that has been excessive and has caused a lot of these issues. We
need to unwind a
bit of these 30 years. If we have a refoundation of business, it can be a refoundation of
capitalism as well... I think this can be done, this has to be done." A new direction More than three decades
ago, the United Nations Brundtland Commission wrote in "Our Common Future" that there was ample evidence that social and
environmental impacts are relevant and need to be incorporated into development models. It is now obvious that these issues must
also be considered within the social contract underpinning capitalism, so that it is more inclusive, holistic and integrated with basic
human values. Ultimately, it is worth remembering that citizens
in a capitalist, liberal democracy are not
powerless. Collectively, they can support companies aligned with their beliefs, and continuously
demand new laws and policies which transform the competitive landscape of corporations so
that they might improve their practices. When Adam Smith was observing nascent industrial capitalism in 1776, he
could not foresee just how much it would transform our societies today. So it follows that we might be similarly blind to what
capitalism could look like in another two centuries. However, that does not mean we should not ask how it might evolve
into something better in the nearer term. The future of capitalism and our planet depend on it.

Capitalism is inevitable yet evolving- there is only a risk that the aff creates a
positive model for evolution
Manyika et al 20- *Leads research on global economic and technology trends and serves
many of the world's leading high tech companies on growth, innovation, and strategy.
**Chairman of North America and a global leader in private equity and investment, with deep
roots in healthcare. (James Manyika*, Gary Pinkus**, and Monique Tuin, “Rethinking the future
of American capitalism,” McKinsey Global institute, 11/12/20,
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/long-term-capitalism/rethinking-the-future-of-
american-capitalism)//mcu

The next era of American capitalism The 21st century provides remarkable opportunities for business and
economic growth domestically and internationally. Our own research and that of others highlight many different
opportunities for innovation and growth in the coming decades. The strengths of American capitalism could
position the United States to take advantage of these opportunities. But for its individuals, firms,
and overall economy to fully participate in and benefit from these opportunities, America’s
model of capitalism may need to evolve if it is to remain the unmatched mechanism for
delivering prosperity for all that it has been. However, in any such evolution, it is important to
retain the strengths of the current model, especially those that will be critical to capturing the
opportunities in the decades ahead, and focus on addressing the weaknesses, such as the ones we
have highlighted in this article. In previous eras, new ideas emerged and institutional actors enacted a number of market-based
mechanisms that attempted to address the issues that capitalism faced. Modern
forms of intervention may be
needed, given the growing and pervasive role of technology, the emergence of new business
models, the growing importance of intangible assets, and the changing ways in which individuals
participate in the economy as workers, consumers, and savers. The magnitude of the economic shock
brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic creates an opportunity to reconsider how well the current model works and the extent to
which it is fit for the challenges and opportunities of the present and future.
These include how to ensure capitalism
is inclusive, how to evolve market mechanisms, where to apply them, the role of government
and industrial policy, and the role of corporations in the 21st century in addressing societal
challenges. Whether and to what extent America’s model of capitalism will need to adjust to growing challenges and new
economic and technological possibilities remains to be determined. However, answers to some key questions may help provide
direction: Whereand how can the strengths of American capitalism be reinforced and broadened
to fully benefit the growth and prosperity of all in the United States, and others beyond it, to
fully capture the promise and evolving opportunities and possibilities of the 21st century ? What
types and mix of market-based and non-market-based interventions can shift capitalism to
provide opportunities and improved outcomes to all its participants while preserving the
innovation and competition that enable growth and greater prosperity ? What aspects of market
design and redesign are needed in order to create well-functioning and inclusive markets fit for
a 21st-century economy and its participants? As technology, the growing importance of capital
and intangibles, and globalization all affect labor markets, how can capitalism evolve to ensure
that people—the majority of whom participate in the economy via their labor—prosper,
through access to quality jobs, income, and dignity ? As COVID-19 has further highlighted vulnerabilities for many
individuals, what safety nets and transition supports are required going forward, and how can these best be provided? How can
capitalism ensure that all people and places in the United States have the opportunity to participate fully in the economy, especially
those most adversely affected to date and at risk of being left behind in the future? What investments are needed and how should
these be made? How should the concentration of economic returns and the emergence of superstar firms, sectors, and cities be
addressed? How can the benefits of these superstars—for example, the ability to make larger, more uncertain long-term
investments in breakthrough innovation and the benefits to consumers from scale and network effects—be harnessed for wider
benefit, while the downsides including impacts on innovation, competition, consumers, and regional economies are mitigated? To
what extent is
capitalism equipped to address a challenge like climate change with the required
speed and scale? Where can market-based interventions be applied, and what role can
governments and other institutions play to create incentives and enable coordination in order to
address climate change? What actions will ensure that American capitalism remains competitive and resilient in the global
economy? What can be learned from other systems of capitalism, and what aspects that make the American system unique should
be leveraged for continued growth and prosperity? What, if any, is the role of industrial policy? How can capitalism ensure
sufficient investment in public goods, such as education and other human capital investments, in
public infrastructure including health infrastructure, or in fundamental R&D ? How can these
investments be made equitably across various socioeconomic and demographic groups and parts of the country? How should these
investments be financed? There are further questions to be answered, some of which we intend to contribute to through our
research at the McKinsey Global Institute over the coming months. How the
American model of capitalism works is
not set in stone and can evolve, as it always has, to meet the new opportunities and challenges .
Business leaders, policy makers, social institutions, and individuals will all play a role in shaping
the American model of capitalism in the 21st century.

It’s inevitable – capitalism has infiltrated the global world system through
privatization, international capital, state intervention, and industry
displacement.
Singh and Tiwana 20’ (Paramjit Singh is an assistant professor at the Department
of Economics in Chandigarh, India. His research focuses on Political Economy of
Development. His area of interest lies in the Marxian Political Economy. Balwinder
Tiwana is a professor of Economics at Punjabi University in Patiala, India. He has
multiple publications in economics and is interested in the broader consequences of
neoliberal reforms. “THE STATE AND ACCUMULATION UNDER CONTEMPORARY
CAPITALISM”, vol. 11, no. 1, Pluto Journals, Spring 2020,
doi:10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.11.1.0076. Accessed July 25 th, 2021. P 90-91) //AT

Under the reign of oligopoly-finance capital, a powerful ideological cluster takes shape that
preaches privatization, market deregulation, and retreat from state intervention . However,
despite the small government rhetoric, the neoliberal state continually protects the interest of
oligopoly-finance capital and plays an important role by facilitating, subsidizing, and building a
favourable environment for private capital accumulation . It does all this, of course, without intervening to
promote employment and social services (health and education), and without building a safety net for the bottom strata of the
society via subsidized food and other basic goods. The state’s macroeconomic policy is confined to monetary adjustments aimed at
stabilizing prices. At the same time, its
political function involves using the police, military, and public
administration to guarantee international finance capital’s access to domestic resources. (To
secure these assets, state power backs up finance capital, and both aid industrial capital). The
International Monetary Fund (IMF) was key in promoting the global retreat from state
intervention in production and distribution. No longer viewed as a mere economic indicator, fiscal deficit emerged in
the IMF’s discourse as the main economic problem, its elimination being a necessary precondition for economic growth. The IMF
pointed the finger especially at state expenditures in the social sector (subsides to poor people and other welfare programmes) as
the main cause of fiscal deficits, ignoring the role played by declining state revenues from custom duties and taxes on corporations.
The search for fiscal equilibrium justified privatizing not only state-owned industries and other assets, but even social services such
as education and health. The end result defies logic and common sense: a capitalist state that rules “on the masses’ behalf” without
providing any services to them. In
reality, the state’s (and the IMF’s) objective is to put the masses’
labour power and the country’s resources at the service of oligopoly-finance capital, with a view
to accelerating accumulation. Another important feature of today’s capitalism is the
displacement of industry towards the developing regions of the world to counterbalance
declining profits in the central countries. International capital relies on the developing
countries’ states, which have become an integral part of the capitalist world system , to
ensure access to cheap labour, raw materials, land, and other resources to accelerate the
accumulation process and enhance profits. The peripheral states also intervene in those areas of
social life that private corporate capital cannot easily manipulate . For example, their ideological apparatuses
present the interests of big capital as identical to national interests. The developing countries’ states also use their repressive
apparatuses to displace millions of people and forcibly transfer resources to private corporations ,
in the name of
industrialization and modernization. In this latest phase of capitalism, the state has become
oblivious to the real problems that the masses face.

Capitalism is Inevitable- Other Capitalist countries make it inevitable

Muscato 20- Chris has a master's degree in history and teaches at the University of Northern
Colorado. (“Capitalist Countries: Definition & List,” Study.com, July 29, 2020,
https://study.com/academy/lesson/capitalist-counties-definition-list.html)

So where can capitalism be found today? The most honest answer is: everywhere. We
live in an increasingly globalized
economy, which is based on an international free market since there is no single government
with the authority to control means of production or value of commodities for the world. So the
international economy is basically capitalist and nearly every nation in the world today practices
some form of capitalism on the global scale. However, not all of these nations practice capitalism on the domestic
scale. Traditionally, capitalism was associated with Western Europe, where the terms and ideas we
associate with capitalism were first developed. Ever since the Cold War, though, the real
champion of capitalism has been the United States, one of the most strictly capitalist nations in
the world today. Many Americans remain devoted to the ideologies and institutions of capitalism, especially private property,
seeing it as an integral part of the American democratic experience. While the USA may well be one of the world's most capitalist
nations, even the USA is not 100% committed to capitalism. After all, some government regulation of private businesses is allowed.
This is important to remember. Capitalism comes in various shapes and sizes. Every country has its own
model.

Neolib is resilient – global resistance proves

Igor Guardiancich 17, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public
Management of the University of Southern Denmark, 3/3/2017, “Absorb, Coopt and Recast:
Global Neoliberalism’s Resilience through Local Translation”,
http://www.euvisions.eu/neoliberalisms-resilience-translation/

One powerful message permeating the book, and which gives a forceful explanation to Colin Crouch’s punchy title is that: “ rather
than a mass-produced, slightly shrunk, and off-the-rack ideological suit, neoliberalism is a
bespoke outfit made from a dynamic fabric that absorbs local color ” (5). Even under a full-out
attack against some of its basic assumptions, such as the one unleashed in the immediate wake
of the global financial crisis, neoliberalism proved resilient beyond its many architects’ wildest
dreams. Its capacity to absorb, coopt and recast selected ideas of oppositional social forces has
been the most valuable asset guaranteeing its survival. Again, the comparison of the responses to the crisis in
Spain and Romania show such adaptability in full.¶ The socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
tried to salvage the social-democratic legacies of the Spanish economy by engineering a
Keynesian rescue package. Only later, when the disaster of the cajas became apparent and the
emergency intensified, did conservative PM Mariano Rajoy embrace more deregulation in the
labour market (inspired by the Hartz IV reform) and extensive cuts in the public sector under the strong external pressure of the
European Central Bank and of international financial markets.¶ In
Romania, local policymakers further radicalized
in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers’ crisis, thereby outbidding the IMF on austerity and
structural reforms. Instead of shielding lower-income groups, the opposite strategy of upward
redistribution was chosen. By heroically withstanding the external attempts at moderation, the Romanian economy
retained an unenviable mix of libertarian achievements (flat-tax rates), experimental neoliberalism (privatized pensions) and
mainstream neoliberal orthodoxy (sound finance, labour market deregulation, social policy targeting, privatization of all public
companies). Pure laissez-faire ideas such as the replacement of the welfare state by a voluntary, private, Christian charity system
were not unheard of.¶ Hence, through an insightful analysis of the ideational underpinnings of its local interpretations, this book
shows us that, despite the challenges, neoliberalism is alive and kicking. Ban guides us through half a century
of policymaking in Spain and Romania, and embeds his analysis within the related nuances of contemporary liberal economic
thought. The research is a valuable addition to a growing literature on the origin of current ideational frames and comfortably sits
alongside contemporary classics, such as Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Bifo Answers

Bifo is wrong about the connection between symbols and capitalism AND his
abstracted theory actually re-produces the de-regulation he opposes.
Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon, 2013. Assistant editor of n+1's film review, N1FR. “On Theory and Finance: Review of
Berardi’s "The Uprising",” The American Reader, http://theamericanreader.com/on-theory-and-finance-review-of-
berardis-the-uprising/.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s newly translated book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance  is light on two
things: poetry and finance. What Berardi gives the reader instead is a poetics loaded with
quasi-literary keywords and bits of post-Marxist critique, a poetics that is semiotized and
Search Engine Optimized for the reader of contemporary theory. If we were to give this
poetics a name, we might call it reverse symbolism, for Berardi means quite literally to reverse the project of
symbolist poetry, or what he calls “the main thread of twentieth century poetic research.” The symbolist culprit, the
moving target of Berardi’s reversionism, is what he calls the “dereferentialization” of language, the tearing apart of
the signifier and the referent. To put this in another way, The Uprising argues that symbolist experiments with
language in the early twentieth century have found their deepest expression in our current predicament. We now find
ourselves in the throes of a symbolist “semio-capitalism” where the word and the world are no longer linked together
in meaning.

Semio-capitalism is a portable concept; it is easy to pack and travels light. In parable form, it goes something
like this:
            Financialization and the virtualization of human communication
            are obviously intertwined: thanks to the digitization of exchanges,
            finance has turned into a social virus that is spreading everywhere,
            transforming things into symbols. The symbolic spiral of financialization
           is sucking down and swallowing up the world of physical things, of
           concrete skills and knowledge. The concrete wealth of Europeans is
            vanishing into a black hole of pure financial destruction.

Now, I’ve never seen a symbol “suck down” or “swallow up” anything—including matter,
skills, and knowledge—but Berardi does tie another knot between symbolist poetry and finance: deregulation.
Citing Rimbaud’s phrase “dérèglement des sens et des mot,” Berardi, through sleight of hand,
hitches the symbolist (or proto-symbolist) “deregulation (or derangement) of the senses and the
word” to the economic project of financial deregulation that took place throughout the 1980s, 1990s,
and 2000s in Europe and America. The idea is that symbolism “deregulated” language by divorcing it from the world
in much the same way that financial deregulation led to a disconnect between financial instruments and the value of
labor.

This is a tidy metaphor, but more on that later. The first problem with Berardi’s analogy between
poetry and finance is that it bears no relation to the reality of either.
✖

Financial deregulation was not meant to divorce money from matter or value; its purpose was
to get government out of the way of finance. The result, we know from no less than two
financial crises, was not the loss of connection between money and matter, it was the wild
proliferation of connections, of speculative positions taken on anything and everything . Or, as a
financial regulator once told me, “It isn’t the speculation on ‘nothing’ that keeps me up at night, it’s the gambling on
all of the things that matter.”

So there was nothing symbolist about the development of modern finance . In Berardi’s version
of symbolism, nothing means anything. In global finance, every signifier is forced to mean
something. Every speculative position is tethered to some good or commodity or service , or
some permutation thereof. This is why financial regulators are trying, and failing, to put limits on the number of
positions speculators can take on commodities.

What’s worse, Berardi never identifies the beneficent regulator of symbolist poetry, the good guy we need to
reinstate in order reverse symbolism and bring meaning back to language. Who was such a regulator in the time of
the symbolist poet? Perhaps it was bourgeois morality or the real and violent government censor? Or maybe what we
need is general intellect in high-minded agreement, synchronized en masse by Berardi’s poetics?

The Uprising revels in the commonplace that financial instruments are fictional, as innot real. But
if these contracts are merely “fictional” or “symbolic,” how did they manage to sink the global
economy? If the same logic applied to literature, we’d be living in a world of flesh and blood Hans Castorps, and we
would also have very little need for novels or poetry. Speculation leads to failure. In a contract where one person bets
on one thing, and another person bets on its opposite, someone will lose. No one loses this way in literature (except
for the writer blurbed by Jay McInerney).

If Berardi is right about one thing, it is that financial capitalism is semiotic . It thrives on interpretive
value, on the meaning we have too long attributed to money as a medium. More than that, though, finance is
properly aesthetic. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a friend to symbolist poets like Mallarmé, has identified
the “aesthetic regime of art” with the period when literary representation broke down. The “aesthetic regime” began
when the mass circulation of novels and poetry reduced the classical hierarchy of roles to a scrapheap. In the
aesthetic age—we’re still in it—no privileged connection between form and social position remains intact; in fact, the
emergence of the aesthetic led us to a moment when everything, even idle matter, can speak. Ours is an age where a
writer can find the whole history of oppression in the mute speech of the Pergamon Altar.

The dark underbelly of the aesthetic or semiotic condition is that it allows for any and every
object to become a medium, to speak for something else . In the case of the financial economy,
money has been fetishized—by the theorist as much as the nefarious financier —as a medium
more capable of exchange than language . This mediatization of money is the fever dream of
Hofmannsthal’s narrator in his great Letter of Lord Chandos, the work that perhaps more than any other announced
the semiotic age of language:

            And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a
            medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words.

The Uprising is a concise, even powerful expression of Lord Chandos’ nightmare, of the idea that money is hyper-
exchangeable whereas poetry is the “language of nonexchangeability.” In this sense we might consider Berardi’s
theory the crystallization of semiotic critique, and we might call Berardi himself the diamond of theory.

Berardi’s book is meant to galvanize “the general intellect” into believing that poetry is a non-
exchangeable form of language. This because Berardi (admirably) wants us to believe in another
world altogether, one we are transported to by poetry as “the excess of language, a hidden
resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another .” In Berardi’s work, as in
much of contemporary theory, literature becomes a vanishing mediator, a throwaway
wormhole that takes us to another community. But communities must be built before they
are found. Poetry can only build a community if it is exchanged, and exchangeability lies at the
very etymological root of the word literature, of letters shared among friends. Perhaps it is Berardi’s own
semiotization that has led to his alienated view of poetry; it is ironic that he considers Google to be an evil algorithmic
plot driven by semio-capitalism even when his name registers more than two million search results.

The mistakes of The Uprising speak to a much larger crisis within the evolution of theory in
general. In fact, if contemporary finance is analogous to something in literature, it isn’t
symbolist poetry but theory itself. Denationalized, decontextualized, divorced from its origins
in philosophy and criticism, theory has assumed totally deregulated positions on everything
from literature to politics and beyond. With its uncountable speculations and tightly
commoditized, catch worded language, theory has become the swaps market of thought .
Strong State Good
Tech sans government support will always fail against foreign competitions –
China’s firms are united while the U.S. ones squabble with each other – only
sustained government investment can solve.
Atkinson 21 – founder and president of ITIF, an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research
and educational institute focusing on the intersection of technological innovation and public
policy.

Robert Atkinson, “The Case for Legislation to Out-Compete China,” Information Technology &
Innovation Foundation, 3/29/21, https://itif.org/publications/2021/03/29/case-legislation-out-
compete-china

It is time for U.S. policy analysts, pundits, and policymakers to take a fresh and unbiased look
at the role of the state in industry and technology advancement. An unwillingness to do so will
mean, at best, the incremental development of a weak, generic form of advanced industry policy
that will almost surely fail in addressing the existential China technology challenge.

The United States must jettison the prevailing economic doctrine that disparages a more
active role of government in promoting industrial competitiveness and technological
innovation that reflects the complex and hence public-private character of modern technologies
and the industrial supply chains that deliver them.

Casting off the shadows of long defunct (and also current) economists who conceive of innovation
industries as the same as commodity-based “widget” industries, and who deny the very validity of the
concept of national industrial competitiveness, is a necessary first step because it opens the debate to fresh,
empirically-based, pragmatic analysis, rather than the ideological edicts related to industrial strategy that now pass for
expert insight from economists.

But as important as that is, this new recognition needs to be translated into concrete policy action. There
are many steps Congress and the Biden administration should take—steps the Information Technology and Information Foundation
(ITIF) has detailed in numerous reports.3 Near the top of the list should be passing and funding the Endless Frontiers Act, including
charging (and funding) the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with expanded functions; significantly expanding
the research and development tax credit; and instituting within the federal government a role for sector-by-sector industrial strategy
analysis. Regardless of what path Congress takes, the
country needs big, bold, and sustained action if it is to
maintain its technological and advanced industry leadership.
What Is Industrial Strategy?

Ever since the concept of a national industrial strategy was first proposed in the late 1970s, it has received scorn from
virtually all neoclassical economists, who advocate it be treated as the economic equivalent of chiropractors (who are looked down
upon by medical doctors). But
the idea is getting a new life, largely because of the growing awareness
of the economic, technology, and national security threats posed by China.
Policymakers on both sides of the aisle are rejecting the dead-end, intellectual straightjacket of conventional economics. The House
Republican’s China Task Force Report calls for a national industrial strategy, including doubling federal funding for basic science,
expanding industry-university-federal lab partnerships, expanding funding to help spur innovation in lagging regions, and doubling
the research and experimentation tax credit.4 Democrats Chris Coons (DE), Chuck Schumer (NY), Krysten Sinema (AZ), and Mark
Warner (VA) and Republicans John Cornyn (TX), Tom Cotton (AR), Marco Rubio (FL), and Todd Young (IN) have all sponsored or co-
sponsored key competitiveness legislation. Similar bipartisan efforts have been introduced in the House. And President Biden’s Build
Back Better plan includes funding for industrial strategy programs.5

But what exactly is an industrial strategy (or as it has also been termed, industrial policy)? As Robert Reich once quipped, industrial
policy “is one of those rare ideas that has moved swiftly from obscurity to meaningless without any intervening period of
coherence.”6 But this lack of coherence is because, just as in other areas of policy—energy, transportation, health, defense, and
others—the ideal policy not only differs depending on who is advocating for it, but evolves over time. Industrial policy is no different.
Critics know that if they can define industrial policy so broadly that it includes Brazil putting tariffs on imports as well as Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding GPS and the Internet, they make the term meaningless.

The definition of an advanced industry and technology strategy (AITS) is simple: It is a set of
policies and programs explicitly designed to support specific targeted industries and
technologies. As figure 1 shows, the R&D tax credit would not qualify as an industrial or technology policy tool because its
focus is not on any particular industry or technology, but rather on R&D generally. It is, however, an overall
innovation or competitiveness strategy tool. Likewise, the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce
Semiconductors) Act, which was designed to spur the domestic growth of the semiconductor industry, is a component of AITS
because it targets a particular industry. But it is also a component of a broader competitiveness or innovation strategy. Expanding
funding for the NSF-led National Robotics Initiative would be an AITS
policy because it is specifically designed to
support the development of a particular technology . In contrast, any program that expands STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and math) education would not be an AITS tool, but would be an innovation or competitiveness strategy
tool.

Governments are key actors in technological innovation because they are the
ones who feel comfortable to take on risk!
Mazzucato 21 – Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University
College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation &
Public Purpose (IIPP)

Mariana Mazzucato, “MISSION ECONOMY: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism,” Penguin

Publisher, 1/28/21,
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/315/315191/mission-economy/9780241419731.html

The role of top management is to identify essential data and make sure it reaches the right people; it’s also to be
constantly refocusing on the problem in a process of communication where information flows freely up and down the
hierarchy and across departments. Staff in implementing agencies can consolidate project results from the portfolio to see what
works best. Missions therefore need the freedom to say how resources are allocated within and between projects and to decide on
progress milestones and technical goals during a project’s life.

Running a mission-oriented system of innovation requires leadership that – like NASA – encourages
risk-taking and adaptation and can attract the best talent . It is important that agencies carrying
out missions have sufficient autonomy to take risks without their authority being questioned.
Autonomy also makes room for the organizational flexibility necessary for a mission-oriented
body to respond quickly to changing conditions and the development of novel technologies.
Allowing autonomy in pay helps agencies to recruit top talent with the skills to manage complex networked missions. With this
combination of autonomy, flexibility and support from high levels in government, implementing
agencies can empower their staff to embrace the inherent risk and push forward the projects
that emerge to carry out the mission, while turning off the funding tap for those that turn out to be less promising.

Risk-taking and learning in government require working outside of the usual silos, coordinating
across policy fields and finding the synergies that turn the components of cooperation into a
whole that is larger than the sum of its parts . A mission can easily span ministries, departments, regional and local
government bodies. But the greater the need for organizational transformation, the harder it is to accomplish. This is the ‘complexity
paradox’ of modern public policy: the more complex policy issues are, the more compartmentalized policymaking becomes,
fragmented into different and sometimes competing government departments and initiatives.10 On top of that, complex
organizational structures with rigid, formal processes can limit the flow of information, reduce
openness and constrain creativity. Breaking down silos means setting up a more horizontal
relationship between departments, as Mueller did. A mission to tackle air pollution, for example, would need
to work across all relevant departments, such as energy, environment, transport, health and finance. Each
department retains clear responsibility for its contribution, but the synergies arise from co-
ordination from the top of government, while stimulating the innovation from below, as described
above. Organizational innovation is both a necessary propellant of missions and a result of
them.11
NASA’s decentralization, with delegation of authority to laboratories such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena
California (part of Caltech), was key to its success. So was its ability to sidestep the usual bureaucratic procedures. As discussed by
Arnold Levine in his study of management inside NASA, vital for its dynamism and speed was the ability to ‘negotiate contracts up to
a specified amount, to transfer funds between programs, to start new research tasks without seeking specific authorization, to shift
manpower from one division to another, and so on. The strategy of senior management was to give the centers what they needed to
get the job done but not so much that their work would lose its relevance to the agency’s mission.’12 Furthermore, dynamic
procurement and HR practices allowed NASA to attract talent and contract to the most innovative firms. As Levine further writes:

Another element in the success of the NASA organization was flexibility: flexibility for the Administrator
to appoint to excepted positions, to award major R&D contracts without competitive bidding, to reprogram within appropriation
accounts and to transfer between them, to devise and administer a custom-tailored entrance examination, and the like. Examples
such as these represent flexibility within the system, not a departure from it; variances from the norm were allowed by Congress,
the Bureau of the Budget, and the Civil Service Commission. This
flexibility allowed for that ‘free play of the
joints’ without which institutional rigor mortis sets in. The use of excepted positions, for example, served not
only to retain employees within the organization but also to bring in new blood and to expose NASA to outside influences.13

In 1958, the same year as NASA was founded, the US government also set up DARPA, the innovation agency of the US Department
of Defense – most noted for its investment in what became ARPANET, today’s internet. Both were results of Cold War investments.
And, similarly to NASA, DARPA’s key characteristics are its organizational flexibility, which includes independence from government,
flat internal structures, hiring outside of standard government processes, and flexible contracts.14 The organization encourages
bottom-up design, which means that design is left to people like programme managers. They allow discretion in project choice and
offer active project management. And indeed, without DARPA there would be no internet to have fuelled the twenty-first- century
innovations. Better
understanding the organizational structures that have encouraged problem-
solving, risk-taking and horizontal collaborations is thus key to understanding the wave of future
radical change.
Spillovers: serendipity and collaboration

The successes of organizations that take risks and are directed at large goals are often unpredictable. Innovation
itself is
often characterized by unpredictable spillovers: the search for one thing leads to the discovery
of another – unexpected technological benefits from R&D that can also produce wider
managerial, social and economic benefits. Viagra, for example, was initially intended to treat heart problems and
then was found to have another application. Innovation is fuelled best when serendipity is allowed, so that
multiple paths are pursued, bringing advances in unknown areas. Embracing that uncertainty
and serendipity is key for any entrepreneurial organization, whether in the public or private
sphere. And as the story below illustrates, such serendipity in technological innovation can also bring
great societal benefits.
Capitalism Good – Specific Reasons
2AC---Cap Good -- General
Capitalist innovation boosts living standards and solves warming---outweighs
inequality
Jerry Z. Muller 20, Professor of History at the Catholic University of America, January/February
2020, “The Neosocialist Delusion,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 99, No. 1, EBSCOhost

Here they can draw on a venerable antimonopoly tradition in American political culture from
the trustbusters on, rooted in the assumption that the further away you move from Smith’s
ideal of perfect competition among many small firms, the more the public is hurt. The economist
Joseph Schumpeter, however, argued that Smith had greatly underestimated both the
dynamism of capitalism and the role of entrepreneurs in driving it. Capitalism’s manifold
benefits didn’t just happen; they were created, by a relatively small group of people responsible
for introducing new products, services, and business methods. Entrepreneurs sought the big
profits associated with temporary monopolies and so were driven to create whole new
industries they could dominate.

Large companies, Schumpeter realized, acted as engines of innovation, plowing back some of
their profits into research and development and encouraging others to do the same in the hopes
of becoming an acquisition target. He would have been delighted with Silicon Valley, viewing
technology giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft as poster children for the
enormous benefits to consumers that entrepreneurs generate.

Companies such as Amazon and Walmart, meanwhile, maintain their position through furious
competition in service and price, contributing to the virtual elimination of inflation in the
American economy. And yet it is precisely these dynamic, successful, customeroriented
companies that the neosocialists want to tax heavily, burden with regulations, and cut up for
parts.

THE SKY IS NOT FALLING

What is the cancer that requires such deadly radiation to cure? Supposedly, that median
earnings per household in the United States have stagnated for several decades and, for the
lower deciles of the income distribution, even declined. The implication is that most people’s
standard of living has flatlined or dropped over the last two generations. But this is just not true.

The first thing to note is that statistics about income brackets don’t map neatly onto individual
lives, because the people inside the income brackets keep changing. Those billionaires the
neosocialists want to soak are not fourthgeneration patrician trust-fund babies but self-made
entrepreneurs, and the lower brackets at any time include many young people and recent
immigrants, who tend to move up later.

Second, the rich have indeed gotten much richer—at a higher rate than those in the middle, and
with those at the bottom improving the least—and inequality has certainly increased. But that
does not mean the nonrich haven’t improved their condition, too. As a recent study by the
economist Bruce Sacerdote concluded, “Meaningful growth in consumption for below median
income families has occurred even in a prolonged period of increasing income inequality,
increasing consumption inequality and a decreasing share of national income accruing to labor.”

Beware the games that can be played with statistics. Households today, for example, are smaller
than they were a generation ago, with more people living alone or with a single parent. Even if
household income is stagnant, therefore, per capita income may have risen. Then there is the
changing age structure of society. As more people live longer, the share of the retired elderly is
increasing, and since they have less earnings, this has led to a decline in average household
income. Income, moreover, should be understood to include not simply wages and salaries but
also benefits. And employers have spent ever more in recent decades on the costliest of
benefits, health care—money that should be considered part of earnings. Add government
transfer programs, which lower incomes at the top and raise incomes and expenditures at the
bottom, and the picture changes again. It is not one of dystopian immiseration.

The intellectual heirs of Smith, as opposed to those of Rousseau, are interested less in capping
inequality than in raising the standard of living of the population at large—finally achieving that
“universal opulence” that Smith so presciently predicted free markets could deliver. Capitalism
has proved so extraordinarily fertile and dynamic in finding ways to improve living standards, in
fact, that it is difficult to track them.

Schumpeterian creative destruction has changed life in ways that are literally immeasurable. As
the economist Russell Roberts has noted, even objects that are nominally the same, such as
televisions, have evolved so much as to be incomparable over time. An average American
television in 1973 showed half a dozen channels on a screen no larger than 25 inches wide.
Today, the screens are larger and better, there are hundreds of channels available, and the unit
is less a television than a digital hub. Personal computers used to be science fiction.

Then they became ubiquitous. Now they seem to be ancient technology compared with the
even more ubiquitous and powerful smartphones that bring the interconnected digital world to
anybody, anywhere. Communication today is instantaneous and cheap; shopping is easier and
better informed; everybody can watch or listen to what he or she wants, when he or she wants
to; and nobody ever gets lost.

At one point in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a revolutionary in ancient Jerusalem asks his
followers, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” His audience keeps shouting answers,
until the speaker finally pleads, “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine,
education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what
have the Romans ever done for us?” (“Brought peace!” offers a final heckler.)

The neosocialists scorn billionaires and attack Big Tech, asking, “What have Amazon, Apple,
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the rest ever done for us?” Only made possible all the modern
digital wonders we increasingly take for granted. Have Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and the other
entrepreneurs partially responsible for such blessings profited from their success? Absolutely.
But so have the rest of us, and vastly more—in improved lives, to be sure, but even as a result of
their companies’ supposedly threatening corporate growth, since those companies are mostly
owned by us, the broadly dispersed shareholders of their common stock.
TURNING OFF THE ENGINE

Capitalism drives economic and social dynamism, prosperity, and personal freedom but also
erodes tradition and stability. It produces universal gains in the long term but inequality and
volatility along the way. From Smith onward, the system’s greatest defenders have
acknowledged the full range of its effects and accepted the need to address the downsides in a
variety of ways, not least in order to preserve political peace and social harmony. Capitalism’s
greatest critics, in turn, have always respected its awesome capacity for growth and invention,
and successful progressive movements have sought to domesticate markets rather than abolish
them.

That is not the game the neosocialists are playing. What is distinctive about their program is not
its promises—anybody can produce impossible wish lists—but its threats. They are
fundamentally uninterested in sustaining a dynamic, entrepreneurial private sector and milking
its proceeds for public investment. They don’t care about the health of the geese, because their
economists simply assume an endless supply of golden eggs. They abhor inequality and are out
to reduce it in the simplest, most direct way possible: by lopping off the outliers at the top.

The growing popularity of this movement could not come at a worse time, for there are indeed
crucial problems on today’s agenda—climate change high among them. Dealing with these
challenges will certainly require effective government policy and investment. But the bulk of the
actual problem solving and practical innovation involved will inevitably come from the private
sector. The war against climate change, that is, will ultimately be fought and won in large part by
an army of Schumpeterian entrepreneurs large and small, deploying their mage-like powers for
humanity’s collective defense. Unless the neosocialists have their way, and turn off the engines
of innovation just when they are needed the most.
Cap Good---Environment
Renewables replace fossil fuels this decade.
Ambrose 19, guardian writier, citing Michael Liebreich, the founder of the research group
Bloomberg New Energy Finance. (Jillian, 10-14-2019, "Rise of renewables may see off oil
firms decades earlier than they think", Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/14/rise-renewables-oil-firms-
decades-earlier-think)
The world’s rising reliance on fossil fuels may come to an end decades earlier than the
most polluting companies predict, offering early signs of hope in the global battle to tackle
the climate crisis. The climate green shoots have emerged amid a renewable energy
revolution that promises an end to the rising demand for oil and coal in the 2020s, before
the fossil fuels face a terminal decline. The looming fossil fuel peak is expected to emerge
decades ahead of forecasts from oil and mining companies, which are betting that demand
for polluting energy will rise until the 2040s. But energy experts are adjusting their
forecasts as clean energy technologies, including wind and solar power, emerge faster than
predicted and at costs that pose a direct threat to coal-fired electricity and combustion-
engine vehicles. In the UK, renewable energy projects generated more electricity over
the last quarter than fossil fuels for the first time since the country’s first public power plant
fired up in 1882. It is a marked change from only 10 years ago, when gas and coal generated
more than 70% of the UK’s electricity. The pace of progress has raised hope that the global
groundswell of climate protest could spark fresh political will to accelerate the energy
transition in time to keep global temperatures from rising to levels that could trigger a
climate catastrophe. The UK Labour party has promised a Green Industrial Revolution to
create almost 70,000 new jobs while working to create a carbon-neutral economy by 2030.
In the US, the Green New Deal, spearheaded by the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, aims to virtually eliminate the US’s greenhouse gas emissions within the next
decade. Within the energy industry, experts believe the rapid rise of renewable energy in
recent years may soon seem glacial compared with the changes to come. Michael
Liebreich, the founder of the research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), says
the substitution of old technology with new is always “like waiting for a sneeze”. “The first
1% takes forever, 1% to 5% is like waiting for a sneeze – you know it’s inevitable but it
takes longer than you think – then 5% to 50% happens incredibly fast,” he says.
Cap Good---Global South
Capitalism is economically decolonizing now.
Smith 21, *Noah Smith, Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of
finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion; (April 2nd, 2021, “Against
Hickelism”, https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/against-hickelism)

What Hickel gets wrong is his idea that Western powers, libertarian ideology, and international
institutions have conspired to keep poor countries from adopting mixed approaches to their
economies. In fact, activist state policies are quite common, and have contributed substantially
to the poverty reduction documented above.

For example, take India. Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian, in a 2004 paper about India’s
growth surge, write the following:

Most conventional accounts of India’s recent economic performance associate the pick-up in
economic growth with the liberalization of 1991. This paper demonstrates that the transition to
high growth occurred around 1980, a full decade before economic liberalization. We investigate
a number of hypotheses about the causes of this growth—favorable external environment, fiscal
stimulus, trade liberalization, internal liberalization, the green revolution, public investment—
and find them wanting. We argue that growth was triggered by an attitudinal shift on the part
of the national government towards a pro-business (as opposed to pro-liberalization) approach.
We provide some evidence that is consistent with this argument. We also find that registered
manufacturing built up in previous decades played an important role in influencing the pattern
of growth across the Indian states.

In other words, India didn’t just liberalize things; it implemented its own version of a
development state, and prospered as a result. The same is true of Southeast Asia, where
Malaysia, Thailand, and to a lesser degree Indonesia have emerged as success stories and have
relied thoroughly on development states and industrial policy. See Vietnam’s recent growth for
another example.

In Latin America, it’s true that the Washington Consensus slowed down structural change and
productivity growth. But that doesn’t mean Latin American governments had no role in reducing
poverty. Bad advice may have held back the development state in Latin America, but
governments there have engaged in extensive redistribution and better education.

A series of papers by Nora Lustig, Luis F. Lopez-Calva, and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez documents these
policies. Inequality in Latin American countries fell substantially during the 2000s:

Lustig et al. find that roughly half of this was due to government transfers and pension policies,
while the other half was due to increasing incomes for workers at the bottom of the distribution
— which in turn was due to better education. So Latin American governments, though they
didn’t pursue the kind of manufacturing-intensive, export-led development policy used by many
Asian countries, did manage to cut poverty with government action.
Cap Good – Fascism Answers
Capitalism doesn’t cause fascism---it strengthens autonomy and freedom from
oppression.
Cudd 10, Anne Cudd is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean for Humanities, University
of Kansas. She is the author of Analyzing Oppression (2006), and co-edited (with Anita Superson)
Theorizing Backlash (2002) and (with Robin Andreason) Feminist Theory (2005). (2010,
“Capitalism, For and Against A Feminist Debate”, Cambridge University Press)
Capitalist markets and freedom

Freedom is the ultimate appeal of capitalism. The early proponents of capitalism, such as Adam Smith , as well as
more recent defenders, including economists from such diverse political motivations as Milton Friedman and Amartya Sen, have all
defended capitalism on this ground. While efficiency and the ability to raise living standards is an important reason to maintain free
markets, and an aspect of the freedom that Sen extols, the freedoms
provided by capitalism are intrinsically
valuable and partially constitutive of freedom. As Sen argues, regardless of the efficiencies of the market, “the more
immediate case for the freedom of market transaction lies in the basic importance of that freedom itself.” 97 While securing this
freedom is straight- forward and simple for middle and upper class men of the First World, for women and others
oppressed
by traditional norms of their cultures, the freedom to transact in the marketplace can be liberating on
a far wider scale. Thus, I will argue as well that capitalism enhances women’s freedom.

The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a
basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom
like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of
markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations
because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of
individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice
between competing ends, goods, and values.” 98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and
designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it. 99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in
providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the
positive freedom that markets
promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision
makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a
third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not
know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each
of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women
have been more confined by traditional roles to a con- strained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of
family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism
has already, as we have seen, brought
great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and
create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled. In what follows I will
explore each of the three senses of freedom to see how capitalism is related to its realization.

Negative freedom is the freedom not to be interfered with, and a list of such freedoms typically includes civil and political freedoms,
but also the economic freedoms to engage in market transactions and to use or benefit from one’s legitimately owned property.
These latter two – the freedom
to exchange and the freedom to use or benefit from one’s property – are
two of the hallmarks of capitalism as I have defined it in terms of the private ownership of capital, free wage labor, and
free market conditions. I also added the freedom from discrimination constraint, which is another aspect of negative freedom.
Capitalist systems, whether any of the forms discussed at the beginning of my contribution or the enlightened form that I defend, do
place some constraints on trade. Taxation by government to provide public goods that the market does not efficiently provide or to
internalize negative externalities that traders would otherwise ignore to the detriment of bystanders places legitimate constraints
on trade. So, too, do reasonable restrictions on trade designed to certify the quality of some goods. But capitalism by definition
defends the basic freedom to open or close a business, to contract one’s labor with the highest bidder, and to exchange goods
without attend- ing to the social status of the trading partners. Negative freedoms for the serf, the bonded laborer, or the slave
would be freedom to leave the master – to not be impeded, whether by custom or law – to freely engage in wage labor. The
nondiscrimination constraint also comprises this freedom; it is the freedom not to be constrained by features about one that are
fixed at birth and that have nothing to do with one’s talents or abilities.

As Sen explains, there are four ways in which free markets are needed now to uphold negative
freedom or, put another way, to resist tyranny and enslavement. 100 First, they allow persons to escape
the bonds of traditional labor bondage by being able to seek wage employment away from
traditional bosses. In many rural areas people farm land for traditional landowners, and markets for labor allow them to
escape this bondage. This is the freedom capitalism offers that Marx recognized as an improvement
over feudalism, where serfs had no choice in their place or way of life. Second, the communism of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union, and still existing in North Korea and Cuba, denied the freedoms to engage in exchange or choose
where one lives. That these freedoms are now less abridged makes it no less important to recognize that they are important
negative freedoms that capitalism upholds. Third, free markets help to liberate children from bonded labor

. Children in parts of South Asia are particularly susceptible to being placed in bondage to higher caste men,
who put them to work making carpets or bricks for a very small pittance paid to their parents. The main
reason for child labor is parental poverty. Where parents can earn more by their labor, they send
their children to school. Even if the parents are still too poor or shortsighted or lack schools, if the children can earn
wages by their labor, then they can do better than they do in bondage, where they have no income
and no ability to resist harsh, violent treatment. Fourth, market employment for women is crucially important for their economic
independence and for getting a better deal in intra-household distributions.

Outside employment gives women opportunities that are not directly tied to their menfolk. It makes them able to bargain for a
better share of the family wealth and income, but also for less of the burden of chores, or enables them to pay others to do some of
the work. The opportunity to work in the same kinds of jobs as men eventually wears away gender distinctions, or makes those
distinctions less confining and more equal in terms of status. In this way, enlarging women’s negative freedom also tends toward
enlarging their positive freedom.

Positive freedom is defined in two different ways: either as simply the positive supports that individual persons need in order to live
a life with enough good choices to deserve the name freedom, or as also including the internal qualities of character that allow
persons to be autonomous or self-lawmakers. The two are connected in that persons are typically unable to develop their capacities
to plan their lives or live according to principles if they do not have enough to eat, or they have to worry about their physical health
and security, or if they have not had an adequate education. Positive freedom in the sense of autonomy recognizes that completely
unconstrained behavior is not necessarily action motivated by desires that are one’s own. And positive freedom in the sense of
social supports recognizes that without the wherewithal (material and psychological) to act on one’s own desires, there can be no
freedom. Sen refers to these as the process and opportunity aspects of freedom. 101 In this book I do not take a stand on which is
the proper sense of positive freedom; both are clearly desirable as described. Instead, I argue that both
senses of positive
freedom are supported in capitalism, though not necessarily guaranteed. In the first sense, capitalism supports, but
does not guarantee, the ability of persons to secure their own livelihood and material well-being. As we
have seen, capitalism has increased life expectancy, improved health, and decreased fertility and
child mortality on average. Increasing wealth is also correlated with increasing educational levels ,
and decreased fertility is correlated specifically with increasing female education. 102 Capitalism, as a highly
cooperative and social form of production, requires socially coordinated and regulated efforts. Thus, capitalism is clearly a form of
social provision in design as well as in outcome. Capitalism does not guarantee that any given individual will develop or exercise
autonomy, but rather supplies
external supports for autonomy by offering opportunities to plan and to
raise one’s level of material well-being. In particular, capitalism does not guarantee that persons will develop
autonomous desires, and in some ways may be seen as encouraging nonautonomous or what Kant would have called heteronomous
desires, a point I will return to in section 6.

The most important objection against capitalism, however, is that it enables gross inequalities in wealth and
income. When these inequalities also entail absolute impoverishment, so that persons do not have the ability to choose between
decent ways of life, then this is clearly a failure. But capitalism
raises the overall level of material wealth in a
society, and so allows for the possibility of addressing such abject poverty. The fact that market
interactions lead to inequalities is not, in itself, a denial of freedom. But it does pose the possibility of
inequalities in power that can lead to positive and social unfreedoms, and indeed this is borne out in the actual world in many ways.
Perhaps the worst sort is where wealth buys political influence in a nominally democratic country.

Before leaving the topic of inequality, however, it is important to point out that capitalism
is not alone in supporting
gross inequalities, but the way in which it does so is acceptable where it is not in other systems.
North Korea, a socialist totalitarian system, creates gross inequalities of wealth through political power that
controls resources. The leader and his minions live in vast wealth while much of the population teeters on the brink of famine. The
communist systems of the Soviet Union and China were also notorious for the vast consumption and
indulgence of their leaders compared with the average citizen, and notoriously one had to be a party member in the Soviet
Union in order to own a car. Traditional societies are no better; the patriarchs of many such societies are rich while the young and
the less powerful labor for far less. But in each of these cases the wealth comes not through productive effort, but
rather through political control, and in some cases through inheritance. While the leader of North Korea is in charge simply
by virtue of being the son of the previous leader, the richest capitalists in the world were not born to the previous generation of the
wealthiest. It is true that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were born to upper-middle-class families, but their vast wealth was earned
through innovation, skills, and talents, and not through inheritance. This is not to say that inequality in wealth is not a problem, nor
to say that opportunities to achieve great wealth are fairly distributed in capitalism. They are not, and that is a serious moral issue.
But it is to say that socialist
and traditional societies have at least equally difficult problems to address in
terms of inequality in wealth and power . In the final section of my contribution, I will argue that an enlightened
capitalism must do better to address inequalities that either amount to absolute poverty or cause political and social inequalities
that deny free- dom. It is also important to note, however, that inequality that does not rule out good options for life does not
seriously interfere with individual positive freedom, in either sense of the term. One need not live in the best of all possible worlds,
after all, in order to be free enough to pursue one’s own projects.

Positive freedom as autonomy requires that one is not manipulated by the social structure under which one lives. One’s desires
must be one’s own and one’s beliefs must be rationally generated for one’s actions to be entirely autonomous. Isaiah Berlin , who
draws the distinction between negative and positive freedom in this latter way, ultimately rejects the idea of positive freedom
because, he argues, to posit a breach of positive freedom one would have to impose desires on individuals that they do not
acknowledge. 103 For governments to attempt to guarantee positive freedom, then, they would have to posit a good for their
citizens and entice them to seek it, that is, in Rousseau’s famous phrase, to force their citizens to be free. Berlin, as a liberal, argues
that freedom requires merely imposing no impediments to individuals’ given preferences. Positive freedom, Berlin concludes,
insinuates a totalitarian menace.

Although Berlin’s is a commonly cited libertarian line of argument that is often aligned with defenders of capitalism, I want to argue
that Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom is drawn incorrectly, and that positive
freedom in the
sense of autonomy is not hostile to capitalism. It is especially important for women and other oppressed groups to
attend to internal, psychological impediments to freedom that are generated by social constraints on what they can do and be.
Negative and positive freedom cannot be easily separated for two reasons. First, a persistent lack of negative freedom for a social
group harms the individuals of that group psychologically, causing them to lack positive freedom. Second, even though the idea that
a government might posit an individual’s good for her raises the specter of totalitarianism, that fact does not vitiate the claim that
an individual’s freedom can be compromised by a lack of vision of viable alternative options. A person can lack freedom with- out
there being a clear way for the person to attain freedom in the future. Violations of negative freedom turn out to result in deeper
harms that slide over into the kinds of harms that violations of positive freedom entail.

This is particularly the case for victims of oppression, and particularly for women. 104 Women are often convinced by many different
social norms, expectations, and incentives to live within constraints that similarly placed (in terms of race, class, culture, and time
period) men need not consider. This sort of internally constrained vision, whether it is because of false consciousness , shame,
stereotype, or trauma, is the kind of violation of their positive freedom that should most concern feminists. Capitalism, by
providing an option outside kin and traditional community norms for independence and social
power, can allow women the wherewithal to escape these constraints. Even if a particular woman does
not choose to work outside the home or compete in the marketplace as an entrepreneur, the fact that women have this option
under capitalism increases the freedom of all women. Enlarging the set of things that women are seen as cap- able of can reduce the
sense that women have that they are inferior, and this can increase their confidence in a wider set of social circumstances. It puts
the lie to the idea that women are incapable, and helps women to stand up to ill-treatment and violence.
While many philosophers recognize negative and positive freedoms in quite similar ways, a third concept of freedom has been proposed by different philosophers in quite different ways. Quentin Skinner’s third
concept of liberty is the lack of an ongoing threat to one’s freedom of thought and expression. 105 Skinner argues that this requires the existence of a noncoercive government or absence of a threat of
domination by one. This form, however, is reducible to negative freedom from interference by government, insofar as it refers to legitimate forms of coercion. A legitimate government may legitimately apply
coercive measures to assure the good of the whole or the protection of others who have a rightful claim to such protection, provided that the measures are, in Thomas Scanlon’s terms, something that no reason-
able person could reject. Skinner clearly does not mean to rule that out, but rather to rule out coercion that is wrongful. Yet this is already covered under the concept of negative freedom; one is not free in the
negative sense if one is coercively dominated by one’s government. However, it goes too far to suggest that one is not free if one is threatened by domination of a coercive government. In this sense Skinner’s third
concept of freedom is similar to Philip Pettit’s view of freedom as nondomination. Both are mistaken to take the (implied) ability to pose a threat to be the same thing as a coercive threat.

If freedom in this third sense is compromised by even the threat of coercion or domination, then the free market is not free in this sense. But both Skinner and Pettit claim too much for a concept of freedom. As
Gaus argues, it fails to distinguish between power to and power over. 106 Wealth gives one the power to afford many trades, but it does not give one the ability to exercise power over another by forcing a person
to make a trade she or he does not want, and thereby limit that person’s liberty. While the classical liberal claims that market transactions are free as long as there is no force, fraud, or coercive threat, Pettit
denies this with an argument that freedom requires nondomination, and one dominates another if one has the ability to exercise power over another (including by means of financial clout, technical advantage, or
political power). To avoid domination, he argues, one has to have anti-power. Rule of law gives anti-power. Gaus argues that Pettit’s view is profoundly anti-market because the market will inevitably lead to
unequal wealth and income, and this would always involves domination on Pettit’s understand- ing, since greater success would allow one to potentially exercise power over another. Thus, the market is full of
relations of domination – everyone except Bill Gates is dominated, after all, on this analysis. Furthermore, since equals have equal ability to attack each other, if we all had equal power to achieve our ends, we
would all be unfree. Such an analysis trivializes the concept of domination. If Skinner or Pettit are understood to sim- ply mean that freedom requires that there is no active threat or active domination, then this
requirement can be seen as entailed already by negative freedom, since an active threat or domination is a direct constraint of one’s basic civil, political, and property rights. If Skinner or Pettit are taken to mean
that there can be no potential threat, however, then their concept of freedom falls prey to this triviality objection. And insofar as these concepts are positive, that is, perhaps requiring social supports for
individuals to be able to fully participate in social cooperation, they are reducible to positive freedom.

Berlin discussed and rejected a third sense of freedom that he finds in the claims of colonial oppressed persons, and which emerged in the writings of philosophers writing about colonial oppression, such as Jean-
Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon . Freeing oneself from oppression requires negative freedoms in the form of freedom of protest, and positive freedom. In progressive hands, “negative freedom is the capacity to
destabilize identities and interrupt norms.” 107 This form of freedom, defended as well in Cynthia Willett’s Irony in the Age of Empire , is the desire for sociality and belonging within one’s group, and recognition
of one’s social group and its distinctive values and norms from out- siders. She calls this third form of freedom, “solidarity.” Willett’s third freedom as solidarity requires something more than those two concepts,
though. In particular, it requires the existence of social bonds that tie the individuals beyond their ability to resist and set themselves free. I want to resist the notion that this is a form of freedom, regardless of
how good social bonds might feel. For they are the very forces of unfreedom in many cases. Bonds of solidarity both enable and constrain. The first, enabling, is indeed freedom, but the second, constraint, is not;
it is the dark, exclusionary side of solidarity. Willett does not embrace any particular terms on which social solidarity might be forged. Cornel West’s appeal to nuclear family norms as form of third freedom raises
her suspicions. She writes, “West’s appeal to the virtues of sacrifice may not subjugate women to patriarchal control, but it doesn’t sound like the battle cry for liberation that we might desire.” 108 But her
suspicions here raise for me the question of why, then, she would align social bonds with freedom. If concepts of freedom proceed from sources of anxiety, I cannot think of anything that produces more anxiety
than the requirement that I follow the norms of some particular community, without any opportunity to opt out of that community.

In my view wewant freedom to pursue or reject social bonds – not to be dominated or threatened
with constraints by others who would prevent our ability to pursue or imagine them. This is most important for
members of social groups that have been oppressed for generations, as women have been. Such persons have
a constrained vision of what is possible for them, and need to be able to see beyond these constraints that have been erected by
others, but reinforced internally. Nonetheless, a third form of freedom can emerge under the right circumstances, namely the social
conditions which allow and support individual autonomy for each person, which I call “social freedom.” Social freedom transcends
positive freedom by considering the needs of each, not just of individuals one at a time. Autonomy
requires an absence
of oppressive social constraints that prevent free self- development. Systematic violence, economic
discrimination and segregation, social shaming, and vicious stereotyping are among the most autonomy-defeating forces. Social
freedom poses a collective obligation to provide for the education of the next generation, not because they are “our children,” as if
we own them or they are our personal, genetic or property-inheriting legacy, but because children are at that stage where they need
to be taught to develop their capacities if they are to be autonomous adults. Mill argued for this on the utilitarian grounds that more
and higher quality pleasure is created that way. 109 Other moral and political theories can generate this obligation as well. For
example, a contractarian can argue that by educating children in this way we provide more and better opportunities for cooperation
for mutual advantage. A Kantian can simply argue that it is the only way to treat children as ends in themselves. Social freedom can
be described as the Rawlsian union of social unions , which he argues arises in the society that is structured by his two principles of
justice, and involves each taking pleasure in the achievements, the flourishing, of others. I take it that this is true of the society of
free persons, which is not only free of cur- rent oppressions, but whose members seek to free all persons from oppression. For in
such a society the individuals are able to seek their own good with good will toward others as well. They seek to encourage diversity
and enhance the freedom of others. They take pleasure in and identify with the accomplishments of others. And further, they come
to see their own freedom as connected to that of the others.

Capitalism supports social freedom, but, as with positive freedom, does not guarantee it. That would be
too much to ask of an economic system alone. As I have argued elsewhere, capitalism embraces the positive
aspects of competition. 110 Competition in capitalism is valuable because it allows many different persons to
succeed at least in part. For businesses to be profitable there must be consumers to buy their products, and for there to be
consumers to buy products, there must be a large sector of the population that earns enough through their labor to consume, and a
significant number who can invest and create new opportunities for work. Capitalism
thrives where the situation is
more like what game theorists call a cooperative competition; that is, the players of the game have interests
that are partly shared and partly opposed. The optimal and equilibrium outcome arises when each pursues a strategy
that both maximizes their outcome, but also leads to the others being better off, as WE1 suggests. This contrasts sharply with the
situation of either the zero-sum game, where there is only one winner and all the others are losers, or worse, a game in which, when
each of the players pursues their own best strategies, a socially suboptimal outcome arises (such as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma).

This optimism about capitalism and its role in raising the sights of women is as applicable in poor,
developing countries as it is in rich , First World ones. As Sen has argued, freedom is both constitutive of
development seen in a progressive light, but also instrumental toward that form of development.
Development as he understands it requires making human lives better on a variety of levels that he calls “capabilities.” Included
among these capabilities are the abilities that I have listed as the interests of persons, and as the requirements of autonomy. Not
only are negative and positive freedoms constitutive of development, though. Social freedom arises from the
development of these freedoms as well. Capitalism is not the only route to development, but development
seems, empirically, not to be complete without opening up markets to relatively free trade. Sen
illustrates this by pointing to the development in China , which moved to a market-oriented economy in 1991. 111 While pre-
reform China pursued basic education and health care for all, it lacked democratic freedoms, and this meant
less responsiveness to famine and social crises. China suffered an enormous famine, in which 30 million people
died, during the Great Leap Forward of 1958–61. Sen credits democracy with preventing any famine in India
since independence in 1947. The development of capitalist markets has raised the overall level of
income in China , however, to the point where it is unlikely to suffer another such catastrophe, despite
the lack of democracy .
Cap Good – Racism Answers

Capitalism isn’t more racist than other systems and only political engagement
solves its disparities
Barlow 20 [Rich, Senior Writer for BU Today, “Capitalism Isn’t Racist. We Are”. 9/17/20.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/09/17/racist-capitalism-rich-barlow]

“There is no capitalism without racism,” says Angela Davis. The activist and academic boasts a communist past, but on this one,
she’s hardly radical.

The ideathat capitalism is incurably racist down to its profit-counting bones was scripture in
certain progressive precincts even before George Floyd’s murder opened a lens on bigotry beyond policing. A recently released book by
another scholar makes the capitalism equals racism case.

That white capitalists have exploited people of color for centuries is indisputable , from Dixie’s plantations
and land theft under Jim Crow to redlined neighborhoods and job discrimination today. Instead of reopening all those capitalist businesses shuttered by
COVID-19, should we abolish them?

No. Anti-capitalists
ignore a sadder, inconvenient truth. To tweak Davis to be more accurate,
there is no economic system, period, without racism . And there is a lot we can do to dilute
bigotry in our system.

The pioneering Black studies scholar Cedric Robinson found that capitalism evolved from
Western societies already steeped in racial discrimination ; feudal Europe wasn’t humming
“Kumbaya.” Nor, for that matter, were African kings who kept slaves to strut their wealth and
power, before 18th-century European traders waded ashore and remade slave-owning into an
industrial-scale profit machine.

My point isn’t to deny U.S. capitalism’s systemic racism. It is, rather,

to snuff out knee-jerk, utopian notions that racism is
anything less than a universal infestation among different economies and cultures.

“A more pessimistic view might say

As Boston University researcher Jim Bessen, who has studied racial wage disparities, told me,

civilization may inherently introduce tribal antagonisms that lead to racism.” And not just
Western civilization.

The stray Marxist may look for racial and ethnic harmony in self-declared workers' paradises
such as China. The million Uyghurs and other Muslims herded into concentration camps by Xi
Jinping likely would beg to differ. Their plight is the latest link in an historical chain of racism in
the People’s Republic.

Socialist regimes elsewhere flunk the brotherhood test, too. Only recently, Cuba began inching
beyond shunting Black Cubans to the margins of political and economic equality. Fidel Castro
may have declared his nation delivered from racism by his revolution, but a young Cuban activist
in 2018 dissented: “To me, Cuba is very, very racist, one of the most racist countries in the
world.”

Perhaps anti-capitalists think the lava of race hate has cooled in the northern climes and
egalitarian ethos of nations practicing democratic socialism. (Which, the name notwithstanding, is actually capitalism
with sturdier regulatory and safety-net guardrails than ours. But never mind.)
Alas, if they’re gazing at Scandinavia or Canada, they need to seek Eden elsewhere. In recent years, the U.N. professed itself “concerned” about
Swedish racism towards Africans, Jews, Muslims and Roma. A journalist who has lived in Denmark finds economic
inequality for non-western immigrants and racist newspaper cartoons blemishing Bernie Sanders’s beloved Denmark, while Norway grapples with
Islamophobia.

Canada meanwhile repents a history of “notoriously abusive schools for Indigenous children”
and “pollution of [Native] traditional territory.”
My point isn’t to deny U.S. capitalism’s systemic racism. It is, rather, to snuff out knee-jerk, utopian notions that racism is anything less than a universal
infestation among different economies and cultures. Circling the world with open eyes and mind confirms professor and New Yorker contributor
Nicholas Lemann’s observation that “it’s
possible to be anti-capitalist without being anti-racist, and anti-racist
without being anti-capitalist.”
Indeed, Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged capitalism, but the civil rights martyr’s enthusiasm seems to have been for democratic socialism, which, as I
mentioned, would make him an uber-progressive capitalist, not the raging commie of J. Edgar Hoover’s fevered nightmares.

"It’s possible to be anti-capitalist without being anti-racist, and anti-racist without being anti-capitalist."

NICHOLAS LEMANN

We abolished slavery to make capitalism less racist in the 19th century. In the 21st, It
doesn’t take a democratic socialist to
map the next steps on that far-from-finished journey . Bessen favors one surgically precise intervention: ban
employers from inquiring about job applicants’ salary histories. Since past discrimination suppresses Blacks’ wages,
knowing those wages allows employers to lowball proffered salaries to minority hires. States with bans have narrowed the racial

wage gap, his research shows.

That’s just for starters. We also could create public works jobs in Black neighborhoods ravaged
by the evaporation of employment documented by scholar William Julius Wilson; pay for
healthy food markets in food deserts, at a time when 14 million American children aren’t getting
enough to eat; make public colleges tuition-free, a ticket to the middle class for disadvantaged
people of all races; and enact Obamacare for All to begin addressing racial health care
disparities. And elect more compassionate leaders than our incumbent president and his congressional bootlickers.

None of this would make us a less capitalist society. It would make us a less racist one.

Forty years ago, an academic study asked, "Does Socialism Mean Greater Equality?" If only the world were so simple. Focused on
that era’s leading socialist power, the Soviet Union, the article answered its own question: nah.

That answer hasn’t changed.

Cap Good – Financialization Bad Answers

No impact—it’s limited in scope and explanatory power.

Christophers 15 [Brett Christophers, Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala
University, "The limits to financialization", 2015,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2043820615588153?casa_token=4407uJ-
wcLQAAAAA:3q8k_qDLMivKZsd3w8OeaOMjvjgkfOhElVeopTgh2vIJODGiA68K2mHVfSbpf9R-
agJkrqQiNXJBDw]

‘Financialization’ meaningfully entered the lexicon of the cultural–economic and political–

economic literatures on capitalism later than either globalization or neoliberalization. Roughly
speaking, if globalization was the new buzzword of the 1990s and neoliberalization—or, in form
rather than process terms, neoliberalism—of the 2000s, then financialization is very much the
buzzword of the 2010s, although of course neoliberalization has been conceptualized as
handmaiden, not replacement, of globalization and financialization, in turn, of both. To be sure,
pivotal statements on and conceptualizations of financialization appeared well in advance of the
2010s, and we shall revisit many of these here. But it is in the past half-dozen years—those, not
coincidentally, coming after the onset of the global financial crisis—that financialization has
seemingly taken root in the critical scholarly vocabulary and consciousness. A Google Scholar
search, for example, yields 170 hits for financialization (or financialisation) between 1996 and
2000, 1088 between 2001 and 2005, 5790 between 2006 and 2010, and 12,010 between 2011
and the midpoint of 2014.1

In response to, and in the face of, this mushrooming financialization literature, the present
article constitutes, essentially, a call for caution. With scholars from various disciplinary
constituencies having enthusiastically invoked the concept in attempting to understand
contemporary capitalism and its specificities, and with a critical mass of increasingly breathless
and boosterish scholarship on the phenomenon having crystallized, now is the time, the article
submits, to pause, breathe in, and carefully (re)evaluate. Are we—not just geographers but
other scholarly communities to have invested in financialization—comfortable with our
collective, if contested, theorization of the concept? Is it working for us as we want and need it
to? Should we simply plow ahead with mobilization and elaboration of the concept broadly
along the lines we have been tracing to date?

Having reviewed the state of the field, the article argues that caution is not just advisable but
necessary. It makes this case by invoking a multiply constituted idea of limits. Financialization, it
suggests, is limited, both conceptually and empirically. As such, in continuing to use the
concept—as surely for the foreseeable future we, as a constellation of scholarly communities,
will—it is essential to recognize such limits and to think through their implications for the ways
we use the concept and for the work that we expect it to do for us. The limits are sufficiently
substantive, and their implications sufficiently material, to warrant a tempering of enthusiasm, if
not a turn away from the concept altogether. More specifically, we need to be much more wary
of relying on the concept and of mobilizing it for the purposes of both categorization and
explanation.
The article proceeds in five sections, which respectively correspond to and delineate the five
connected types of limits that attach to financialization. The first such limits are analytic. For a
concept to be analytically valuable, it should be possible for scholars to invoke it in such a way
that it brings recognizability and clarity to the particular topic of analysis; the critical properties
or dynamics of the empirical object of investigation are foregrounded, if not comprehensively
accounted for, simply by the use of a term whose reproducible coherence offers ready-made
analytical expedience and insight. For a variety of reasons, however, not least unchecked and
promiscuous conceptual reiteration, the idea of financialization has by now largely lost any
coherence that it previously enjoyed: increasingly standing only for a vague notion of ‘the
(increased) contemporary importance of finance’, its enrolment today risks raising more
questions than it answers.

Does this then mean that the concept is valueless and that it has facilitated no scholarly
progress? Absolutely not. But, the article goes on to argue, there are crucial limits to its positive
contributions, not least—as discussed in the ‘Theoretic limits’ section—of a theoretic nature.
Here the argument is that there are very real limits to the depth and range of genuinely new
conceptual insights generated by the positing and theorization of financialization. The central
concern in this regard, to be clear, is not so much with the sophistication, rigor, or novelty of
theorizations of financialization per se, although as we shall see there are legitimate questions
to be asked here, too. Rather, our main concern is with the limits to the power of
financialization and its conceptualization to meaningfully advance our theoretical understanding
of capitalism’s cultural and political economies more generally.

The third section discusses limits of a very different type. One of, if not the most important
contribution of the financialization discourse and ‘movement’ has been of a strategic nature. It
has served to make finance a more acceptable, indeed more obligatory, object of study for a
range of scholarly communities for whom it historically represented something of an
unmentionable and unknowable other. In the process, it has also helped bringing those
communities into productive conversation with one another. In other words, it—financialization
—has served vital strategic purposes. Yet there are limits to this strategic function, which the
third section of the article identifies and reflects critically upon. If financialization’s great
contribution has been to alert new constituencies to the significance, broadly defined, of
finance, at what point can we say that this contribution is more or less complete?

The latter question of finance’s significance— economic, political, and cultural—is considered
explicitly in the article’s fourth section. It argues that notwithstanding the self-evident and
demonstrable importance of finance to contemporary social life on all manner of axes, its
significance nonetheless risks being overstated, and arguably already has been in influential
financialization accounts. The scale of finance’s significance is one aspect of such potential
overstatement, and the historical novelty thereof is another. In attempting to understand and
account for the possibility of such overstatement, meanwhile, the article invokes, once more,
the central trope of limits: a susceptibility to exaggerate finance’s contemporary significance is
embedded, it submits, in the limited nature of the optics brought to bear upon contemporary
‘financialized’ phenomena.
To recognize that exaggeration of financialization’s reality as a historical–geographical set of
phenomena is conceivable is to recognize, at the same time, that there are material limits—fifth,
and finally—to the various processes referred to with that term. In other words,
financialization-as- ‘thing(s)’ is no less limited—or, better, no less required to confront limits to
its conditions of possibility and its scope for intensification or extension— than financialization-
as-concept. But these limits, the article’s last substantive section argues, have ordinarily not
been recognized and critically reflected upon, and nor, therefore, have their implications for the
discourse of financialization actively been considered. Recognizing and robustly conceptualizing
these empiric limits, it is therefore argued, is in fact an indispensable component of the
simultaneous process of working through financialization’s analytic and theoretic limits.
Cap Good---Democracy
Economic freedom is a pre-requisite to Democracy.
Shruti Rajagopalan 21, writer at the Mint, 2/2/2021, "There is no political freedom without
economic liberty," https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/there-is-no-political-freedom-
without-economic-liberty-11612277918481.html, Marsh

Explicit censorship laws are rightly criticized as an assault on democracy. But, India’s long legacy of socialist policies—
price controls, quantity controls, and ownership controls on the means of production—also directly affects the
resources Indians need to express themselves. The Yogi Adityanath government of UP is not the first to exploit this legacy and likely won’t be the
last.

One famous example is the Indira Gandhi government’s attempt on 25 June 1975 to suppress news of the arrest of opposition leaders at the proclamation of Emergency. A chain of orders directed the general manager of Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking to cut off
supply to newspaper offices in New Delhi. Newspaper editions from other cities carried the news, while some of the Delhi editions of 26 June struggled. The same story manifests itself in different ways —sometimes through diesel and electricity, and at other times,
through social media and the internet.

It is not just ‘authoritarian’ leaders who have used means of production to control free speech. In the 1950s, the Nehru government passed the Newspaper (Price and Page) Act, 1956, and the Daily Newspapers (Price and Page) Order, 1960. These laws regulated the
prices publishers could charge for newspapers, based on page count and the amount of content. Sakal Papers challenged their constitutionality. In Sakal Papers (P) Ltd. vs. The Union of India (1962), the Supreme Court held the laws unconstitutional as they would
either increase prices or reduce the number of pages, both of which would inhibit the dissemination of ideas, and therefore violate Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court was not always consistent in fighting economic controls that infringed speech. Another socialist policy in the 1950s was to regulate the wages of journalists through the Working Journalists (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous
Provisions Act, 1955. This was challenged by Indian Express, arguing that Wage Board rates would make it prohibitively expensive to run the newspaper. In Express Newspapers vs. Union of India (1958), the Supreme Court held this law valid, though it did set aside
the punitive order of the Wage Board.

Even before the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s government tried to use old orders in a new form to control press freedom. In addition to custom duties and limits placed on importing newsprint under the Import Order, 1955, and regulation of the sale, acquisition and
use of newsprint under the Newsprint Order, 1962; the government directly regulated the size and circulation of newspapers under the Newsprint Policy of 1972-73. When challenged, in Bennett Coleman & Co. vs. Union of India (1973), the Supreme Court held that
regulating newsprint supply and fixing quantity in terms of number of pages per newspaper would either lead to reduced advertisements or reduced news, and directly impact the economic viability of the paper.

These cases are a small sample of the long list of controls. They are not new. In fact, they are all pre-Emergency, imposed by Congress governments. The modern-day version of this is the internet lockdown in Kashmir, costly licensing fees for TV and radio
broadcasting of news channels, and the shutdown of mobile networks, electricity, internet, social media platforms, and specific media accounts to quell protests. It is the same old economics of control that directly impacts freedom of press, civil liberties and the core
of a functioning democracy.

This is also not just an Indian aberration. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), F.A. Hayek pointed out the deep
link between political and
economic freedom, and warned the world that without economic freedom, civil liberties remain under
threat. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman argued for strong property rights protection and economic
freedom as a requirement for democracy. This theory also holds up empirically. In a 2018 study, Christian
Bjørnskov analysed the relationship using measures of economic freedom and press freedom indices in

177 countries. He finds that improvements in economic freedom are associated with subsequent
improvements of press freedom, and that the overall association is mainly driven by changes in market openness.

Socialists and progressives who support price controls, quantity controls and minimum wages
across other sectors are often the first to cry foul when these tools are used against journalists . But this
view is myopic. The Uttar Pradesh administration’s restriction of diesel sales to protesting farmers demonstrates that the economy is not
separate from the individuals who inhabit it. All our actions—economic , political, civic—are deeply entangled.

Letting the government control the prices and sale of diesel can be as harmful to our freedom and
democracy as direct censorship.
Cap Good---Disease
Unleashing the market solves disease---all answers don’t assume that there is
not enough capitalism.
Kerry Jackson, writer for the Orange County Register, 12/18/2016, "Free market policies
needed to incentivize creation of new life-saving treatments,”
https://www.ocregister.com/2016/12/18/free-market-policies-needed-to-incentivize-creation-
of-new-life-saving-treatments/, Marsh

Yet new drug approvals increased over the last decade. Don’t look for a surge of antimicrobial
drugs in that pipeline, though. Winegarden
says that particular drug class is among several that “face unique impediments” that serve as disincentives for

innovation.

To overcome the steep hill that impedes the development of new AMR drugs, lawmakers must implement policies that unleash the
incentives of the free market . Policymakers also should look at the 1983 federal Orphan Drug Act and its market-oriented reforms that increased
the number of drugs developed to treat rare diseases. More than 400 have been introduced to the market since the law was enacted, compared to
fewer than 10 in the 1970s.

Put another way, government needs to remove its anchors from the process and let
the market do what it does so well. In this
case, that’s
restoring patients’ health, enriching innovative companies that create jobs, and
inspiring biotech start-ups such as the group of Stanford undergraduates that has been capitalized to develop new
antibiotics. If the proper incentives are in place, the needed treatments will follow.
Cap Good---Environment
Capitalism solves the environment
Houser 20 (Adam Houser writes for CFACT; 09-29-20; CFACT; “Capitalism is sustainable”;
https://www.cfactcampus.org/sustainable-capitalism/)//ZW

Free market capitalism has proven to be the greatest force for both lifting humans out of
poverty and protecting the Earth. Yes, capitalism has flaws, but the benefits greatly outweigh the
drawbacks. Let’s look at just the facts. What is the record of capitalism versus socialism, purely on the standards of environmental protection and
human progress? Animals & Endangered Species Quite frequently in the history of humanity, over-hunting, over-fishing, and

even poaching has decimated animal species . This is known as the “tragedy of the commons”, which is best defined as where
individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling
the shared resource through their collective action. In other words, hunters were hunting everything they could to make as much money as possible
without taking into account whether they were leaving any animals alive to breed and keep the population going .
In a system of
capitalism with clearly defined private property rights, land owners, animal breeders, and
ranchers have a market incentive to keep members of an animal species alive in order to keep making
money and sustain their livelihoods into the future. This is best portrayed by the situation surrounding the

American Bison in the late 1800s. According to the Division of Fish and Wildlife, there were 324 total bison left in the USA in 1884. After
private ranchers began herding and breeding the animals, however, the population began to recover, leading to the more than 270,000 bison
alive today. But
that’s not the only species saved by property rights . The Scimitar-Horned Oryx is a
type of antelope which is extinct in the wild but thriving on private ranches . Appropriate hunting within the
rules of property rights can have amazing results for species. The Division of Fish and Wildlife said in 2012: “Hunting…provides an economic
incentive to continue to breed these species…hunting reduces the threat of the species’ extinction.” The same can be said of the
American alligator, which was “down listed” in its protection status in 1997, allowing for legal trade of the species. Numbers have
skyrocketed since – so much so that alligators are now becoming a nuisance in many parts of the nation. Emissions are Decreasing Free market

competition with smart and efficient regulation incentivizes companies to compete to become
as efficient as possible. Of course there will always be bad actors and companies that try to “cheat the system,”
and they should be held accountable. But overall, technological advancement from competition
has launched society to heights that economists and environmentalists didn’t dream possible in
decades past. In 2017, the United States had the largest decline in CO2 emissions in the world. That was
also the 9th time this century the United States led the world in emissions reduction, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy and the
American Enterprise Institute. As more natural gas is relied upon for electricity generation, and technologically advanced scrubbers of smokestacks, car
mufflers, and energy efficient vehicles are put into use, the United States will continue to be a leader in emissions efficiency. When
it comes
to air pollution of the “six common pollutants” (Ozone, Particulate Matter, Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Oxides, Sulfur Dioxide, and Lead ) the
United States has reduced emissions of these by 71% since 1980, all while Gross Domestic Product increased by
182%, vehicle miles traveled increased by 114%, and population increased by 44% according to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA). With capitalism you can “have your cake and eat it too.” The United States has achieved significant
improvement in air quality, while economic advancement has also seen significant gains. Socialism Pollutes The big government, top-down style of
socialism produces inefficiency and pollution. Comparing
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with the
United States gives a stark contrast of the record of capitalism versus socialism . Total emissions in the
USSR in 1988 were approximately 79% of the United States’ emissions, but the Soviet Gross National product was just 54% of the United States’
economy. Meaning that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of
Gross National Product, explained in the journal Global Environmental Change, volume 4, issue 3. The United States not only had a
better economy, it was doing it cleaner and more efficiently. Today, in Venezuela, the socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro has

produced chaos for its people, destroying its economy and ruining the environment. Lake Maracaibo, a
large inlet to the Caribbean Sea in Venezuela, has become blackened as mismanagement and poor environmental standards from the government-
owned, nationalized oil company of Venezuela, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., allows crude oil to ooze into the Lake. It is destroying the fishing industry,
the local populace’s economy and health, and of course, the ecosystem of Lake Maracaibo and the surrounding area. Both people and animals are
suffering from the economic situation in Venezuela. Zoo keepers are reporting that not only are the zoo animals themselves “emaciated”, but there
have been many reports of animals being stolen, according to Mongabay. Police and zoo officials believe they were taken with the intent to eat them,
as food has become incredibly scarce in the once prosperous nation. Plastic in the Ocean The United States has been vilified for its supposed role in
plastic waste reaching the Pacific Ocean and harming marine life. But according to studies reported on in the Wall Street Journal: “China and
Indonesia are likely the top sources of plastic reaching the oceans, accounting for more than a third of the plastic bottles, bags and other detritus
washed out to sea, an international research team of environmental scientists reported…” Not only this, but the United States was determined to be
#20 on the list of nations who contribute to plastic in the oceans, being responsible for just 1% of such pollution. In addition, plastic straws are also
responsible for less than 1% of all plastic in the oceans, according to Stanford Earth. Finally,
organizations doing the most to
clean up the oceans are based off of capitalist principles. One such successful organization is 4Ocean, a company
that sells bracelets and other accessories made from the plastic collected by their cleanup crews. Each purchase provides more funding to hire more
clean up crews around the world – providing not just a job for local communities impacted the most by pollution, but also creating a self-sustaining
clean up system to monitor coastlines for plastic and waste.
Cap Good---Equality
Capitalism is best at solving equality---alternatives cause an endless cycle of
poverty.
Jeffrey Overall 17, Assistant Business Professor at Nipissing University, 2017, “Practice what
you preach: the failure of the welfare state and the discovery of total equality through
capitalism,” International Journal of Public Policy, 13(1), pp 69-85,
https://doi.org/10.1504/IJPP.2017.081049, Marsh

The ineffectiveness of the welfare state

There are many advantages to social programs. For example, universal healthcare offers all citizens, rich and poor, free access to basic healthcare. Free
education ensures that literacy rates remain at sustainable levels and the welfare provided to low-income families can assist in minimising
homelessness. Although many countries admire those that have social services built into their political structures, the success of these programs in
alleviating social problems has been challenged (Harrigan and Wang, 2011; Pieterse, 2002). It has been argued that aid, defined
as providing
monetary assistance to the disadvantaged, in general, does not solve social problems (Harrigan and Wang,
2011; Pieterse, 2002). For example, the American Government has provided nearly $3.5 trillion in foreign aid; however, it

has been argued that this has resulted in minimal (if any) positive impact on reducing poverty and has failed
to sustain modest economic growth in Africa (Morrissey, 2006). In many ways, it has been argued that aid has caused the
problem to perpetuate as it creates dependency (Teijlingen et al., 2012).

Consistent with the issues involving international aid, there

have been equally disappointing results with
welfare, which is a state-funded social assistance program that provides monetary support to low-
income families. Specifically, there has been empirical evidence from the USA that demonstrates that the

welfare state encourages dependency, lowers recipients’ self-esteem, causes a lack of

motivation, and denies individuals any opportunity to a better life (Angus, 1992) as they are locked-in to a
cycle of poverty. Through this, individuals are incapable of becoming self-sufficient (Hiller and Reeves, 1973)
and, as a result, the welfare state leads to a generational problem through not only the expansion, but also the

perpetuation of welfare dependence (Aras and Crowler, 2008; Bochel et al., 2011; Brown, 2012; Kaufman and Nelson, 2012;
Winters, 2008). In addition, recipients are marginalised as there are negative social connotations associated with

receiving social assistance (Tanner, 1994), which tends to contribute to depression among recipients (Coiro, 2001). Not only

that, it has been shown that welfare has been argued to cause crime rates (Tanner, 1994) to continue, unabated as

the resources received through welfare are barely sufficient for individuals to surmount their
impoverished state. As such, recipients attempt to supplement their income through illegal means.
Moreover, those that receive social assistance have virtually no incentive to become productive members

of society as their basic needs are supplied by the government (Teijlingen et al., 2012). It is important to note that these
issues cannot solely be blamed on the welfare state as there might be several intervening variables, such as weak family ties with many single-parent
households, high illiteracy rates, lack of formal education, and a lack of resources, which may compound the issue. As outlined by Dawkins (1976), the
welfare state is an unnatural phenomenon that can lead to individuals exploiting and gaming the system, which seems to be occurring in practice.

However, as was shown, the welfare state can lead to the perpetuation of these problems as there is a lack of incentive to improve as the
state provides the basic means for survival. Most concerning is that the failure
of the welfare state continues to fundamentally
infringe on the human rights of the wealthy. The state restricts the freedom of the wealthy by placing a
significant burden upon them as they are forced to transfer their wealth to the poor (Angus, 1992). It is a
popular view that this may result in a slowdown in economic growth (Bochel et al., 2011; Sadli and Thee, 1999) and

rising unemployment (Mackenbach, 2012; Rosanvallon, 1988) as the highly educated members of society are often
willing to emigrate to more competitive locals to avoid paying high taxes (Andersen, 2006; Gould and Moav, 2007;
Karrass, 2008). In Africa, as an example, the supply of healthcare workers is exceedingly low as these members have the incentive to migrate to
industrialised nations (Dovlo, 2004). This causes a shortage of manpower in not only healthcare, but all areas of human endeavours as the knowledge
gained on the continent is no longer available (Muula, 2005; Ojo et al., 2011). Indeed, high taxation has been shown, empirically, to have an impact on
brain drain (Wagner, 2000) and this might be detrimental on the productivity, social development, and human capital accumulation within a nation
(Kuptsch and Fong, 2006; Wong and Yip, 1999). Clearly, excessive
taxation might be unsustainable as the most
productive members of society are forced to emigrate .
In parallel to these issues, high taxes have been found to decrease the economic rewards to entrepreneurs, which act as a deterrent to
enterprising behaviour (Hoxha and Krasnigi, 2008; Kellerman, 2002; Nystrom, 2008). Mandatory contributions have a direct impact on determining the
incentives for work effort, labour supply, career aspirations, and the propensity to upgrade one’s skills (Henrekson et al., 2010). This, in turn, may lower
economic productivity, the skills of the workforce, and impairs the supply of skilled workers that are willing to participate in the labour force
(Henrekson et al., 2010). Therefore, the failure
of the welfare state appears to create a self-perpetuating
problem, which is consistent with the failure of state socialism as a whole (Offe and Heinze, 2002). Indeed, the public
good can never be achieved where one group is sacrificed at the expense of another because in this
system, all human rights and personal freedoms are violated (Rand, 1961).
Cap Good---Poverty
Capitalism is the best way to decrease poverty—robust studies prove.
Julian Adorney 14, economic historian, entrepreneur, and contributor for the Ludwig von
Mises Institute. He’s citing studies from professors and globally recognized institutes,
Foundation for Economic Education, “Free the Poor”, 3/7,
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/free-the-poor

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, and many claim that President Johnson’s program has lifted millions out of poverty. But if

we really want to help the poor, research suggests that economic freedom does more than
government aid. Economic Freedom Within the United States In “A Dynamic Analysis of Economic Freedom and Income Inequality in the 50
States: Empirical Evidence of a Parabolic Relationship,” Daniel L. Bennett and Richard K. Vedder argue that, past a certain point,

economic freedom decreases inequality. Increasing economic freedom benefits the poor and
middle class more than it helps the wealthy. Bennett and Vedder analyze the 50 states in terms
of their economic freedom and their income inequality over 25 years (from 1979 to 2004). Bennett and
Vedder define economic freedom as more or less the degree to which government is limited.
They measured and ranked states according to the size of government, the level of taxation, and
the level of labor market regulation. They define income inequality using the Gini coefficient. Because different states
have radically different levels of economic freedom (compare New York and North Dakota, for
instance), the authors were able to draw on a wealth of data about relative economic freedom
in 50 distinct economies. The authors find a parabolic relationship between a state’s economic
freedom and its income inequality. As states initially become more economically free, most of
the gains go to the wealthy. But at a certain inflection point X, which 21 states had already hit by
2004, the relationship shifts: past this point, as states become more free, income inequality
declines. But does income inequality decline because the rich lose wealth (perhaps through fewer opportunities
for crony capitalism), or because the gains from increasing economic freedom go primarily to the poor?

In “Income Inequality and Economic Freedom in the U.S. States,” Nathan J. Ashby and Russell S. Sobel find that it’s the latter.

Ashby and Sobel analyze the 48 states of the continental United States in terms of their
economic freedom and the incomes of their poor , middle-class, and wealthy residents over 20 years
(from the early 1980s to the early 2000s). They use the same measure of economic freedom as Bennett and Vedder. The authors find a

strong positive correlation between a state’s economic freedom and the income level of the
poorest 20 percent of residents. Freer states did better by their poor than less free ones. In particular, Ashby and Sobel
found that increasing the economic freedom of a state by one unit (equivalent to moving from 40th-freest state to 7thfreest-state) increased the
incomes of its poorest residents by 11 percent. By contrast, the same change increased the incomes of the richest quintile by just over a third of that
(4.3 percent). The middle class also saw increases, greater than the rich but less than the poor .
Increasing a state's economic
freedom by reducing taxation and regulation creates broadly shared prosperity across all
quintiles. Their research helps explain why, as states become more economically free, their
income inequality declines: The poor and the middle class see more gains than the wealthy. But
couldn’t this be a case of mistaken causality? Maybe some states have less poverty because they have more natural resources. With less poverty, they
need less government to help the poor, meaning they’re economically freer. But Ashby and Sobel anticipated this claim. They control
for about a dozen variables, including education, geography, and median income. The last controlled
variable is especially important; it places richer and poorer states on a level playing field, so to speak, for the study. It combats the idea that

perhaps wealthier states need less government because they have less poverty, and firmly points the arrow of causality toward

economic freedom reducing poverty. Ashby and Sobel’s research is a compelling argument against
government poverty programs. Other research, for instance the Mercatus Center’s Freedom in the 50 States annual report, notes the positive effects of
economic freedom on aggregate economic growth. But because their data is left in the aggregate, it’s difficult to determine to whom exactly the
economic gains go. But by breaking down their research by quintile, Ashby and Sobel make a case that economic growth especially
helps the poor. Economic Freedom Worldwide Nor is the connection between economic freedom and
bottom-rung prosperity unique to the United States. Recent research in the Economic Freedom
of the World (EFW) 2013 Annual Report finds the same trend internationally. The Economic Freedom of
the World (EFW) Annual Report, published by the Fraser Institute, analyzes around 150 countries in terms of factors like their

economic freedom, closeness to a laissez-faire state, poverty levels, and per capita income. The results are a striking indictment

of the idea that more government intervention in the economy can help the poor. As EFW
points out, the shares of a country’s GDP going to the bottom 10 percent are pretty consistent
regardless of how free the country is. From communist states to progressive countries to almost
laissez-faire societies, the poorest 10 percent of citizens receive about 2.5 percent of the
country’s wealth. No amount of progressive policies has changed that number. But for the poor,
life is still much better in an economically free country than in one with more government. More
economically free countries have more wealth than less free ones, meaning the poorest 10
percent can end up with thousands of dollars more per year. The poorest citizens of the 25
percent most-free countries earn an average of $10,556 per year. The poorest citizens in the
middle 50 percent of countries earn less than a third of that. So why does more economic
freedom mean less poverty? The answers are well-known to libertarians, but worth reviewing. In societies with more
economic freedom, decreased taxes and regulation make it easier to accumulate savings and to
start or expand a business. Today in the United States, getting permits and navigating the legal maze to start a business can cost tens of
thousands of dollars. Getting the permit for a food truck, and complying with the various laws, can cost $15,000 at the high end. Regulations in the
United States overall cost about 1.5 percent of the country’s income per capita. But in other countries this cost is even higher; in Germany regulations
sap 4.7 percent of the nation’s income per capita. In Italy it’s 14.2 percent. Some of these regulations drain money from existing
corporations, leaving them with fewer funds to expand; others impose hefty costs on anyone wishing to start a
business. Both ultimately discourage wealth creation. Countries or states with more economic freedom therefore

have more jobs, more innovation, and more goods and services—ultimately more wealth—than
societies burdened by a heavy government. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, legislators
would do well to bear these data in mind. The cure for poverty is not more well-meaning
government programs to make the United States resemble Europe. The solution, as it has
always been, is more economic freedom.

Statistical evidence shows the capitalism ends poverty.

Jesse Hathaway 18, 10/28/2018, "Want to end poverty? Promote capitalism, not socialism,"
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/want-to-end-poverty-promote-
capitalism-not-socialism, Marsh

In 1981, 44
percent of the world 's population was classified as living in “extreme poverty,” which means earning
$1.90 per day or less in wages, according to the World Bank. As
of 2013, that number had declined to just 10.7 percent.
This was the direct result of the transition by many large countries — including China, India, and Russia — to largely free-
market economies and away from socialism.

Unfortunately, many countries, including the United States, cling

to suboptimal big-government policies and to policies
that subject market forces to political considerations. This is known as "crony capitalism." But although flawed, this is still

far better than a full-fledged socialist system, which would cause poverty to skyrocket.

If people truly want to end poverty — and they should — they should choose the only proven way to do that, instead of
endorsing pie-in-the-sky fantasies and long-discredited ideologies. Big government wealth
redistribution policies are a main cause of poverty. People who create and innovate, including the bright minds
behind drawing readers and advertisers to Teen Vogue, should be celebrated for providing goods and services that
people want.

To end poverty, government needs to get out of the way of the people, and let the magic of the free
market work, as it has every single time it’s been allowed to do so.
Cap Good---Gender
Capitalism solves the patriarchy---four warrants.
Ann Cudd 14, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor & Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Pittsburgh, 5/21/14, “Is Capitalism Good for Women?” Journal of Business Ethics, pp 761-770,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2185-9

Capitalism offers four mechanisms for overthrowing tradition and forging a path to end
patriarchal oppression of women. Materially, capitalism subverts traditional forms of deformed desires
and false consciousness by offering options that expand opportunities for women. By offering
jobs and wages to women, capitalism offers women an opportunity for activities outside the home and for
income that opens other doors. In some developing countries, mainly those where men’s human capital is relatively low
as well, women will immediately compete with men for equal wages. This gives women greater

bargaining power within families and communities, and thus a greater ability to resist violence and
exploitation by men of their community. Capitalism also offers the option for women to become
entrepreneurs and thus their own bosses. The Grameen Bank founded by Yunus Muhammad and its many offshoot social
enterprises provide concrete evidence that this is a real option for women in the developing world (Muhammad 2007).

The second mechanism capitalism offers to overthrow traditional culture is the ideology of individual rights, which
can be adopted by women to disrupt the traditional gender ideology (Gordon 1996). Capitalism derives its prime justification

from the maximization of individual liberty , and capitalist societies promulgate the ideology of
individualism, which helps to break down patriarchal and sexist norms and practices of traditional
cultures. A good example of this is the resistance to contraception and the forbidding of abortion common in traditional cultures. Capitalism
directly provides incentives to fight against this resistance by making children less valuable as uneducated, unskilled laborers and more valuable when
educated and raised to adulthood before going into paid employment. Capitalism also indirectly incentivizes having fewer children by allowing families
to afford nutrition and health care, and thus improving health outcomes, of infants and children. Even in capitalist societies women and men must
struggle against the forces of tradition to preserve women’s rights to reproductive and bodily autonomy. The ideology of individualism which capitalism
reinforces and relies upon helps women and men to see women as valuable in themselves, and not only for the subordinated social roles that they
fulfill. At the very least they are consumers who have their own preferences and tastes that the market attempts to satisfy. But capitalism is also part of
the liberal worldview, which values individuals and individual autonomy above all else. Once the ideology of individual
rights becomes
widely known and discussed, the false beliefs of inferiority of women can be challenged and countered,

and this in turn challenges evaluations of women as inferior .

Third, in promoting free market exchange, capitalism promotes the idea of mutual advantage. Adam Smith’s
notion of the invisible hand is one original formulation of this idea. In capitalism, each
person pursues their own advantage, and
the advantage of the group arises. Another formulation of the idea of mutual advantage comes from the idea of a
positive sum game, in which all the players may gain at the same time. By playing by the rules within a
suitably constrained and monitored system, each one can strive to achieve without depriving others. Mutual

advantage opposes the notion that women should sacrifice their own interests for the sake of
others without any expectation of benefit (Gauthier 1986). In this way, capitalism enshrines the idea of
equality in market exchange itself.

Finally, because capitalism promotes innovation, capitalist governments and firms promote science as a path to
technical innovation. Science offers a means for critical analysis of beliefs, and hence a way to uncover and debunk false
consciousness.9 In the quest for a creative, innovative workforce, successful firms seek out highly educated individuals and individuals from
widely varying backgrounds. If a society is to support such innovation, it needs to support the education of individuals from all walks of life in order to
maximize the potential for finding the uniquely creative individuals who will invent new technologies and new forms of life. But an
inevitable
byproduct of such broadly distributed education will be the creation of individuals capable of critical
thinking, who question the fetishes of the current generation. In this way capitalism creates the
conditions for trenchant critiques of capitalist fetishes, as well.
Cap Good---Quality of Life
Capitalism improves quality of life
Allison 12 - American businessman, director at Moelis & Company, former CEO and president
of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. (John A. Allison IV, “The Financial Crisis and the Free
Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy’s Only Hope”, Published September
2012,
https://learning-oreilly-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/library/view/The+Financial+Crisis+and+the+Fre
e+Market+Cure:+Why+Pure+Capitalism+is+the+World+Economy's+Only+Hope/
9780071806787/ch21.html#ch21)//IB

While neither taking advantage of others nor self-sacrifice is a rational alternative, there is an
uncompromising moral code that underlies a free society and free markets. This moral code
can best be described as the “trader principle.” Successful human relationships are about
trading value for value—getting better together. In our business at BB&T, we are morally
committed to doing our best to help our clients achieve economic success and financial
security, because we expect to earn a profit while achieving this end. Of course, there are times
when there are difficult trade-offs, and sometimes one of the parties does not keep his
agreement. However, the goal is a mutually beneficial relationship in which both parties are
better off because of the value-for-value trade. This very fundamental idea is why free markets
create a better quality of life. Through voluntary trade, we all benefit. When government (or
anyone with a “gun”) interferes in these voluntary trades, at least one party and sometimes
both parties are worse off.
Cap Good---Space Col
Capitalism is key to getting us off the rock.
Alex Knapp 20, writer at Forbes, 5/25/2020, "Elon Musk’s First Astronaut Launch Is One Giant
Leap For Space Capitalism," https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2020/05/25/elon-musks-
first-astronaut-launch-is-one-giant-leap-for-space-capitalism/?sh=408fad182b49, Marsh

Even more significant: It’s the first time ever that astronauts will travel to orbit on a privately-owned
spacecraft (previous space-tourism stunts have been either decidedly sub-orbital or provided by the Russian government). Behnken and Hurley
will be hitching a ride on a Dragon capsule, launched by a Falcon 9 rocket, both designed and manufactured by Elon Musk-founded SpaceX. The pair will
even be conveyed to the launch pad on Tesla-manufactured electric cars.

It’s a triumphant moment for Musk and his Hawthrone, California-based company. But this isn’t just a victory for one billionaire and one company. It’s

a culmination of a decades-long effort to transform space into a new frontier of entrepreneurship.

“This is the same excitement I felt as a kid during the Apollo moon landings,” says Tom Zelibor, retired admiral and CEO of the Space Foundation, a
nonprofit that advocates space exploration. “It’s inspiring opportunities for people who may not have thought
of it before.”
During the Apollo program, putting Neil Armstrong on the Moon wasn’t just about technology or science. It was about the triumph of capitalism over communism. Or so the rhetoric went. Reality was different. Yes, the Apollo program was built by hundreds of
private companies. But its development and direction was centralized by the federal government which spent an estimated $152 billion in today’s terms to put a man on the moon. Space would be the exclusive domain of big government through the space shuttle
program in the 1980s.

This was galling to many space enthusiasts, whose passion was nurtured on science fiction stories by the likes of Robert Heinlein, who portrayed a future in space driven by capitalists. When the Cold War finally ended in 1991, entrepreneurial opportunities in the
final frontier did finally begin to open up — ironically, within the former Soviet Union.

“It was the Russians that took the first steps in commercial services in space,” says Jeffrey Manber, a long-time space entrepreneur and CEO of Nanoracks. “Because of their economic collapse, they made a decision that their world-class markets — whether it was
airplanes with Aeroflot, or the Bolshoi Ballet or space — had to stand on their own.”

Manber served in the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, where he’d helped to establish the Office of Space Commerce. In that role, he helped to secure the first commercial contract between the Soviet space agency and a U.S. company. His work in Russia
continued after the Soviet Union fell, first by working with Russian space company Energia beginning in 1992.

The emergence of Russian space companies, which were building durable rockets at reasonable price tags, helped energize the marketplace. European and American firms, coddled by the military-industrial complex, pushed back by lobbying their governments to
limit the number of Russian launches. A 1993 article of Forbes describing this response to the nascent Russian rocket industry wryly commented, “Isn’t competition good? Not to cartel members it isn’t.”

In 2000, Manber became the first CEO of MirCorp, a Netherlands-based company that took over operations of the Russian space station Mir. Though its tenure was short (the space station was de-orbited by the Russian government in March 2001), it still notched
several firsts: the first privately funded cargo resupply, the first privately-funded crewed mission and the first space tourism contract.

Meanwhile, the U.S. saw a mini-boom of space entrepreneurs founding rocket companies. These efforts, however, frequently met with resistance from policymakers and legacy industry. Most ended in failure. “There were a lot of political and cultural barriers” to
accepting space entrepreneurship in the United States at that time, says Manber.

One notable example of these efforts came from banker and billionaire Andrew Beal, who founded an aerospace company in 1996 with an aim to produce low-cost, reusable rockets. “It’s a big roll of the dice,” he told Forbes in April 2000. He was right. The luck ran
out six months later when Beal shut down the company, citing the impossibility of competing with the government-subsidized aerospace industry.

Musk unveiled a combination of showmanship and execution reminiscent of Howard Hughes. In late 2003, for example, Musk “unveiled” his company’s early Falcon 1 rocket by shipping one across the country by truck, where it was parked in front of the Smithsonian
Air and Space Museum. But that was after he’d already successfully tested its engines.

Another milestone for the industry was achieved in 2004 when SpaceShipOne, a spacecraft created by pioneering aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites made two successful suborbital flights. That allowed Rutan to claim the $10 million
Ansari XPRIZE, an incentive offered to spur development of private space vehicles. The technology was subsequently licensed by Sir Richard Branson for Virgin Galactic, which aims to fly tourists into space later this year.

Enthusiasm for private space efforts began to bubble up even in Washington D.C. In 2004, Congress passed legislation that helped clear a regulatory path for commercial launch companies. Shelli Brunswick, COO of the Space Foundation, which advocates for space
exploration, credits this as a key foundation for SpaceX’s orbital launch this week. “It’s built on the right legislation, the right funding, the right policies over the last 20 years,” she says.

By 2005, NASA started changing the way it did business with the advent of its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. Championed by-then NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, this changed the way the agency did business. Rather than taking the lead on
engineering and design, the space agency instead simply identified transportation capabilities and invited companies to offer bids on meeting them.     

Since 2009, over $30 billion has been invested in over 530 separate space companies.

SpaceX seized the opportunity, winning a contract with NASA in 2006 that provided it with $278 million to develop its Falcon 9 rocket, which successfully launched for the first time in 2010. It signed a separate $1.6 billion contract with the space agency in 2008 to
send cargo to the International Space Station, which it began fulfilling in 2012 when its Dragon capsule became the first private spacecraft to dock with the station.

One reason for this success, says Space Angels’ Anderson, is that legacy spacecraft companies didn’t pay much attention to the opportunity. “The big defense contractors didn’t think it was worth their time because the amounts were so small,” he says. “But for
SpaceX, a young up and coming, venture-backed company, it was a big amount of money.”

he cultural shift sparked by NASA’s commercial cargo program helped lower other barriers for space entrepreneurs. Jeffrey Manber, for example, returned to the scene with a new company, Nanoracks, which in 2010 installed a research platform on the International
Space Station, enabling customers to run experiments in space. In 2014, it installed a deployment system on the station that could be used to put small satellites into orbit.

As the decade moved on, SpaceX began offering launch services to other commercial customers such as telecommunications companies, at drastically lower prices than its competition (including the Russian rocket firms). Between SpaceX and Nanoracks, the cost to
space quickly became drastically lower, opening new business opportunities.

“The private sector is now a full partner in opening the frontier of space.”

Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks

One beneficiary of these opportunities was Planet, which deployed its first constellation of small satellites to take images of the Earth’s surface for things like oil and gas exploration in 2014. The satellites were launched to the ISS on a rocket under a NASA
commercial cargo contract and propelled to orbit from Nanoracks deployment system. The San Francisco-based company now boasts a valuation of over $2.2 billion, according to Pitchbook.

Spurred on this success and others like it, investors have begun to flock to the commercial space sector. According to a report
from Space Angels, since 2009 over $30 billion has been invested in over 530 separate space companies. There
are several venture-backed space unicorns, including Planet, SpaceX and L.A.-based rocket manufacturer Rocket Lab.
Success with cargo convinced NASA to embrace a market-driven approach to returning human spaceflight to American soil. “ The commercial
space sector had really gained excellence in commercial and technical capability,” says Phil McAlister, NASA’s
director of commercial spaceflight.

In 2014, NASA awarded contracts for crewed commercial space flights to two companies: Boeing, the aerospace stalwart that’s been working with
NASA since the 1960s - and SpaceX. Combined, the two contracts are worth up to about $6.8 billion. “It was a huge shift in accountability and
responsibility to the private sector, which is geared towards speed and cost-effectiveness. These are things that NASA is conscious of, but it’s not really
in our core competencies,” McAlister chuckles.

This doesn’t mean that NASA is totally hands off in the development of either company’s spacecraft, McAlister says. But he sees it as a collaboration
that combines the best of government expertise with that of the private sector. He acknowledges it hasn’t always been easy.

“Thiswas a huge culture change for us to step back and say we’re going to give some of this control to the
private sector,” he says. “And that was very, very difficult for NASA because we felt like we were the experts in this. I think that was the biggest
challenge early on.”

For Jeffrey Manber, SpaceX sending astronauts to space “is

the exclamation point” on the past few decades of
entrepreneurship. “That’s what this mission is really going to bring home to the American public and the
world,” he says. “That the private sector is now a full partner in opening the frontier of space.”

Space col solves extinction

Britt, 1 -- Senior Science Writer (Robert Roy, Space.com, “The Top 3 Reasons to Colonize
Space” http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/colonize_why_011008-4.html)
Sooner or later, Earth's bell will be rung. A giant asteroid or comet will slam into
It's no secret.

the planet, as has happened many times before, and a deadly dark cloud will envelop the globe, killing much
of whatever might have survived the initial impact. " We live on a small planet covered with
the bones of extinct species, proving that such catastrophes do occur routinely," says J. Richard
Gott, III, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton and author of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe." Gott cites the presumably
hardy Tyrannosaurus rex, which lasted a mere 2.5 million years and was the victim of an asteroid attack, as an example of what can happen if you don't plan ahead. But

space rocks may not be the only threat. Epidemics, climatological or ecological
catastrophes or even man-made disasters could do our species in, Gott says. And so, he argues, we need a
life insurance policy to guarantee the survival of the human race. "Spreading out into space
gives us more chances," he says. And the time is now: History instructs that technological hay should be made while the economic sun shines. "There is
a danger we will end the human space program at some point, leaving us stranded on the Earth," Gott warns. "History shows that expensive technological projects are

often abandoned after awhile. For example, the Ancient Egyptians quit building pyramids . So we should be colonizing space now
while we have the chance.">
Cap Good – Super Volcanoes

Super volcanoes cause extinction

Dye, 12 (Lee Dye, Vice President of Franchise Support and Training Team Logic IT, 6-6-
2012, accessed on 8-27-2021, ABC News, "This Is the Way the World Ends? Volcanoes Could
Darken World", https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/end-world-super-volcanoes-form-
quickly-destructive-asteroid/story?id=16508702)//Babcii
Super-volcanoes have probably caused more extinctions than asteroids. But until now it has been thought that
these giant volcanoes took thousands of years to form -- and would remain trapped beneath the earth's crust for thousands
more years -- before having much effect on the planet. But new research indicates these catastrophic eruptions,
possibly thousands of times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, may happen only a
few hundred years after the volcanoes form. In other words, they may have a very "short fuse," according to researchers at
Vanderbilt University. Such an event could make thermonuclear war or global warming seem trivial,

spewing untold tons of ash into the atmosphere to block sunlight. The result would be many years of
frigid temperatures, wiping out millions of species. A super-volcano that erupted 250 million years ago is now believed to have created the greatest
mass extinction the world has ever seen, wiping out up to 95 percent of all plant and animal species . Some renegade scientists believe it
was a volcano, not an asteroid, that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Growth is sustainable AND solves super volcanoes, and space col

hÉigeartaigh 17 – Professor @ Cambridge, PhD in Genomics from Trinity College Dublin
(Sean, “Technological Wild Cards: Existential Risk and a Changing Humanity”,
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/technological-wild-cards-existential-risk-
and-a-changing-humanity/, Accessed 3-7-2019)
Technological progress now offers us a vision of a remarkable future. The advances that have brought
us onto an unsustainable pathway have also raised the quality of life dramatically for many , and have unlocked
scientific directions that can lead us to a safer, cleaner, more sustainable world . With the right
developments and applications of technology, in concert with advances in social, democratic, and distributional processes globally,
progress can be made on all of the challenges discussed here. Advances in renewable
energy and related technologies, and more efficient energy use—advances that are likely to be
accelerated by progress in technologies such as artificial intelligence—can bring us to a point of zero-
carbon emissions. New manufacturing capabilities provided by synthetic biology may
provide cleaner ways of producing products and degrading waste. A greater scientific understanding of
our natural world and the ecosystem services on which we rely will aid us in plotting a trajectory whereby critical environmental systems are
maintained while allowing human flourishing. Even advances in education and women’s rights globally, which will play a role in achieving a
stable global population, can be aided specifically by the information, coordination, and education tools that technology provides, and more
generally by growing prosperity in the relevant parts of the world. There
are catastrophic and existential risks
that we will simply not be able to overcome without advances in science and technology.
These include possible pandemic outbreaks, whether natural or engineered. The early
identification of incoming asteroids, and approaches to shift their path, is a topic of active
research at NASA and elsewhere. While currently there are no known techniques to prevent or mitigate a
supervolcanic eruption, this may not be the case with the tools at our disposal a century from now. And
in the longer run, a civilization that has spread permanently beyond the earth, enabled
by advances in spaceflight, manufacturing, robotics, and terraforming, is one that is much
more likely to endure. However, the breathtaking power of the tools we are developing is not to be taken lightly. We have been
very lucky to muddle through the advent of nuclear weapons without a global catastroph e. And within this century, it is realistic to expect
that we will be able to rewrite much of biology to our purposes, intervene deliberately and in a large-scale way in the workings of our global
climate, and even develop agents with intelligence that is fundamentally alien to ours, and may vastly surpass our own in some or even most
domains—a development that would have uniquely unpredictable consequences.
Cap Good---Terrorism
A hefty dose of capitalism ends terrorism---recruitment is based for economic
reasons that capitalism solves.
Hernando De Soto 14, not that Hernando De Soto, founder of the Institute for Liberty and
Democracy in Peru and has written several books, 10/10/2014, "The Capitalist Cure for
Terrorism," https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-cure-for-terrorism-1412973796, Marsh

Today we hear the same economic and cultural pessimism about the Arab world that we did about Peru
in the 1980s. But we know better. Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru , so can terrorists be defeated by

reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East
and North Africa.

To make this agenda a reality, the only requirements are a little imagination, a hefty dose of capital
(injected from the bottom up) and government leadership to build, streamline and fortify the laws and structures

that let capitalism flourish. As anyone who’s walked the streets of Lima, Tunis and Cairo knows, capital isn’t the problem
—it is the solution.

Here’s the Peru story in brief: Shining Path, led by a former professor named Abimael Guzmán, attempted to overthrow the Peruvian government in the 1980s. The group
initially appealed to some desperately poor farmers in the countryside, who shared their profound distrust of Peru’s elites. Mr. Guzmán cast himself as the savior of proletarians
who had languished for too long under Peru’s abusive capitalists.

What changed the debate, and ultimately the government’s response, was proof that the poor in Peru weren’t unemployed or underemployed laborers or farmers, as the conventional wisdom held at the time.
Instead, most of them were small entrepreneurs, operating off the books in Peru’s “informal” economy. They accounted for 62% of Peru’s population and generated 34% of its gross domestic product—and they
had accumulated some $70 billion worth of real-estate assets.

This new way of seeing economic reality led to major constitutional and legal reforms. Peru reduced by 75% the red tape blocking access to economic activity, provided ombudsmen and mechanisms for filing complaints against government agencies and recognized
the property rights of the majority. One legislative package alone gave official recognition to 380,000 informal businesses, thus bringing above board, from 1990 to 1994, some 500,000 jobs and $8 billion in tax revenue.

These steps left Peru’s terrorists without a solid constituency in the cities. In the countryside, however, they were relentless: By 1990, they had killed 30,000 farmers who had resisted being herded into mass communes. According to a Rand Corp. report, Shining Path
controlled 60% of Peru and was poised to take over the country within two years.

Peru’s army knew that the farmers could help them to identify and defeat the enemy. But the government resisted making an alliance with the informal defense organizations that the farmers set up to fight back. We got a lucky break in 1991 when then-U.S. Vice
President Dan Quayle, who had been following our efforts, arranged a meeting with President George H.W. Bush at the White House. “What you’re telling me,” the president said, “is that these little guys are really on our side.” He got it.

This led to a treaty with the U.S. that encouraged Peru to mount a popular armed defense against Shining Path while also committing the U.S. to support economic reform as an alternative to the terrorist group’s agenda. Peru rapidly fielded a much larger, mixed-
class volunteer army—four times the army’s previous size—and won the war in short order. As Mr. Guzmán wrote at the time in a document published by Peru’s Communist Party, “We have been displaced by a plan designed and implemented by de Soto and
Yankee imperialism.”

Looking back, what was crucial to this effort was our success in persuading U.S. leaders and policy makers, as well as key figures at the United Nations, to see Peru’s countryside differently: as a breeding ground not for Marxist revolution but for a new, modern
capitalist economy. These new habits of mind helped us to beat back terror in Peru and can do the same, I believe, in the Middle East and North Africa. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The Arab world’s informal economy includes vast numbers of potential Islamic
State recruits—and where they go, so goes the region.

It is widely known that the Arab Spring was sparked by the self-immolation in 2011 of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian street merchant. But few have asked why Bouazizi felt driven to kill himself—or why, within 60 days, at least 63 more men and women
in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Egypt also set themselves on fire, sending millions into the streets, toppling four regimes and leading us to today’s turmoil in the Arab world.

To understand why, my institute joined with Utica, Tunisia’s largest business organization, to put together a research team of some 30 Arabs and Peruvians, who fanned out across the region. Over the course of two years, we interviewed the victims’ families and
associates, as well as a dozen other self-immolators who had survived their burns.

These suicides, we found, weren’t pleas for political or religious rights or for higher wage subsidies, as some have argued. Bouazizi and the others who burned themselves were extralegal entrepreneurs: builders, contractors, caterers, small vendors and the like. In
their dying statements, none referred to religion or politics. Most of those who survived their burns and agreed to be interviewed spoke to us of “economic exclusion.” Their great objective was “ras el mel” (Arabic for “capital”), and their despair and indignation
sprang from the arbitrary expropriation of what little capital they had.

Bouazizi’s plight as a small entrepreneur could stand in for the frustrations that millions of Arabs still face. The Tunisian wasn’t a simple laborer. He was a trader from age 12. By the time he was 19, he was keeping the books at the local market. At 26, he was selling
fruits and vegetables from different carts and sites.

His mother told us that he was on his way to forming a company of his own and dreamed of buying a pickup truck to take produce to other retail outlets to expand his business. But to get a loan to buy the truck, he needed collateral—and since the assets he held
weren’t legally recorded or had murky titles, he didn’t qualify.

Meanwhile, government inspectors made Bouazizi’s life miserable, shaking him down for bribes when he couldn’t produce licenses that were (by design) virtually unobtainable. He tired of the abuse. The day he killed himself, inspectors had come to seize his
merchandise and his electronic scale for weighing goods. A tussle began. One municipal inspector, a woman, slapped Bouazizi across the face. That humiliation, along with the confiscation of just $225 worth of his wares, is said to have led the young man to take his
own life.

Tunisia’s system of cronyism, which demanded payoffs for official protection at every turn, had withdrawn its support from Bouazizi and ruined him. He could no longer generate profits or repay the loans he had
taken to buy the confiscated merchandise. He was bankrupt, and the truck that he dreamed of purchasing was now also out of reach. He couldn’t sell and relocate because he had no legal title to his business to
pass on. So he died in flames—wearing Western-style sneakers, jeans, a T-shirt and a zippered jacket, demanding the right to work in a legal market economy.

I asked Bouazizi’s brother Salem if he thought that his late sibling had left a legacy. “Of course,” he said. “He believed the poor had the right to buy and sell.” As Mehdi Belli, a
university information-technology graduate working as a merchant at a market in Tunis, told us, “We are all Mohamed Bouazizi.”

The people of the “Arab street” want to find a place in the modern capitalist economy. But hundreds of millions
of them have been unable to do so because of legal constraints to which both local leaders and Western elites are often blind.

They have ended up as economic refugees in their own countries.

To survive, they have cobbled together hundreds of discrete, anarchic arrangements, often called the “informal economy.” Unfortunately, that sector is
viewed with contempt by many Arabs and by Western development experts, who prefer well-intended charity projects like providing mosquito nets
and nutritional supplements.

But policy makers are missing the real stakes: If ordinary people
in the Middle East and North Africa cannot play the
game legally—despite their heroic sacrifices—they will be far less able to resist a terrorist offensive, and the most
desperate among them may even be recruited to the jihadist cause.
Western experts may fail to see these economic realities, but they are increasingly understood in the Arab world itself, as I’ve learned from spending time there. At conferences
throughout the region over the past year, I have presented our findings to business leaders, public officials and the press, showing how the millions of small, extralegal
entrepreneurs like Bouazizi can change national economies.

For example, when the new president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, asked us to update our numbers for his country, we discovered that the poor in Egypt get as much income from returns on capital as they do
from salaries. In 2013, Egypt had about 24 million salaried citizens categorized as “workers.” They earned a total of some $21 billion a year but also owned about $360 billion of “dead” capital—that is, capital that
couldn’t be used effectively because it exists in the shadows, beyond legal recognition.

For perspective: That amounts to roughly a hundred times more than what the West is going to give to Egypt this year in financial, military and development assistance—and eight times more than the value of all foreign direct investment in Egypt since Napoleon
invaded more than 200 years ago.

Of course, Arab states even now have laws allowing assets to be leveraged or converted into capital that can be invested and saved. But the procedures for doing so are impenetrably cumbersome, especially for those who lack education and connections. For the
poor in many Arab states, it can take years to do something as simple as validating a title to real estate.

At a recent conference in Tunisia, I told leaders, “You don’t have the legal infrastructure for poor people to come into the system.”

“You don’t need to tell us this,” said one businessman. “We’ve always been for entrepreneurs. Your prophet chased the merchants from the temple. Our prophet was a merchant!”

Many Arab business groups are keen for a new era of legal reform. In his much-discussed 2009 speech in Cairo, President Obama spoke of the deep American commitment to “the rule of law and the equal administration of justice.” But the U.S. has yet to get behind
the agenda of legal and constitutional reform in the Arab world, and if the U.S. hesitates, lesser powers will too.

Washington should support Arab leaders who not only resist the extremism of the jihadists but also heed the call of Bouazizi and all the others who gave their lives to protest the theft of their capital. Bouazizi and
those like him aren’t marginal people in the region’s drama. They are the central actors.

All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring
entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths.
Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction.

As countries from China to Peru to Botswana have proved in recent years, poor
people can adapt quickly when given a framework of
modern rules for property and capital. The trick is to start. We must remember that, throughout history,
capitalism has been created by those who were once poor.

I can tell you firsthand that terrorist leaders are very different from their recruits. The radical leaders whom I
encountered in Peru were generally murderous, coldblooded, tactical planners with unwavering ambitions to

seize control of the government. Most of their sympathizers and would-be recruits, by contrast, would rather have been legal

economic agents, creating better lives for themselves and their families.
Cap Good -- Sustainable Ag
Only Capitalist farming is sustainable
Jayson Lusk 16, Distinguished Professor and Department Head in the Department of
Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, 9/23/16, “Why Industrial Farms are Good for the
Environment,” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/why-industrial-farms-
are-good-for-the-environment.html

Stillwater, Okla. — There is much to like about small, local farms and their influence on what we
eat. But if we are to sustainably deal with problems presented by population growth and
climate change, we need to look to the farmers who grow a majority of the country’s food and
fiber.

Large farmers — who are responsible for 80 percent of the food sales in the United States,
though they make up fewer than 8 percent of all farms, according to 2012 data from the
Department of Agriculture — are among the most progressive, technologically savvy growers on
the planet. Their technology has helped make them far gentler on the environment than at any
time in history. And a new wave of innovation makes them more sustainable still.

A vast majority of the farms are family-owned. Very few, about 3 percent, are run by nonfamily
corporations. Large farm owners (about 159,000) number fewer than the residents of a
medium-size city like Springfield, Mo. Their wares, from milk, lettuce and beef to soy, are
unlikely to be highlighted on the menus of farm-to-table restaurants, but they fill the shelves at
your local grocery store.

There are legitimate fears about soil erosion, manure lagoons, animal welfare and nitrogen
runoff at large farms — but it’s not just environmental groups that worry. Farmers are also
concerned about fertilizer use and soil runoff.

That’s one reason they’re turning to high-tech solutions like precision agriculture. Using
location-specific information about soil nutrients, moisture and productivity of the previous
year, new tools, known as “variable rate applicators,” can put fertilizer only on those areas of
the field that need it (which may reduce nitrogen runoff into waterways).

GPS signals drive many of today’s tractors, and new planters are allowing farmers to distribute
seed varieties to diverse spots of a field to produce more food from each unit of land. They also
modulate the amount and type of seed on each part of a field — in some places, leaving none at
all.

Many food shoppers have difficulty comprehending the scale and complexity facing modern
farmers, especially those who compete in a global marketplace. For example, the median lettuce
field is managed by a farmer who has 1,373 football fields of that plant to oversee.

For tomatoes, the figure is 620 football fields; for wheat, 688 football fields; for corn, 453
football fields.

How are farmers able to manage growing crops on this daunting scale? Decades ago, they
dreamed about tools to make their jobs easier, more efficient and better for the land: soil
sensors to measure water content, drones, satellite images, alternative management techniques
like low- and no-till farming, efficient irrigation and mechanical harvesters.

Today, that technology is a regular part of operations at large farms. Farmers watch the
evolution of crop prices and track thunderstorms on their smartphones. They use livestock
waste to create electricity using anaerobic digesters, which convert manure to methane. Drones
monitor crop yields, insect infestations and the location and health of cattle. Innovators are
moving high-value crops indoors to better control water use and pests.

Before “factory farming” became a pejorative, agricultural scholars of the mid-20th century
were calling for farmers to do just that — become more factorylike and businesslike. From that
time, farm sizes have risen significantly. It is precisely this large size that is often criticized today
in the belief that large farms put profit ahead of soil and animal health.

But increased size has advantages, especially better opportunities to invest in new technologies
and to benefit from economies of scale. Buying a $400,000 combine that gives farmers detailed
information on the variations in crop yield in different parts of the field would never pay on just
five acres of land; at 5,000 acres, it is a different story.

These technologies reduce the use of water and fertilizer and harm to the environment. Modern
seed varieties, some of which were brought about by biotechnology, have allowed farmers to
convert to low- and no-till cropping systems, and can encourage the adoption of nitrogen-fixing
cover crops such as clover or alfalfa to promote soil health.

Herbicide-resistant crops let farmers control weeds without plowing, and the same technology
allows growers to kill off cover crops if they interfere with the planting of cash crops. The
herbicide-resistant crops have some downsides: They can lead to farmers’ using more herbicide
(though the type of herbicide is important, and the new crops have often led to the use of safer,
less toxic ones).

But in most cases, it’s a trade-off worth making, because they enable no-till farming methods,
which help prevent soil erosion.

These practices are one reason soil erosion has declined more than 40 percent since the 1980s.
Cap Good---War
Capitalism solves war.
Zack Beauchamp 15, at Vox interviewing Stephen Pinker professor at Harvard, 6/4/2015,
"Steven Pinker explains how capitalism is killing war,"
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/4/8725775/pinker-capitalism, Marsh

The idea that war is on the decline — that is, that there are fewer wars today and fewer people are dying from them than ever before — is
hard for a lot of people to believe (including Republican presidential candidates).

And yet the data makes a very compelling case that that's true:
Those numbers were put together by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist whose book The Better Angels of Our Nature makes the strongest case yet
that the world is getting progressively more peaceful. Pinker's argument has come under fire recently, with some arguing that it's way too soon for
anyone to say we've turned the corner from an era of war.

I spoke with Pinker this week to discuss some of the reasons why, specifically, he thinks the world has gotten so much safer, especially in the past 70
years. We talked about the idea that war just isn't as profitable as it used to be, why Vladimir Putin and ISIS seem
to think differently, and what world leaders should do if they actually want to make sure the unprecedented peace of the past 70 years
holds. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Zack Beauchamp: One story you hear from political scientists for why there's been less war recently that it's just less profitable —countries don't gain
very much, economically or politically, from taking over new land anymore. Does that seem right to you?

Steven Pinker: Yes, it's one of the causes. It's

the theory of the capitalist peace: when it's cheaper to buy things
than to steal them, people don't steal them. Also, if other people are more valuable to you alive than
dead, you're less likely to kill them. You don't kill your customers or your lenders, so the arrival of the
infrastructure of trade and commerce reduces some of the sheer exploitative incentives of conquest.
This is an idea that goes back to the Enlightenment. Adam Smith and Montesquieu extolled it; it was on the minds of the founders when they built
incentives for free trade into the Constitution.

I don't think it's the entire story of the decline in war. But I do think it's part of the story. There was a well-known study from Bruce Russett and John
Oneal showing statistically that countries
that engage in more trade are less likely to get into militarized
disputes, and countries that are more integrated into the world economy are less likely to get into
trouble with their neighbors.
ZB: Is it just that pairs of countries are trading with each more, or has something fundamentally changed about the global economy?

SP: It's both. Countries

that trade with each other are less likely to pick fights with each other. Independently,
individual countries that get more integrated into the global economy are less likely to make trouble.

Capitalism solves war on a massive scale – it creates lock-in mechanisms that

bind countries together and economically dampens conflict – robust studies
Dafoe 14 (Allan Dafoe & Nina Kelsey; assistant professor in political science at Yale & research
associate in international economics at Berkeley; Journal of Peace Research, “Observing the
capitalist peace: Examining market-mediated signaling and other mechanisms,”
http://jpr.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/51/5/619.full)

Countries with liberal political and economic systems rarely use military force against each
other. This anomalous peace has been most prominently attributed to the ‘democratic peace’ – the apparent
tendency for democratic countries to avoid militarized conflict with each other (Maoz & Russett, 1993; Ray, 1995; Dafoe, Oneal & Russett, 2013).More recently, however, scholars have

proposed that the liberal peace could be partly (Russett & Oneal, 2001) or primarily (Gartzke, 2007; but see Dafoe, 2011) attributed to
liberal economic factors, such as commercial and financial interdependence . In particular, Erik Gartzke, Quan Li &
Charles Boehmer (2001), henceforth referred to as GLB, have demonstrated that measures of capital openness have a substantial and

statistically significant association with peaceful dyadic relations. Gartzke (2007) confirms that this
association is robust to a large variety of model specifications. To explain this correlation, GLB propose that countries with
open capital markets are more able to credibly signal their resolve through the bearing of
greater economic costs prior to the outbreak of militarized conflict. This explanation is novel and plausible, and resonates with
the rationalist view of asymmetric information as a cause of conflict (Fearon, 1995). Moreover, it implies clear testable predictions on evidential domains different from those examined by GLB. In this article

we exploit this opportunity by constructing a confirmatory test of GLB’s theory of market-

mediated signaling. We first develop an innovative quantitative case selection technique to
identify crucial cases where the mechanism of market-mediated signaling should be most
easily observed. Specifically, we employ quantitative data and the statistical models used to support the theory we are probing to create an impartial and transparentmeans of selecting cases in
which the theory – as specified by the theory’s creators –makes its most confident predictions.We implement three different case selection rules to select cases that optimize on two criteria: (1) maximizing the
inferential leverage of our cases, and (2) minimizing selection bias. We examine these cases for a necessary implication of market-mediated signaling: that key participants drew a connection between conflictual
events and adverse market movements. Such an inference is a necessary step in the process by which market-mediated costs can signal resolve. For evidence of this we examine news media, government
documents, memoirs, historical works, and other sources. We additionally examine other sources, such as market data, for evidence that economic costs were caused by escalatory events. Based on this analysis,
we assess the evidence for GLB’s theory of market mediated costly signaling. Our article then considers a more complex heterogeneous effects version of market-mediated signaling in which unspecified scope
conditions are required for the mechanism to operate. Our design has the feature of selecting cases in which scope conditions are most likely to be absent. This allows us to perform an exploratory analysis of

our
these cases, looking for possible scope conditions. We also consider alternative potential mechanisms. Our cases are reviewed in more detail in the online appendix.1 To summarize our results,

confirmatory test finds that while market-mediated signaling may be operative in the most
serious disputes, it was largely absent in the less serious disputes that characterize most of
the sample of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). This suggests either that other mechanisms
account for the correlation between capital openness and peace, or that the scope conditions
for market-mediated signaling are restrictive. Of the signals that we observed, strategic market-mediated signals
were relatively more important than automatic market-mediated signals in the most serious
conflicts. We identify a number of potential scope conditions, such as that (1) the conflict must be driven by bargaining failure
arising from uncertainty and (2) the economic costs need to escalate gradually and need to be
substantial, but less than the expected military costs of conflict . Finally, there were a number of other explanations that seemed
present in the cases we examined and could account for the capitalist peace: capital openness is associated with greater anticipated

economic costs of conflict; capital openness leads third parties to have a greater stake in the
conflict and therefore be more willing to intervene; a dyadic acceptance of the status quo could promote both peace and capital openness; and
countries seeking to institutionalize a regional peace might instrumentally harness the pacifying effects of liberal markets. The correlation: Open capital markets and peace The empirical puzzle at the core of this
article is the significant and robust correlation noted by GLB between high levels of capital openness in both members of a dyad and the infrequent incidence of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars
between the members of this dyad (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). The index of capital openness (CAPOPEN) is intended to capture the ‘difficulty states face in seeking to impose restrictions on capital flows (the
degree of lost policy autonomy due to globalization)’ (Gartzke & Li, 2003: 575). CAPOPEN is constructed from data drawn from the widely used IMF’s Annual Reports on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange
Controls; it is a combination of eight binary variables that measure different types of government restrictions on capital and currency flow (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 407). The measure of CAPOPEN starts in
1966 and is defined for many countries (increasingly more over time). Most of the countries that do not have a measure of CAPOPEN are communist.2 GLB implement this variable in a dyadic framework by
creating a new variable, CAPOPENL, which is the smaller of the two dyadic values of CAPOPEN. This operationalization is sometimes referred to as the ‘weak-link’ specification since the functional form is
consonant with a model of war in which the ‘weakest link’ in a dyad determines the probability of war. CAPOPENL has a negative monotonic association with the incidence of MIDs, fatal MIDs, and wars (see Figure
1).3 The strength of the estimated empirical association between peace and CAPOPENL, using a modified version of the dataset and model from Gartzke (2007), is comparable to that between peace and,
respectively, joint democracy, log of distance, or the GDP of a contiguous dyad (Gartzke, 2007: 179; Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 412). In summary, CAPOPENL seems to be an important and robust correlate of
peace. The question of why specifically this correlation exists, however, remains to be answered. The mechanism: Market-mediated signaling? Gartzke, Li & Boehmer (2001) argue that the classic liberal account
for the pacific effect of economic interdependence – that interdependence increases the expected costs of war – is not consistent with the bargaining theory of war (see also Morrow, 1999). GLB argue that
‘conventional descriptions of interdependence see war as less likely because states face additional opportunity costs for fighting. The problem with such an account is that it ignores incentives to capitalize on an

that financial interdependence

opponent’s reticence to fight’ (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 400.)4 Instead, GLB (see also Gartzke, 2003; Gartzke & Li, 2003) argue

could promote peace by facilitating the sending of costly signals. As the probability of
militarized conflict increases, states incur a variety of automatic and strategically imposed
economic costs as a consequence of escalation toward conflict. Those states that persist in a
dispute despite these costs will reveal their willingness to tolerate them, and hence signal
resolve. The greater the degree of economic interdependence, the more a resolved country
could demonstrate its willingness to suffer costs ex ante to militarized conflict. Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s
mechanism implies a commonly perceived costly signal before militarized conflict breaks out or escalates: if market-mediated signaling is to account for the correlation between CAPOPENL and the absence of
MIDs, then visible market-mediated costs should occur prior to or during periods of real or potential conflict (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). Thus, the proposed mechanism should leave many visible footprints in

This theory predicts that these visible signals must arise in any escalating conflict,
the historical record.

involving countries with high capital openness, in which this mechanism is operative Clarifying the
signaling mechanism Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s signaling mechanism is mostly conceptualized on an abstract, game-theoretic level (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). In order to elucidate the types of observations that

A conceptual classification of costly

could inform this theory’s validity, we discuss with greater specificity the possible ways in which such signaling might occur.

signals The term signaling connotes an intentional communicative act by one party directed
towards another. Because the term signaling thus suggests a willful act, and a signal of resolve is only credible if it is costly,
scholars have sometimes concluded that states involved in bargaining under incomplete
information could advance their interests by imposing costs on themselves and thereby
signaling their resolve (e.g. Lektzian & Sprecher, 2007). However, the game-theoretic concept of signaling refers more generally to any situation in which an actor’s behavior reveals
information about her private information. In fact, states frequently adopt sanctions with low costs to themselves and

high costs to their rivals because doing so is often a rational bargaining tactic on other
grounds: they are trying to coerce their rival to concede the issue. Bargaining encounters of
this type can be conceptualized as a type of war-of-attrition game in which each actor
attempts to coerce the other through the imposition of escalating costs . Such encounters also
provide the opportunity for signaling: when states resist the costs imposed by their rivals,
they ‘signal’ their resolve. If at some point one party perceives the conflict to have become too costly and steps back, that party ‘signals’ a lack of resolve. Thus, this kind
of signaling arises as a by-product of another’s coercive attempts. In other words, costly signals come in two forms: self-inflicted
(information about a leader arising from a leader’s intentional or incidental infliction of costs on himself) or imposed (information about a leader that arises from a leader’s response to a rival’s imposition of costs).

Additionally, costs may arise as an automatic byproduct of escalation towards military conflict or may
be a tool of statecraft that is strategically employed during a conflict. The automatic mechanism stipulates that as the
probability of conflict increases, various economic assets will lose value due to the risk of conflict and investor

flight. However, the occurrence of these costs may also be intentional outcomes of specific escalatory decisions of the states, as in the case of deliberate sanctions; in this case they are strategic.
Finally, at a practical level, we identify three different potential kinds of economic costs of
militarized conflict that may be mediated by open capital markets: capital costs from political risk, monetary coercion,
and business sanctions.

Cap solves war.

Allan Dafoe & Nina Kelsey 14. *Assistant professor of political science, Yale University.
**Research associate in international economics, University of California, Berkeley. “Observing
the capitalist peace: Examining market-mediated signaling and other mechanisms”. Journal of
Peace Research. 2014. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24557445

Countries with liberal political and economic systems rarely use military force against each
other. This anomalous peace has been most prominently attributed to the ‘democratic peace ’ – the
apparent tendency for democratic countries to avoid militarized conflict with each other (Maoz & Russett, 1993; Ray, 1995; Dafoe,
Oneal & Russett, 2013). More recently, however, scholars have proposed that the liberal peace could be partly
(Russett & Oneal, 2001) or primarily (Gartzke, 2007; but see Dafoe, 2011) attributed to liberal economic factors,
such as commercial and financial interdependence. In particular, Erik Gartzke, Quan Li & Charles Boehmer
(2001), henceforth referred to as GLB, have demonstrated that measures of capital openness have a substantial
and statistically significant association with peaceful dyadic relations. Gartzke (2007) confirms that
this association is robust to a large variety of model specifications .

To explain this correlation, GLB propose that countries with

open capital markets are more able to credibly
signal their resolve through the bearing of greater economic costs prior to the outbreak of
militarized conflict. This explanation is novel and plausible, and resonates with the rationalist view of asymmetric
information as a cause of conflict (Fearon, 1995). Moreover, it implies clear testable predictions on evidential domains different from
those examined by GLB.

In this article we
exploit this opportunity by constructing a confirmatory test of GLB’s theory of
market-mediated signaling. We first develop an innovative quantitative case selection
technique to identify crucial cases where the mechanism of market-mediated signaling should
be most easily observed. Specifically, we employ quantitative data and the statistical models used to support the theory
we are probing to create an impartial and transparentmeans of selecting cases in which the theory – as specified by the theory’s
creators –makes its most confident predictions. We implement three different case selection rules to select cases that optimize on
two criteria: (1) maximizing the inferential leverage of our cases, and (2) minimizing selection bias.

We examine these cases for a necessary implication of market-mediated signaling: that key participants drew a connection between
conflictual events and adverse market movements. Such an inference is a necessary step in the process by which market-mediated
costs can signal resolve. For evidence of this we examine news media, government documents, memoirs, historical works, and other
sources. We additionally examine other sources, such as market data, for evidence that economic costs were caused by escalatory
events. Based on this analysis, we assess the evidence for GLB’s theory of market mediated costly signaling.

Our article then considers a more complex heterogeneous effects version of market-mediated signaling in which unspecified scope
conditions are required for the mechanism to operate. Our design has the feature of selecting cases in which scope conditions are
most likely to be absent. This allows us to perform an exploratory analysis of these cases, looking for possible scope conditions. We
also consider alternative potential mechanisms. Our cases are reviewed in more detail in the online appendix.1

To summarize our results, our

confirmatory test finds that while market-mediated signaling may be
operative in the most serious disputes, it was largely absent in the less serious disputes that
characterize most of the sample of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). This suggests either
that other mechanisms account for the correlation between capital openness and peace, or
that the scope conditions for market-mediated signaling are restrictive . Of the signals that we observed,
strategic market-mediated signals were relatively more important than automatic market-
mediated signals in the most serious conflicts . We identify a number of potential scope conditions, such as
that (1) the conflict must be driven by bargaining failure arising from uncertainty and (2) the
economic costs need to escalate gradually and need to be substantial, but less than the
expected military costs of conflict.
Finally, there were a number of other explanations that seemed present in the cases we examined and could account for the
capitalist peace: capital
openness is associated with greater anticipated economic costs of conflict;
capital openness leads third parties to have a greater stake in the conflict and therefore be
more willing to intervene; a dyadic acceptance of the status quo could promote both peace and capital openness; and
countries seeking to institutionalize a regional peace might instrumentally harness the pacifying effects of liberal markets.
The correlation: Open capital markets and peace

The empirical puzzle at the core of this article is the significant and robust correlation noted by GLB between high levels of capital openness in both members of a dyad and the infrequent incidence of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars between the
members of this dyad (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). The index of capital openness (CAPOPEN) is intended to capture the ‘difficulty states face in seeking to impose restrictions on capital flows (the degree of lost policy autonomy due to globalization)’ (Gartzke & Li,
2003: 575). CAPOPEN is constructed from data drawn from the widely used IMF’s Annual Reports on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Controls; it is a combination of eight binary variables that measure different types of government restrictions on capital and
currency flow (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 407). The measure of CAPOPEN starts in 1966 and is defined for many countries (increasingly more over time). Most of the countries that do not have a measure of CAPOPEN are communist.2

GLB implement this variable in a dyadic framework by creating a new variable, CAPOPENL, which is the smaller of the two dyadic values of CAPOPEN. This operationalization is sometimes referred to as the ‘weak-link’ specification since the functional form is
consonant with a model of war in which the ‘weakest link’ in a dyad determines the probability of war. CAPOPENL has a negative monotonic association with the incidence of MIDs, fatal MIDs, and wars (see Figure 1).3 The strength of the estimated empirical
association between peace and CAPOPENL, using a modified version of the dataset and model from Gartzke (2007), is comparable to that between peace and, respectively, joint democracy, log of distance, or the GDP of a contiguous dyad (Gartzke, 2007: 179;
Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 412). In summary, CAPOPENL seems to be an important and robust correlate of peace. The question of why specifically this correlation exists, however, remains to be answered.

The mechanism: Market-mediated signaling?

Gartzke, Li & Boehmer (2001) argue that the classic liberal account for the pacific effect of economic interdependence – that interdependence increases the expected costs of war – is not consistent with the bargaining theory of war (see also Morrow, 1999). GLB
argue that ‘conventional descriptions of interdependence see war as less likely because states face additional opportunity costs for fighting. The problem with such an account is that it ignores incentives to capitalize on an opponent’s reticence to fight’ (Gartzke, Li &
Boehmer, 2001: 400.)4 Instead, GLB (see also Gartzke, 2003; Gartzke & Li, 2003) argue that financial interdependence could promote peace by facilitating the sending of costly signals. As the probability of militarized conflict increases, states incur a variety of
automatic and strategically imposed economic costs as a consequence of escalation toward conflict. Those states that persist in a dispute despite these costs will reveal their willingness to tolerate them, and hence signal resolve. The greater the degree of economic
interdependence, the more a resolved country could demonstrate its willingness to suffer costs ex ante to militarized conflict.

Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s mechanism implies a commonly perceived costly signal before militarized conflict breaks out or escalates: if market-mediated signaling is to account for the correlation between CAPOPENL and the absence of MIDs, then visible market-
mediated costs should occur prior to or during periods of real or potential conflict (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). Thus, the proposed mechanism should leave many visible footprints in the historical record. This theory predicts that these visible signals must arise in
any escalating conflict, involving countries with high capital openness, in which this mechanism is operative

Clarifying the signaling mechanism

Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s signaling mechanism is mostly conceptualized on an abstract, game-theoretic level (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). In order to elucidate the types of observations that could inform this theory’s validity, we discuss with greater specificity the
possible ways in which such signaling might occur.

A conceptual classification of costly signals

The term signaling connotes an intentional communicative act by one party directed towards another. Because the term signaling thus suggests a willful act, and a signal of resolve is only credible if it is costly, scholars have sometimes concluded that states involved
in bargaining under incomplete information could advance their interests by imposing costs on themselves and thereby signaling their resolve (e.g. Lektzian & Sprecher, 2007).

However, the game-theoretic concept of signaling refers more generally to any situation in which an actor’s behavior reveals
information about her private information. In fact, states
frequently adopt sanctions with low costs to
themselves and high costs to their rivals because doing so is often a rational bargaining tactic
on other grounds: they are trying to coerce their rival to concede the issue. Bargaining
encounters of this type can be conceptualized as a type of war-of-attrition game in which each
actor attempts to coerce the other through the imposition of escalating costs. Such encounters
also provide the opportunity for signaling: when states resist the costs imposed by their rivals,
they ‘signal’ their resolve. If at some point one party perceives the conflict to have become too costly and steps back, that
party ‘signals’ a lack of resolve. Thus, this kind of signaling arises as a by-product of another’s coercive
attempts. In other words, costly signals come in two forms: self-inflicted (information about a leader arising from a leader’s
intentional or incidental infliction of costs on himself) or imposed (information about a leader that arises from a leader’s response to
a rival’s imposition of costs).

Additionally, costs may arise as an automatic byproduct of escalation towards military conflict or
may be a tool of statecraft that is strategically employed during a conflict . The automatic mechanism
stipulates that as the probability of conflict increases, various economic assets will lose value due to the risk
of conflict and investor flight. However, the occurrence of these costs may also be intentional outcomes of specific
escalatory decisions of the states, as in the case of deliberate sanctions; in this case they are strategic.

Finally, at a practical level, we identify three different potential kinds of economic costs of
militarized conflict that may be mediated by open capital markets: capital costs from political risk, monetary
coercion, and business sanctions. The most prominent mechanism proposed by Gartzke, Li & Boehmer (2001) to
account for the correlation between capital openness and peace is that of capital costs. They note that 'since conflict threatens
investments among disputing states, it makes such investments less desirable and capital becomes relatively scarce' (Gartzke, Li &
Boehmer, 2001: 407) and hence more costly. Increased capital openness may increase the capital costs of
escalation by increasing both the ease of capital flight (Abadie & Gardeazabal, 2003, 2007) and the expected harm of escalatory
events to the national economy. This mechanism will be more effective in countries with more open capital markets; countries
where the value of investments are more publicly observable (such as arises with a public stock exchange); and countries where
leaders are more sensitive to the costs of capital.5
AT: Inequality

Inequality is decreasing at unprecedented rates by every metric.

McAfee, 19—cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT
Sloan School of Management, former professor at Harvard Business School and fellow at
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Andrew, “The Global Gallop of the Four
Horsemen,” More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer
Resources—and What Happens Next, Chapter 10, pg 235-240, Kindle, dml)

In 2016 the economist and columnist Noah Smith reviewed the evidence on poverty around the world, and his
conclusion was notably exuberant: "This is incredible—nothing short of a miracle. Nothing like this has ever
happened before in recorded history." A graph created by Max Roser clearly reveals the "miracle" Smith was talking
about, and how right he was that the improvement is without precedent. The graph doesn't show the percentage of
people living in poverty, but instead something even more important: the total number of extremely poor people on earth.

The World's War on Poverty

The total number of poor people in the world peaked right at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, then
started to slowly decrease. But the real miracle came when this happy decline accelerated during the
twenty- first century. In 1999, 1.76 billion people were living in extreme poverty. Just sixteen
years later, this number had declined by 60 percent, to 705 million. Hundreds of millions fewer people are
living in poverty now than in 1820, when the world's total population was seven times smaller than it is today.

Much of this decline is reflective of what occurred in China, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, threw
off economic socialism beginning in 1978 and let capitalism work its poverty-reducing miracles . But the
story of global poverty reduction isn't a purely Chinese one. As the graph below shows, every region
around the world has seen large poverty reductions in recent years. The speed of the recent decline
indicates that it's no longer ridiculous to talk about completely eliminating extreme poverty from
the planet. The World Bank thinks this might be possible by 2030.
It's not just incomes that have improved. As I consult Our World in Data and other comprehensive sources
of evidence, I struggle to find even a single important measure of human material well-being
that's not getting better in most regions around the world.
Here are recent trends in a few key areas.

Daily Bread

As recently as 1980, the global average number of available daily calories wasn't enough to permit
an active adult male to maintain his body weight. Less than thirty-five years later, however, every region in the world
met this standard of twenty-five hundred daily calories .
Clean Living

More than 90 percent of the world's people now have access to improved water;VII in 1990 only
a bit more than 75 percent did. The situation is similar for sanitation: in 1990 only a bit more
than half of the world's people had it; now, more than two-thirds do.
Young Minds
The trend in secondary education enrollment around the world is similar to the one for sanitation, but
even sharper: in 1986 fewer than half of the world's teenagers were in school; at present, more
than 75 percent are.
One Thing We Say to Death: Not Today

By now the pattern should be familiar: life expectancy at birth has gone up around the world in recent decades:

As we saw in chapter 1, global

life expectancy was about 28.5 years in 1800. Over the next 150 years,
that number increased by 20 years. Then, in the years between 1950 and 2015, it increased by 25 more.
These gains are now universal; Southern Africa has regained the 10 years of expected life lost during its terrifying AIDS
crisis.

One of the reasons life expectancy has gone up so quickly is the collapse in both child and
maternal mortality around the world:
I find these mortality declines especially fast, large, and broad. Today, we still have desperately
poor regions, failed states, and the decimations of war. But in no region today is the child
mortality rate higher than the world's average rate was in 1998.
Convergent

Trends in maternal and child mortality highlight a critical fact that's often overlooked: around
the world, inequality in
most important measures of human material well-being is decreasing. Poor countries are
catching up to rich ones, and gaps that were once large are shrinking. Inequalities in income
and wealth dominate the news, and in many places these gaps are large and growing . They re also
important, so well look at economic inequality in the next two chapters.

But it's true, too, that there are other kinds of inequality that we should care about as we examine
the human condition: inequalities in health, education, diet, sanitation, and other things that
matter deeply for the quality of a person's life. Here the news is profoundly good; these
inequalities are collapsing. As the four horsemen have galloped around the world in recent decades, they've made life
better not only for those people and countries that were already rich but for just about everyone else. Everywhere, fewer
mothers and babies are dying, more kids are getting an education, more people have adequate
nutrition and sanitation.

It's essential to acknowledge these global victories because they show us that what we're
doing is working. Tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government are spreading around
the world and improving it. It's often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different
results. The corollary might be that ignorance is not examining the results of what's being done. Over and over, when we look at the
evidence, we see that the four horsemen are improving our world.
Perm Extensions
Perm do both. The aff’s regulatory, institutional analysis is the best middle
ground which balances the contradictions in capital to ensure social and
environmental sustainability.
- The aff’s intellectual project bridges the gap between the techno-optimists idealism and
reality by testing policy solutions
- That is the best way to manage the contradictions in capital to minimize environmental
damage

Gibbs 9 (David, Emeritus Professor of Human Geography at The University of Hull, “Prospects
for an Environmental Economic Geography: Linking Ecological Modernization and Regulationist
Approaches,” Economic Geography, 82(2), 2009, 193–215. doi:10.1111/j.1944-
8287.2006.tb00296.x)
The basic assumption underlying this article is that existing modes of economic development and organization are not sustainable
because of their environmental consequences. Given this assumption, thereis a need, at the very least, to ameliorate
these consequences and, more profoundly, to shift industrial society to a more ecologically rational
organization. To date, work from the perspective of ecological modernization has gone furthest in trying to conceptualize how
the latter may occur and the political program that may follow from it. A small number of geographers have (implicitly and explicitly)
adopted elements of ecological modernization in their own work, yet there
are a number of problems with
ecological modernization, particularly that it provides little sense of how the desired institutional and
cultural changes will come about or the power relations that are involved. Instead, it “assumes that existing institutions
and structures can internalise environmental problems through efficiency, restructuring and creativity” (Hobson 2003, 152),
although recent work by Mol (2002, 103) recognized that “while various developments point towards an institutionalization of the
environment in the economic domain, there is no fundamental reason or principle preventing the stagnation or reversal of this
process of ongoing institutionalisation.” Exactly
how the proposed transformation (or reversal) to (or from)
ecological modernity will take place , over what time scale, and by which agency still remains unclear
(Low 2002).

In contrast, work from a regulationist perspective has been stronger on conceptualizing the
relationships between institutional forms and practices and the struggles and competing
interests that make up a mode of social regulation. It is here that work by economic geographers offers useful insights into the
potential for greater ecological rationality in economic development. Thus, an advantage of regulation theory is that it
“offers no guarantees that a successor regime will happen along, just as it rejects the idea that new
‘institutional fixes’ are the result either of spontaneous forces or political fiat” (Peck 2000, 67). Rather, a variety of
regulatory discourses have been proposed, from state intervention to freemarket
environmentalism, all of which claim to be the most effective way of dealing with environmental degradation (Gandy 1997).
Taking a regulationist approach, I suggest, is different from either ecological modernization or work on
TEPs, in which the motivation for the necessary technological and institutional changes seems to come from a rational recognition of
the need for change or a paradigmatic shift, especially with regard to innovation (Hayter 2004). The cross-fertilization of
ecological modernization with economic geography approaches , with their emphasis upon the role of social
relations, can therefore improve our understanding of the link between economic processes and
environmental outcomes (Bridge 2002).
Hence, the benefits of drawing upon a regulationist approach for those who are concerned with advancing an
ecological modernization agenda are that it makes clear the nondeterministic nature of post-Fordism
and that the future form of the economy is open to shaping and debate. It emphasizes the need
to consider both economic and social processes as an integrated whole and indicates that
sustainable development will need to be promoted at a variety of levels and scales . Thus
“capitalism may have inviolable laws but is has a plurality of logics, some of which may be more
accordant with a sustainable mode of production than others ” (Drummond and Marsden 1995, 56). Such
political economy approaches can provide a theoretical vantage point from which to view the kinds of current, on-the-
ground initiatives that have been examined in ecological modernization and, in practical terms, could contribute to devising
appropriate policy outcomes. In theoretical terms, reinterpreting environmental problems through a combination of the
two approaches will involve an investigation of the creation of the institutional basis of sustainable economies or the form of the
mode of social regulation that is associated with ecological modernization and to examine whether such developments can cohere
to resolve the crisis of capitalism that stems from environmental problems. Thus, a
regulationist approach is helpful in
exploring the ways in which contradictions emerge among economic growth, environmental
protection, and social equity. At the same time, using ecological modernization approaches helps to link the grand and
high-level abstractions of regulationist approaches to the concrete outcomes and contingencies of everyday life. Focusing upon the
political and social processes that are involved in struggles over economy-environment-equity issues is central to any future
understanding of how ecological modernization can be advanced, both theoretically and through policy prescription. Such an
interlinked approach will enable us to focus upon the contradictions that emerge in relation to
economy-environment relations and the challenges that emerge from the failure of existing
practices and institutions to address problems that arise at the interface of environmental protection, economic growth,
and social equity (Gibbs and Krueger 2004).

Environmental regulation is necessary to force companies to internalize

pollution costs – particularly true for the Clean Water Act
Holm-Hansen 12 (Kristen L. Holm-Hansen, J.D. candidate, Notre Dame Law School, “‘A
Stream Would Rise From the Earth, and Water the Whole Face of the Ground’: The Ethical
Necessity for Wetlands Protection Post-Rapanos,” 2012, 26 ND J. L. Ethics & Pub Pol'y 621, 631-
639)
While elections are rarely won or lost on environmental issues, creating and voting on environmental policy is an important part of
every modern legislative session. With the United States facing population growth, the effects of recent environmental disasters,
and an ever-growing reliance on consumerism and and technology, environmentalism is an increasingly important political issue.
Industry regulation by the federal government is necessary to ensure a healthy environment for
future generations, as well as to protect natural spaces and other species. Absent environmental
regulation, landowners and companies would have unfettered discretion in matters such as
pollution discharge and land use, leaving the environment in an extremely vulnerable position.
In a capitalistic society, without the deterrent effect of the federal government's power to prosecute
and impose fines for breaches of environmental regulation, companies have little incentive to
internalize the cost of pollution control. As a result, important ecosystems have been threatened by decades of lax
regulations and overtly pro-business administrations, necessitating significant regulatory changes. [*622] Whether acknowledged or
not, ethical concerns are implicit in every piece of environmental regulation. When the government determines that there is a need
for something such as pollution control and implements a new policy, it is inherently supporting at least one value of
environmentalism. The ethical theories that drive the modern environmental movement, and subsequently public policy, illuminate
the need for additional regulations. Today, one of America's most threatened landscapes is the wetlands that are vital to the overall
health of the country's hydrologic system, water quality, and biodiversity. In recent years, despite the efforts of the Army Corps of
Engineers ("Army Corps") and the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA"), wetlands protection has been threatened by two
Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Clean Water Act: United States v. Rapanos and Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook
County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Before these holdings, the Army Corps had jurisdiction over most wetlands through permit
issuance, and the EPA had regulatory authority. After almost thirty-four years of protection, many of the nation's wetlands are now
vulnerable to development and destruction as a result of these recent decisions. [*623] In exploring this topic, Part I of this Note
surveys several leading theories of environmental ethics including deep ecology, Christian environmental ethics, and
conservationism that help frame today's public policy debates regarding environmental regulation. Part II of this Note describes the
current state of wetlands protection in the United States by examining a series of court decisions on wetlands protection under the
Clean Water Act. Finally, in Part III of this Note, I argue that ethical concerns necessitate both the implementation of a legislative
solution restoring the Clean Water Act to its full protective capacity and also show the need for increased environmental regulation
generally in the United States. I."For No One Can Lay a Foundation Other Than the One That Has Been Laid:" Environmental Ethics in
the United States The Bible begins with the Book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
God tells the couple that they will now have to fend for themselves in the wilderness: Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil
you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By
the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you
shall return. For centuries, humans struggled simply to live by avoiding such dangers as wild animals,
droughts, and floods. Itwas humanity versus the environment, a daily battle to survive and continue the
existence of the human race. While natural disasters still devastate populations across the world, humanity now faces an
even deadlier opponent - ourselves. With the development of technology came the advent of
pollution and environmental degradation, exacerbating poverty in some regions, and threatening human health across the
planet. [*624] Out of the uncertainty of humanity's continued existence and the threat to Earth's many ecosystems came various
theories of environmental ethics. In the United States, environmental issues came to the forefront of public policy in the latter half
of the twentieth century. Environmental ethics has fueled political debates, provided policymakers with a framework for
conceptualizing solutions, and has helped shape the federal government's implementation of regulatory policies. Many philosophers
wrote from a theological perspective, using religious teachings to promote conservation, while others incorporated concepts such as
natural rights and humanism into environmentalism. Although religious-based ethics may initially seem at odds with
environmentalism and conservation efforts (due to an emphasis on the value of non-human life), philosophers and theologians have
put forth compelling arguments for the necessity of environmental protection. Larry Rasmussen argues that the Judeo-Christian
tradition can use nature as a foundation for morality because God's greatness is expressed through the natural world, and its
observation can lead to knowledge of God. Rasmussen seeks to overcome the anthropocentrism [*625] of Judaism and Christianity
through a comparative study of religions that reveals a "convergence of 'eco'-value" that supports a Judeo-Christian environmental
ethic that calls for the protection of nature through restraint and innovation. Another prominent theory of Judeo-Christian
environmental ethics is the concept of stewardship. Stewardship is defined as "the conducting, supervising, or managing of
something; especially: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care." In Genesis there are two
references to this concept. In Genesis 1:26-28, God gives dominion to humanity over the earth, and in Genesis 2:4-24, God asks
Adam to take care of the Garden of Eden. Stewardship
calls for the conservation [*626] of resources and the
protection of non-human life that can be accomplished through environmental regulation. As
humanity was entrusted with the care of the planet, the natural environment must be taken care of responsibly and managed in a
way so as to preserve what God has given. Applying a Judeo-Christian ethical framework to the ecological problems that plague our
country illuminates the necessity for environmental regulation that can be accomplished through the legislative system. Other
prominent and historically influential theories of environmental ethics include deep ecology, conservationism, ecofeminism, and
preservationism. Arne Naess developed deep ecology in the 1970s in response to environmental crises occurring across the nation.
Perhaps inspired by Kantian philosophy, Naess touted the goal of deep ecology as recognizing that humans are not the only species
which can be thought to be an end-in-themselves; rather, all living things are ends-in-themselves. Naess's philosophy identified
several precepts that, if followed, will enable humans to live according to the deep ecology [*627] ideal. These hypotheses include
precepts such as "self-realization for all living beings" and "no exploitation." Underlying the deep ecology philosophy is the notion
that a human (the "Self") cannot be separated from the rest of the world; therefore, all living and non-living beings are part of the
"Self." This belief necessitates opposition to development that potentially harms non-human life and destroys biodiversity. Like deep
ecology, ecofeminism was introduced to the United States as a philosophy in the 1970s; however, rather than just identifying the
need for an egalitarian relationship between humans and other life, the theory finds that the historical subordination of women has
also contributed to the environmental crisis and must be remedied. Philosophers such as Carolyn Merchant have identified the
defeminization of nature and the androcentrism of American society as the root of today's environmental problems. In another
variation of ecofeminism, philosophers have argued that the exploitation of nature actually leads to the subordination of women
and minorities. In either case, the solution to environmental degradation is egalitarianism among all sexes, all life forms and
ecosystems, and all races. Although deep ecology and ecofeminism were certainly influential theories in the 1970s (and in a certain
respect continue to be so today), the mainstream, present-day environmentalist schools of thought are more analogous to the
preservationist and conservationist movements of the early 19th century. These ethical theories, in contrast to the philosophies
previously discussed, are inherently anthropocentric. Rather than focusing on the intrinsic value of non-human (and even individual
human) life, these theories advance environmentalism as a means to secure the future well-being of humanity. The [*628]
preservationist movement can be traced to John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, whose goal was to keep "natural spaces"
natural by protecting certain land from human modification. The modern-day preservationist movement can still be seen in non-
governmental organizations like the Audubon Society, whose goals include the preservation of natural spaces. Preservationists wish
to protect places like natural parks because the existence of such spaces is inherently good for humanity. The existence of the
natural areas, not the use of the areas, is the intended end. On the other hand, conservationism is based on utilitarian principles that
hold that conservation is good for society as a whole. The value of the land (or the conserved resources), however, is not based upon
its aesthetic and/or inherent value as touted by the preservationists; rather, it is based on its usefulness for bettering humanity.
Modern-day conservationists argue for regulatory policies in order to ensure people's happiness now by allowing them to enjoy
nature through activities like hunting and hiking, as well as for the health and pleasure of future generations. [*629] Philosophers,
theologians, and scientists have argued for various forms of environmental protection throughout the past few decades (for various
reasons); however, the path to change is not through these disciplines, but rather must come from the federal government and the
judicial system. While theorists may persuade some Americans to change their behavior, without governmental regulation, the
market system will continue to ignore environmental issues at the expense of future human generations and other living species.
The government must take proactive steps toward improved environmental regulation in order to safeguard the country's future.
Applying the preceding philosophical arguments to the current legal and environmental controversy regarding isolated wetlands
protection in the United States shows the ethical necessity for governmental regulation. II."I Brought You into a Plentiful Land:"
Wetlands Protection in the United States Through the formation of the Environmental
Protection Agency in 1970, various judicial decisions, and state laws, the states and the federal government have
begun the process of [*630] remedying environmental degradation and preventing future harms. Federal and
state regulations aim to ensure that the future health of humans will be protected through the conservation and protection of
natural resources. These laws implicitly recognize the importance of stewardship and humanity's role as
manager and protector. Unfortunately, however, the current state of environmental regulation leaves much to be desired, and
legislative purpose does not often align with ideas about the inherent value of nature and non-human species. One of the
most important areas of environmental law in the United States is water regulation. Clean water is
not just necessary for a healthy human population, it is also vital for the well-being of every ecosystem and thus must be regulated.
In addition to ensuring that water is uncontaminated, the goals of water regulation should include guaranteeing that there will be
enough [*631] water to support human life and a healthy environment. Water's "divine significance" is recognized in Catholicism as
well as throughout the Bible. Thus, the concept of stewardship necessarily includes water protection.

Regulated capitalism solves war, environment, and quality of life---alternatives

increase degradation and poverty. Prefer empirical and measurable indicators.
Mark Budolfson 21. PhD in Philosophy. Assistant Professor in the Department of
Environmental and Occupational Health and Justice at the Rutgers School of Public Health and
Center for Population–Level Bioethics "Arguments for Well-Regulated Capitalism, and
Implications for Global Ethics, Food, Environment, Climate Change, and Beyond". Cambridge
Core. 5-7-2021. https://www-cambridge-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/core/journals/ethics-and-
international-affairs/article/arguments-for-wellregulated-capitalism-and-implications-for-global-
ethics-food-environment-climate-change-and-beyond/96F422D04E171EECDEF77312266AE9DD

Discourse on food ethics often advocates the anti-capitalist idea that we need less capitalism,
less growth, and less globalization if we want to make the world a better and more equitable place, with
arguments focused on applications to food, globalization, and a just society. For example, arguments for this anti-
capitalist view are at the core of some chapters in nearly every handbook and edited volume in the rapidly expanding subdiscipline
of food ethics. None of these volumes (or any article published in this subdiscipline broadly construed) focuses on a defense of
globalized capitalism.1

More generally, discourse on global ethics, environment, and political theory in much of academia—and in
society—increasingly features this anti-capitalist idea as well.2 The idea is especially prominent in discourse surrounding
the environment, climate, and global poverty, where we face a nexus of problems of which capitalism is a key driver, including
climate change, air and water pollution, the challenge of feeding the world, ensuring sustainable development for the world's
poorest, and other interrelated challenges.

It is therefore important to ask whether this anti-capitalist idea is justified by reason and evidence
that is as strong as the degree of confidence placed in it by activists and many commentators on food ethics, global ethics, and
political theory, more generally.

In fact, many experts argue that this anti-capitalist idea is not supported by reason and argument
and is actually wrong. The main contribution of this essay is to explain the structure of the leading arguments against the
anti-capitalist idea, and in favor of the opposite conclusion. I begin by focusing on the general argument in favor of well-
regulated globalized capitalism as the key to a just, flourishing, and environmentally healthy
world. This is the most important of all of the arguments in terms of its consequences for health, wellbeing, and justice, and it is
endorsed by experts in the empirically minded disciplines best placed to analyze the issue, including
experts in long-run global development, human health, wellbeing, economics, law, public policy,
and other related disciplines. On the basis of the arguments outlined below, well-regulated capitalism has
been endorsed by recent Democratic presidents of the United States such as Barack Obama, and by progressive Nobel
laureates who have devoted their lives to human development and more equitable societies, as well as by a wide range of
experts in government and leading nongovernmental organizations.
The goal of this essay is to make the structure and importance of these arguments clear, and thereby highlight that discourse on
global ethics and political theory should engage carefully with them. The goal is not to endorse them as necessarily sound and
correct. The essay will begin by examining general arguments for and against capitalism, and then turn to implications for food, the
environment, climate change, and beyond.

Arguments for and against Forms of Capitalism

The Argument against Capitalism

Capitalism is often argued to be a key driver of many of society's ills: inequalities, pollution , land use
changes, and incentives that cause people to live differently than in their ideal dreams . Capitalism can
sometimes deepen injustices. These negative consequences are easy to see—resting, as they do, at the center of many of society's
greatest challenges.3

And at the same time, it is often difficult to see the positive consequences of capitalism.4 What are the positive consequences of
allowing private interests to clear-cut forests and plant crops, especially if those private interests are rich multinational corporations
and the forests are in poor, developing countries whose citizens do not receive the profits from deforestation? Why give private
companies the right to exploit resources at all, since exploitation almost always has some negative consequences such as those
listed above? These are the right questions to ask, and they highlight genuine challenges to capitalism. And in light of these
challenges, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that perhaps a different economic system altogether would be more equitable
and beneficial to the global population.

The Argument for Well-Regulated Capitalism

However, things are more complicated than the arguments above would suggest , and the benefits
of capitalism, especially for the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, are in fact myriad and significant. In addition,
as we will see in this section, many experts argue that capitalism is not the fundamental cause of the previously
described problems but rather an essential component of the best solutions to them and of the best
methods for promoting our goals of health, well-being, and justice .

To see where the defenders of capitalism are coming from, consider an analogy involving a
response to a pandemic: if
a country administered a rushed and untested vaccine to its population that ended up killing people, we would
not say that vaccines were the problem. Instead, the problem would be the flawed and sloppy policies
of vaccine implementation. Vaccines might easily remain absolutely essential to the correct response to such a
pandemic and could also be essential to promoting health and flourishing, more generally.
The argument is similar with capitalism according to the leading mainstream arguments in favor of it: Capitalism
is an essential part of the best society we could have , just like vaccines are an essential part of the best response
to a pandemic such as COVID-19. But of course both capitalism and vaccines can be implemented poorly, and can
even do harm, especially when combined with other incorrect policy decisions. But that does not mean that we should
turn against them—quite the opposite. Instead, we should embrace them as essential to the best and most
just outcomes for society, and educate ourselves and others on their importance and on how they must be
properly designed and implemented with other policies in order to best help us all. In fact, the argument in
favor of capitalism is even more dramatic because it claims that much more is at stake than
even what is at stake in response to a global pandemic —what is at stake with capitalism is nothing
less than whether the world's poorest and most vulnerable billion people will remain in
conditions of poverty and oppression, or if they will instead finally gain access to what is minimally necessary for
basic health and wellbeing and become increasingly affluent and empowered. The argument in favor of capitalism proceeds as
follows:

Premise 1. Development and the past. Over the course of recorded human history,the majority of historical
increases in health, wellbeing, and justice have occurred in the last two centuries , largely as a
result of societies adopting or moving toward capitalism. Capitalism is a relevant cause of these
improvements, in the sense that they could not have happened to such a degree if it were not for
capitalism and would not have happened to the same degree under any alternative noncapitalist
approach to structuring society. The argument in support of this premise relies on observed relationships across societies and
centuries between indicators of degree of capitalism, wealth, investments in public goods, and outcomes for health, wellbeing, and
justice, together with econometric analysis in support of the conclusion that the best explanation of these correlations and the
underlying mechanism is that large increases in health, wellbeing, and justice are largely driven by increasing
investments in public goods. The scale of increased wealth necessary to maximize these
investments requires capitalism. Thus, as capitalist societies have become dramatically wealthier
over the past hundred years (and wealthier than societies with alternative systems), this has allowed larger
investments in public goods, which simply has not been possible in a sustained way in societies without the greater
wealth that capitalism makes possible. Important investments in public goods include investments in basic medical
knowledge, in health and nutrition programs, and in the institutional capacity and know-how to regulate society and
capitalism itself. As a result, capitalism is a primary driver of positive outcomes in health and
wellbeing (such as increased life expectancy, lowered child and maternal mortality, adequate
calories per day, minimized infectious disease rates, a lower percentage and number of people
in poverty, and more reported happiness);5 and in justice (such as reduced deaths from war and
homicide; higher rankings in human rights indices; the reduced prevalence of racist, sexist, homophobic
opinions in surveys; and higher literacy rates).6 These quantifiable positive consequences of global
capitalism dramatically outweigh the negative consequences (such as deaths from pollution in the course of
development), with the result that the net benefits from capitalism in terms of health, wellbeing, and
justice have been greater than they would have been under any known noncapitalist approach to
structuring society.7

Premise 2. Economics, ethics, and policy. Although

capitalism has often been ill-regulated and therefore failed to
maximize net benefits for health, wellbeing, and justice, it
can become well-regulated so that it maximizes these societal
goals, by including mechanisms identified by economists and other policy experts that do the following:

 optimally8 regulate negative effects such as pollution and monopoly power, and invest in public
goods such as education, basic healthcare, and fundamental research including biomedical knowledge (more generally,
policies that correct the failures of free markets that economists have long recognized will arise from “externalities” in
the absence of regulation);9
 ensure equity and distributive justice (for example, via wealth redistribution);10
 ensure basic rights, justice, and the rule of law independent of the market (for example, by an independent
judiciary, bill of rights, property rights, and redistribution and other legislation to correct historical injustices due to
colonialism, racism, and correct current and historical distortions that have prevented markets from being fair);11 and
 ensure that there is no alternative way of structuring society that is more efficient or
better promotes the equity, justice, and fairness goals outlined above (by allowing free exchange given the regulations
mentioned).12

To summarize the implication of the first two premises, well-regulated capitalism is essential to best achieving
our ethical goals—which is true even though capitalism has certainly not always been well regulated historically. Society can
still do much better and remove the large deficits in terms of health, wellbeing, and justice that exist under the
current inferior and imperfect versions of capitalism.

Premise 3. Development and the future. If the global spread of capitalism

is allowed to continue, desperate poverty
can be essentially eliminated in our lifetimes. Furthermore, this can be accomplished faster and in a more just
way via well-regulated global capitalism than by any alternatives . If we instead opt for less
capitalism, less growth, and less globalization, then desperate poverty will continue to exist for a significant portion of
the world's population into the further future, and the world will be a worse and less equitable place than it would
have been with more capitalism. For example, in a world with less capitalism, there would be more
overpopulation, food insecurity, air pollution, ill health, injustice, and other problems. In part, this is because
of the factors identified by premise 1, which connect a turn away from capitalism with a turn away from continuing improvements in
health, wellbeing, and justice, especially for the developing world. In addition, fertility
declines are also a
consequence of increased wealth, and the size of the population is a primary determinant of
food demand and other environmental stressors.13 Finally, as discussed at length in the next section of the
essay, capitalism can be naturally combined with optimal environmental regulations .14 Even
bracketing anything like optimal regulation, it remains true that sufficiently wealthy nations reduce
environmental degradation as they become wealthier, whereas developing nations that are nearing
peak degradation will remain stuck at the worst levels of degradation if we stall growth, rather
than allowing them to transition to less and less degradation in the future via capitalism and economic growth.15 In
contrast, well-regulated capitalism is a key part of the best way of coping with these problems, as well as a key part
of dealing with climate change, global food production, and other specific challenges, as argued at length
in the next section. Here it is important to stress that we should favor well-regulated capitalism that includes correct investments in
public goods over other capitalist systems such as the neoliberalism of the recent past that promoted inadequately regulated
capitalism with inadequate concern for externalities, equity, and background distortions and injustices.16

Conclusion. Therefore, we should be in favor of capitalism over noncapitalism , and we should especially
favor well-regulated capitalism, which is the ethically optimal economic system and is essential to any just basic structure for society.

This argument is impressive because, as stated earlier in the essay, it is based on evidence that is so striking that it leads a
bipartisan range of open-minded thinkers and activists to endorse well-regulated capitalism, including many of those who were not
initially attracted to the view because of a reasonable concern for the societal ills with which we began. To better understand why
such a range of thinkers could agree that well-regulated capitalism is best, it may help to clarify some things that are not assumed or
implied by the argument for it, which could be invoked by other bad arguments for capitalism.

One thing the argument above does not assume is that health, wellbeing, or justice are the same thing as wealth, because, in fact,
they are not. Instead, the argument above relies on well-accepted, measurable indicators of health and wellbeing,
such as increased lifespan; decreased early childhood mortality; adequate nutrition; and other
empirically measurable leading indicators of health, wellbeing, and justice.17 Similarly, the argument that
capitalism promotes justice, peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance relies on empirical
metrics for each of these.18
Furthermore, the argument does not assume that because these indicators of health, wellbeing, and justice are highly correlated
with high degrees of capitalism, that therefore capitalism is the direct cause of these good outcomes. Rather, the analyses suggest
instead that something other than capitalism is the direct cause of societal improvements (such as improvements in knowledge and
technology, public infrastructure, and good governance), and that capitalism is simply a necessary condition for
these improvements to happen.19 In other words, the richer a society is, the more it is able to invest in all of these and other
things that are the direct causes of health, wellbeing, and justice. But, to maximize investment in these things societies
need well-regulated capitalism .

As part of these analyses, it

is often stressed that current forms of capitalism around the world are highly
defective and must be reformed in the direction of well-regulated capitalism because they lack investments in public goods, such
as basic knowledge, healthcare, nutrition, other safety nets, and good governance.20 In this way, an argument for a
particular kind of progressive reformism is an essential part of the analyses that lead many to endorse the
more general argument for well-regulated capitalism.
Although these analyses are nuanced, and appropriately so, it remains the case that the things that directly lead to health,
wellbeing, and justice require resources, and the best path toward generating those resources is well-regulated capitalism. And on
the flip side, according to the analyses behind premise 1 described above, an
anti-capitalist system would not
produce the resources that are needed, and would thus be a disaster, especially for the poorest
billion people who are most desperately in need of the resources that capitalism can create and direct, to escape from extreme
poverty.21

Regulated capitalism is key---alternative systems fail to innovate sufficiently.

Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, & Simon Bunel 21. Professor at the Collège de France,
INSEAD, and the London School of Economics and Political Science and was previously Professor
of Economics at Harvard. Senior Researcher at OFCE, the French Economic Observatory at
Sciences Po in Paris, and Research Associate in the Innovation Lab at the Collège de France.
Senior Economist at INSEE, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, and
at the Bank of France. “The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth
of Nations.” Harvard University Press.

Nonetheless, the abolition of capitalism is not the solution. The last century witnessed a large-
scale experiment with an alternative system—a system of central planning in the Soviet Union
and other communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This system failed to offer
individuals the freedom and economic incentives necessary for frontier innovation, and so
these nations were unable to get beyond an intermediate level of development. Henri Weber, a
well-known figure of the French movement of May 1968, was a former Trotskyist leader in the
1960s and 1970s but later became a leader of the French Socialist Party and Socialist member of
the European Parliament. He explained his personal conversion to the free market economy and
social democracy, looking to the Scandinavian experience: “Having witnessed from a front-row
seat the disaster of collectivization of agriculture and firms in the Soviet Union, the Scandinavian
Socialists were the first to break with the dogma of socializing means of production and
managing the economy by a central planning committee. To control and humanize the
economy, it is altogether unnecessary to expropriate management, to nationalize firms, or to
eradicate the market . . . altogether unnecessary to deprive society of the creativity, knowhow,
and dynamism of entrepreneurs. Under certain conditions, entrepreneurial talent can be
mobilized to serve the common good.” A market economy, because it induces creative
destruction, is inherently disruptive. But historically it has proved to be a formidable engine of
prosperity, hoisting our societies to levels of development unimaginable two centuries ago.
Must we therefore resign ourselves to the serious pitfalls and defects of capitalism as the
necessary price to pay to generate prosperity and overcome poverty?

In this book, we have sought to better understand how growth through creative destruction
interacts with competition, inequality, the environment, finance, unemployment, health,
happiness, and industrialization, and how poor countries catch up to rich ones. We have
analyzed to what degree the state, with appropriate control of the executive, can stimulate the
creation of wealth while at the same time tackling the problems mentioned above. We have
seen how, by moving from laissez-faire capitalism, with market forces given free rein, to a form
of capitalism in which the state and civil society play their full role, it is possible to stimulate
social mobility and reduce inequality without discouraging innovation. We have also seen how
appropriate competition policies can curb the decline of growth and how we can redirect
innovation toward green technologies to combat global warming. We have seen that, without
forgoing globalization, a country can improve its competitiveness through innovative
investments and put in place effective safety nets to protect individuals who lose their jobs.
Lastly, we have seen how, with the indispensable support of civil society, it is possible to prevent
yesterday’s innovators, in collusion with public officials, from pulling up the ladder behind
themselves to block the path of tomorrow’s innovators.

The aff is a form of progressive capitalism—government regulations turn their

research—that solves broader inequality and is sustainable
Stiglitz 19 (Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics; 04-19-19; New York Times;
“Progressive Capitalism Is Not an Oxymoron We can save our broken economic system from
itself.”; http://www.businessforum.com/NYT_Stiglitz_04-19-2019.pdf//)ZW

Despite the lowest unemployment rates since the late 1960s, the American economy is failing its citizens . Some 90 percent
have seen their incomes stagnate or decline in the past 30 years. This is not surprising, given that the United States has the highest level of inequality
among the advanced countries and one of the lowest levels of opportunity — with the fortunes of young Americans more dependent on the income
and education of their parents than elsewhere. But things don’t have to be that way. There
is an alternative: progressive
capitalism. Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron; we can indeed channel the power of the
market to serve society. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s regulatory “reforms,” which reduced the ability of government to curb the
excesses of the market, were sold as great energizers of the economy. But just the opposite happened: Growth slowed, and weirder still, this happened
in the innovation capital of the world. The sugar rush produced by President Trump’s largess to corporations in the 2017 tax law didn’t deal with any of
these long-run problems, and is already fading. Growth is expected to be a little under 2 percent next year. This is
where we’ve descended to, but not where we have to stay. A progressive capitalism based on
an understanding of what gives rise to growth and societal wellbeing gives us a way out of this
quagmire and a way up for our living standards . Standards of living began to improve in the late
18th century for two reasons: the development of science (we learned how to learn about nature and used that
knowledge to increase productivity and longevity) and developments in social organization (as a society, we learned how to
work together, through institutions like the rule of law, and democracies with checks and balances). Key to both were systems of assessing and
verifying the truth. The real and longlasting danger of the Trump presidency is the risk it poses to these pillars of our economy and society, its attack on
the very idea of knowledge and expertise, and its hostility to institutions that help us discover and assess the truth. There
is a broader
social compact that allows a society to work and prosper together, and that, too, has been
fraying. America created the first truly middle-class society; now, a middle-class life is
increasingly out of reach for its citizens. America arrived at this sorry state of affairs because we
forgot that the true source of the wealth of a nation is the creativity and innovation of its
people. One can get rich either by adding to the nation’s economic pie or by grabbing a larger share of the pie by exploiting others — abusing, for
instance, market power or informational advantages. We confused the hard work of wealth creation with wealth-grabbing (or, as economists call it,
rent-seeking), and too many of our talented young people followed the siren call of getting rich quickly. Beginning with the Reagan era, economic policy
played a key role in this dystopia: Just as forces of globalization and technological change were contributing to growing inequality, we adopted policies
that worsened societal inequities.Even as economic theories like information economics (dealing with the ever-present
situation where information is imperfect), behavioral economics and game theory arose to explain why markets

on their own are often not efficient, fair, stable or seemingly rational, we relied more on
markets and scaled back social protections. The result is an economy with more exploitation —
whether it’s abusive practices in the financial sector or the technology sector using our own data to take advantage of us at the cost of our privacy.
The weakening of antitrust enforcement, and the failure of regulation to keep up with changes
in our economy and the innovations in creating and leveraging market power, meant that
markets became more concentrated and less competitive . Politics has played a big role in the increase in corporate
rent-seeking and the accompanying inequality. Markets don’t exist in a vacuum; they have to be structured by

rules and regulations, and those rules and regulations must be enforced . Deregulation of the
financial sector allowed bankers to engage in both excessively risky activities and more
exploitive ones. Many economists understood that trade with developing countries would drive down American wages, especially for those
with limited skills, and destroy jobs. We could and should have provided more assistance to affected workers (just as we should provide assistance to
workers who lose their jobs as a result of technological change), but corporate interests opposed it. A weaker labor market conveniently meant lower
labor costs at home to complement the cheap labor businesses employed abroad. We are now in a vicious cycle : Greater economic
inequality is leading, in our moneydriven political system, to more political inequality, with weaker rules and deregulation causing still more economic
inequality. If we don’t change course matters will likely grow worse, as machines (artificial intelligence and robots) replace an increasing fraction of
routine labor, including many of the jobs of the several million Americans making their living by driving. The
prescription follows from
the diagnosis: It begins by recognizing the vital role that the state plays in making markets serve
society. We need regulations that ensure strong competition without abusive exploitation ,
realigning the relationship between corporations and the workers they employ and the customers they are supposed to serve. We must be as resolute
in combating market power as the corporate sector is in increasing it. If we had curbed exploitation in all of its forms and encouraged wealth creation,
we would have had a more dynamic economy with less inequality. We might have curbed the opioid crisis and avoided the 2008 financial crisis. If we
had done more to blunt the power of oligopolies and strengthen the power of workers, and if we had held our banks accountable, the sense of
powerlessness might not be so pervasive and Americans might have greater trust in our institutions. There are many other areas in
which government action is required. Markets on their own won’t provide insurance against some of the most important risks we
face, such as unemployment and disability. They won’t efficiently provide pensions with low administrative costs and insurance against inflation. And
they won’t provide an adequate infrastructure or a decent education for everyone or engage in sufficient basic research. Progressive

capitalism is based on a new social contract between voters and elected officials, between
workers and corporations, between rich and poor, and between those with jobs and those who
are un- or underemployed. Part of this new social contract is an expanded public option for many programs now provided by private
entities or not at all. It was a mistake not to include the public option in Obamacare: It would have enriched choice and enhanced competition, lowering
prices. But one can design public options in other arenas as well, for instance for retirement and mortgages. This new social contract will enable most
Americans to once again have a middle-class life. As an economist, I am always asked: Can we afford to provide this middle-class life for most, let alone
all, Americans? Somehow, we did when we were a much poorer country in the years after World War II. In our politics, in our labor-market
participation, and in our health we are already paying the price for our failures .
The neoliberal fantasy that unfettered
markets will deliver prosperity to everyone should be put to rest. It is as fatally flawed as the notion after the fall
of the Iron Curtain that we were seeing “the end of history” and that we would all soon be liberal democracies with capitalist economies. Most
important, our exploitive capitalism has shaped who we are as individuals and as a society. The rampant dishonesty we’ve seen from Wells Fargo and
Volkswagen or from members of the Sackler family as they promoted drugs they knew were addictive — this is what is to be expected in a society that
lauds the pursuit of profits as leading, to quote Adam Smith, “as if by an invisible hand,” to the well-being of society, with no regard to whether those
profits derive from exploitation or wealth creation.
Leftist ideas are achieved through liberal reforms
AKBAR 20- Amna A. Akbar -Ms. Akbar is a law professor who studies leftist social movements
(“The Left Is Remaking the World”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/opinion/sunday/defund-police-cancel-rent.html)
The uprisings in response to the killing of George Floyd are far different from anything that has come before. Not just because they
may be the largest in our history, or that seven weeks in, people are still in the streets (even if the news media has largely moved
on). But also because, for the last few years, organizers
have been thinking boldly . They have been pushing
demands — from “defund the police” to “cancel rent” to “pass the Green New Deal” — that
would upend the status quo and redistribute power from elites to the working class. And now
ordinary people are, too; social movements have helped spread these demands to a public mobilized
by the pandemic and the protests. These movements are in conversation with one another, cross-endorsing demands
as they expand their grass-roots bases. Cancel the rent campaigns have joined the call to defund the police. This month, racial,
climate and economic justice organizations are hosting a four-day crash course on defunding the police . Each demand
demonstrates a new attitude among leftist social movements. They don’t want to reduce police violence, or
sidestep our environmentally unsustainable global supply chain, or create grace periods for late rent. These are the
responses of reformers and policy elites. Instead, the people making these demands want a new
society. They want a break from prisons and the police, from carbon and rent. They want
counselors in place of cops, housing for all and a jobs guarantee . While many may find this naïve, polls,
participation in protests and growing membership in social movement organizations show these demands are drawing
larger and larger parts of the public toward a fundamental critique of the status quo and a
radical vision for the future. Consider the appeal to defund and dismantle the police,
championed by almost every major social movement organization on the left, from the Black Visions
Collective to Mijente to the Sunrise Movement, and echoed on the streets. Defunding, part of a strategy to
eventually abolish the police, challenges the prevailing logic of police reform: the idea that
police brutality is caused by individual bad apples acting without sufficient oversight and training. This idea
undergirds the familiar panoply of reforms: body cameras, community policing, implicit bias
workshops. If officers are properly equipped and controlled, there will be less violence, its
proponents argue — despite no significant evidence to back that up. Defunding suggests the
problem is not isolated, nor is it a result of a few officers’ attitudes. It challenges the power, the resources and the
enormous scope of the police. Whether they are responding to a mental health emergency or deployed to a protest, their training
and tools are geared toward violence. The demand for defunding suggests, as the police and prison
abolitionist Rachel Herzing often says, that the only way to reduce police violence is to reduce police officers’ opportunities for
contact with the public. The protests have forced us to rethink state-sanctioned violence as our default
response to social problems, to reconsider the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent on prisons and the salaries of
more than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers. The uprisings have also expanded the space for a reckoning
with the failures of liberal reforms and with the possibility of doing things in radically different
ways. Tinkering and training cannot fix our reliance on police officers to deal with routine social problems through violence and
the threat of it. The demand for defunding calls into question the fundamental premise of policing: that it produces safety. It urges
us to take collective responsibility for collective care, repair and redress. It shifts our vantage point on persistent problems: for
example, to guarantee housing for all rather than to continue to arrest and cage this country’s more than 567,000 homeless people.
The call to defund the police is often accompanied by a call to shift resources elsewhere, to education, housing and health care. The
pandemic has put on display the spectacular contradiction such appeals reveal. We have no guaranteed health care, wages, housing
or food; we can’t even provide personal protective equipment. These failures have devastated Black communities in particular. But
then, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, the police show up in high-tech gear and military-style vehicles to arrest, gas and
bludgeon protesters, demonstrating where our tax dollars have gone instead. The demand for defunding shifts power and our
imaginations away from the police and toward a society rooted in collective care for ordinary people. It brings into sharp relief who
we have allowed ourselves to become and offers a vision for who we could be. Taking money away from the police is not the sole
demand. Consider the push to cancel rent. It asks the state to abolish tenants’ obligations to pay their landlords each month. But
rent is the product of a private contract about private property: the foundation of our social, economic and political order. So when
organizers make the demand to cancel rent, they are conjuring up a state whose primary allegiance is to people’s needs instead of
profit. The demand raises the possibility of a world where housing is an entitlement rather than a commodity. It aims to shift power
from landlords to tenants, in the service of visions of housing for all. Or consider the environment. The Green New Deal does not
merely call for less pollution. It requires that we restructure our economy so we can move to clean, renewable energy sources and
net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. To get there, the Green New Deal calls for enormous investments in public transit, universal
health care, free public college tuition and millions of high-wage green jobs. It emphasizes that everyone ought to carry out its
projects, with a central role for working-class people of color. The bill’s vision is so counter to the actual practices of the state, and to
the talking points of the Democratic and Republican Parties, you have to stretch your imagination to understand it. And that is the
point. Organizers often call these demands “non-reformist reforms,” a term coined in the 1960s by the French socialist André Gorz.
Reform on its own is a tired continuation of liberal politics and legalism, expert-driven and elite-centered. Even now, policing experts
are grasping to turn the energy around ‘defund’ toward the same old reforms, and mayors are endorsing superficial budget cuts,
diluting the bold demands. The way to respond is to stay focused on building mass movements of ordinary people who are serious
about restoring and redistributing social wealth, as the Red Nation’s Red Deal puts it, to those who created it: “workers, the poor,
Indigenous peoples, the global South, women, migrants, caretakers of the land, and the land itself.” Here, too, you see the
connections — among Indigenous resistance, environmental justice and more. Leftist movements today see our crises as
intersectional. Police violence, global warming and unaffordable housing are not disconnected, discrete problems; instead, they
emerge from colonialism and capitalism. Organizers recall these histories, and tell stories of freedom struggles. And whatever you
think of their demands, you have to be in awe of how they inaugurate a new political moment, as
the left offers not just a
searing critique, but practical ladders to radical visions. These capacious demands create the
grounds for multiracial mass movements, our only hope for a more just future.

Perm do both---reformism is necessary to actualize the alt

Jon D. Wisman 14, Professor of Economics at American University. 2014, “CAPITALISM AND
INEQUALITY RE-EXAMINED”
https://www.american.edu/cas/economics/research/upload/Wisman-Marx-Update.pdf

Because the struggle is over ideology control, workers can only be expected to use the state for
their own welfare if an alternative to the elite’s ideology can be convincing. Clearly this has
never been fully the case. Had it been, inequality would be far less, as would worker insecurity.
Indeed, if an alternative ideology were sufficiently convincing, capitalism would be evolving
toward a far more humane society.

Blocking the evolution of an effective alternative ideology has been the tendency among critics
of capitalism to blame its core institutions of markets and private property. But if structured in
the interest of the greater population, these institutions can be highly efficient. The root
problem is that because an elite disproportionately controls government, the rules of the game
governing markets and private property bias their workings toward shepherding income,
wealth, and privilege toward an elite. That is, the problem is not with these institutions per se,
but with the politics that structure them. The root problem is inequality.27

The attacks on markets and private property tend to splay blame over the entire status quo. It’s
the corporation and their CEOs, or the bankers and their greedy leaders, or international
trade.28 The root problem of inequality is then presented as only one among multiple problems.
The fact that all are ultimately due to the inequality is unappreciated.29 Little wonder that the
broader population would come to believe that a solution is likely hopeless.

In contemporary rich capitalist societies, no major political parties, that hold promise of winning
elections, represent worker interests in a significant way. And the voices that attempt to
represent the workers fail to gain traction because the positions they espouse appear too
extreme or frightening. They frequently attack capitalism lock, stock, and barrel, advocating the
elimination of private property and markets and replacing them with state ownership and
central planning. Such voices are too easily slammed by the elite’s second ideological trump
card of totalitarianism. Moreover, many workers have net wealth, mostly in their homes,
pension funds, automobiles, and household items which gives them a stake in the status quo
and thus increases the cost of the risk of dramatic social change, the outcome of which would
be unclear.30 Restructuring markets and private property to serve the general interest would
preserve the fundamental institutions of the status quo, while not augmenting the power of
the state.

capitalism.
Karunananthan '19 [Meera; January 2019; PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of
Ottawa, Water Campaigner for the Council of Canadians, Director at the Blue Planet Project
which is part of a global movement to protect water as a resource; "Can the human right to
water disrupt neoliberal water policies in the era of corporate policy-making?" Geoforum, Vol.
98, p. 244-253]
The 2030 WRG is seen to demand a drastic re-organization of water resource management in ways that contradict well-established
human rights norms. In particular, neoliberal reforms required to generate greater and more stable profit from water require
significant re-organization of social relations of production that contradict the human rights aspirations of GWJ and well-established
human rights norms. The
relationship created by human rights mechanisms between the dutybearing state
and the rights-holding population often contradicts the role required of the state to establish of
regimes of capital accumulation in the water sector.
This literature points to the ways in which human rights campaigns might disrupt the role of the neoliberal state and the state-
centered reforms promoted by the 2030 WRG. In the Botswana case, for example, it is not simply that courts are better suited to
address acts of dispossession, but that human rights mechanisms can be deployed to hold states accountable to rights-holder over
corporate stakeholders.

Among other well-established norms and principles, the principle of “participation” requires duty-bearers to ensure that
marginalized communities and communities most impacted by policies and developments are granted every opportunity to
participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives, livelihoods and their ability to enjoy their human rights (de Albuquerque,
2014). This understanding of the principle of participation is in direct contradiction to the decisionmaking models promoted by the
2030 WRG which aim to distance the state, thereby limiting its capacity to ensure public participation in decision-making, and
marginalize the voices of local communities. The right to participate in decisions related to socio-economic rights is deeply rooted in
various international treaties and domestic legal frameworks. In 2011, a South African court deemed a programme by the State of
Western Cape to provided unenclosed toilets to a poor community lacking access to adequate sanitation to be unlawful because the
state had failed to adequately consult the impacted community.

A human rights framework might also serve to redirect efforts to establish market-based strategies aimed at managing water
scarcity to protect economic growth interests. Competing interest of corporations and local communities might co-exist more easily
in regions where water supplies are abundant, but in times of scarcity, human rights obligations hold governments accountable for
implementing measures that safeguard the water needs of vulnerable and marginalized communities (see for example De
Albuquerque, 2013). For instance, in a 2009 ruling the Supreme Court of Chile deemed that the customary rights to water of the
Aimara de Chusmiza Usmaga Indigenous people took precedence over the commercial rights of a bottled water company to the
same water source (Boussard et al., 2014).

Finally, while
it may be useful to rescale some anti-privatization campaigns away from state-
centered or legal strategies towards local resistance and commoning strategies as argued by Bond (2014) and Bakker
(2007), this
research demonstrates that the state remains an important site of struggle for
multinationals seeking to redesign national water policies in order to achieve their privatization,
state redistribution and financialization goals. Whereas struggles against privatization of
services have taken place at subnational levels and have therefore been more easily challenged
through localized resistance strategies, redistribution and financialization strategies take place
at larger scale. In light of this emerging threat GWJ movements cannot ignore the state-centered
processes through which accumulation by dispossession take place . As imperfect as it may be, the human
right to water remains an important channel through which to combat state centered accumulation by dispossession.

Cap is a poor explanation—not viewing it as monolithic is necessary for

changing the structure
Gibson-Graham 06 - pen-name of Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham, feminist
political economists and economic geographers based at the University of Western Sydney,
Australia and the University of Massachusetts Amherst

[J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy, p. xi-xv] #ADAPacket

As we argued in chapter 5 of The End of Capitalism, any contemporary economic politics confronts an existing
object: an economy produced, through particular modes of representation and calculation, as a bounded sphere
"whose internal mechanisms and exchanges separate it from other social processes" (Mitchell 2007).
This economy is not simply an ideological concept susceptible to intellectual debunking, but a materialization
that participates in organizing the practices and processes that surround it, while at the same time being
organized and maintained by them. A project of instituting a different economy must restore this obdurate positivity to its negative
grounding. It must, in Laclau's terms (1990), produce a "dislocation," enabling a recognition that "other economies are possible."
Something outside the given configuration of being must offer itself as an element or ingredient for a
new political project of configuring. For us this dislocating element has been an economic language that
cannot be subsumed to existing ways of thinking economy, and instead signals the ever-present possibility of
remaking economy in alternative terms. The conceptual resources for different languages of economy are abundantly
available. Alongside the hegemonic discourse of economy, many counterdiscourses have arisen from alternative
traditions of economic thought (for example, classical political economy, feminist economics,
economic anthropology, geography, and sociology ) and from workingclass, third-world, and
social and community movements (for example, the feminist, socialist, cooperative, and local sustainability
movements).4 Yet while there exists a substantial understanding of the extent and nature of economic difference, what does not
exist is a way of convening this knowledge to destabilize the received wisdom of capitalist dominance and unleash the creative
forces and subjects of economic experimentation.

Our intervention has been to propose a language of the diverse econof social studies of economy since The End of Capitalism was of
social studies of economy since The End of Capitalism was published. published. to perform different economies.5 The
language
of the diverse economy widens the identity of the economy to include all of those practices
excluded or marginalized by the theory and presumption of capitalist hegemony . The objective is
not to produce a finished and coherent template that maps the economy "as it really is" and presents (to the
converted or suggestible) a ready-made "alternative economy." Rather, our hope is to disarm and dislocate the
naturalized dominance of the capitalist economy and make a space for new economic
becomings—ones that we will need to work to produce. If we can recognize a diverse economy, we can begin to imagine and
create diverse organizations and practices as powerful constituents of an enlivened noncapitalist politics of place. We began
constructing our language by surveying a variety of economic traditions and languages and conceptualizing three differentiated
practices:6 different kinds of transaction and ways of negotiating (in)commensurability; different types of labor and ways of
compensating it; and different forms of economic enterprise and ways of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus. Our
current representation of what we have called the diverse economy is shown in Figure I.I. In this figure, what
is often seen as
the economy, that is, formal markets, wage labor, and capitalist enterprise, is merely one set of cells in a complex
field of economic relations that sustain livelihoods in regions around the world. Realizing that in both rich and poor
countries the bottom two-thirds of the diagram accounts for well over 50 percent of economic activity, we cannot help but
be struck by the discursive violence enacted through familiar references to "capitalist"
economies and societies.
Considering for a moment just the market-oriented enterprises in the right-hand column of Figure I.I, we recognize in the bottom
cell the presence of commodity-producing enterprises of a noncapitalist sort. This should not be surprising— commodities are
just goods and services produced for a market; they can
be produced in a variety of exploitative or
nonexploitative noncapitalist organizations. On the exploitative side, slave modes of producing and appropriating
surplus where workers lack freedom of contract are arguably growing—for example, in the United States prison system and in the
sex and domestic service industries worldwide (Bales 1999). In addition, feudal surplus appropriation via payments of rent goes on in
tenant farming and in many household-based businesses (Kayatekin 2001). But there
are also nonexploitative forms
of surplus appropriation in the noncapitalist cell: consider the large population of self-employed or
independent producers who appropriate and distribute the wealth they produce , and the growing
number of collectives and cooperatives that jointly appropriate their surplus and distribute it in ways decided on by
the collective membership.

Moving up one cell, we are reminded that difference within the category of capitalist enterprise is as important as the differences
between enterprise forms or class processes. Increasingly "alternative" capitalist firms distinguish themselves from their mainstream
capitalist counterparts in that part of their production process, their product, or their appropriated surplus is oriented toward
environmentally friendly or socially responsible activity. State capitalist enterprises employ wage labor and appropriate surplus but
have the potential to produce public goods and distribute surplus funds to public benefit. Nonprofit enterprises similarly employ
wage laborers and appropriate their surplus, but by law they are not allowed to retain or distribute profits. Like other capitalist
enterprises, these different forms of organization are scattered over the economic landscape. In this representation, no system or
unified economy covers the social space and thus necessarily dominates other forms of economy.

Elaborating a vision of the "diverse economy" is one of our strategic moves against the
subordination of local subjects to the discourse of (capitalist economic) globalization . Each of our
action research projects starts with an inventory by community researchers of local economic practices and organizations that
modifies and expands Figure I.I. This process yields a wider field of economic possibility and a revaluation of the local economy in
terms of economic resources (as opposed to economic deficiencies) available for projects of economic invention. Representing
the diverse economy is a deconstructive process that displaces the binary hierarchies of
market/nonmarket and capitalism/noncapitalism , turning singular generalities into multiple particularities, and
yielding a radically heterogeneous economic landscape in preparation for the next phase of the projects—the construction of
"community economies" in place. In the terms of our language politics, this constructive process entails (1) articulation, or making
links among the different activities and enterprises of a diverse economy, and (2) resignification, or convening these
activities/enterprises under the signifier of the "community economy." As a practice of development, constructing a community
economy is an ethical project of acknowledging relationships and making connections, rather than a technical project of activating
generic logics of growth.

Reject their lens of “neoliberalism”—it encourages fake radicalism,

oversimplification, and greater levels of cooptation than positive and pragmatic
politics.
-Ad hoc policies of neoliberalism also originate from Leftist movements for greater autonomy

Clive BARNETT ‘5, Faculty of the Social Sciences at Open University, UK

[“The consolations of ‘neoliberalism’,” Geoforum, Vol. 36, No. 1, January 2005, p. 7-12]
#ADAPacket

The blind-spot in theories of neoliberalism —whether neo-Marxist and Foucauldian—comes with trying to
account for how top-down initiatives ‘take’ in everyday situations . So perhaps the best thing to
do is to stop thinking of “neoliberalism” as a coherent “hegemonic” project altogether. For all
its apparent critical force, the vocabulary of “neoliberalism” and “neoliberalization” in fact provides a double
consolation for leftist academics: it supplies us with plentiful opportunities for unveiling the real workings
of hegemonic ideologies in a characteristic gesture of revelation; and in so doing, it invites us to align our own
professional roles with the activities of various actors “out there”, who are always framed as
engaging in resistance or contestation. The conceptualization of “neoliberalism” as a “hegemonic” project does not need
refining by adding a splash of Foucault. Perhaps we should try to do without the concept of “neoliberalism” altogether, because it
might actually compound rather than aid in the task of figuring out how the world works and how it changes. One reason for this is
that, between an overly economistic derivation of political economy and an overly statist rendition of governmentality, stories
about “neoliberalism” manage to reduce the understanding of social relations to a residual
effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental programmes of rule (see Clarke, 2004a). Stories about
“neoliberalism” pay little attention to the pro-active role of socio-cultural processes in provoking
changes in modes of governance, policy, and regulation. Consider the example of the restructuring of public services such as
health care, education, and criminal justice in the UK over the last two or three decades. This can easily be thought of in terms of a
“hegemonic” project of “neoliberalization”, and certainly one dimension of this process has been a form of anti-statism that has
rhetorically contrasted market provision against the rigidities of the state. But in fact these ongoing changes in the terms of public-
policy debate involve a combination of different factors that add up to a much more dispersed populist reorientation in policy,
politics, and culture. These factors include changing consumer expectations, involving shifts in expectations towards public
entitlements which follow from the generalization of consumerism; the decline of deference, involving shifts in conventions and
hierarchies of taste, trust, access, and expertise; and the refusals of the subordinated, referring to the emergence of anti-paternalist
attitudes found in, for example, women’s health movements or anti-psychiatry movements. They include also the development of
the politics of difference, involving the emergence of discourses of institutional discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, and
disability. This has disrupted the ways in which welfare agencies think about inequality, helping to generate the emergence of
contested inequalities, in which policies aimed at addressing inequalities of class and income develop an ever more expansive
dynamic of expectation that public services should address other kinds of inequality as well (see Clarke, 2004b).

None of these populist tendencies is simply an expression of a singular “hegemonic” project of “neoliberalization”. They are effects
of much longer rhythms of socio-cultural change that emanate from the bottom-up. It seems just as plausible to suppose that what
we have come to recognise as “hegemonic neoliberalism” is a muddled set of ad hoc, opportunistic
accommodations to these unstable dynamics of social change as it is to think of it as the outcome of highly
coherent political-ideological projects. Processes of privatization, market liberalization, and de-regulation
have often followed an ironic pattern in so far as they have been triggered by citizens’
movements arguing from the left of the political spectrum against the rigidities of statist forms of social
policy and welfare provision in the name of greater autonomy , equality, and participation (e.g. Horwitz,
1989). The political re-alignments of the last three or four decades cannot therefore be adequately understood
in terms of a straightforward shift from the left to the right , from values of collectivism to values of
individualism, or as a re-imposition of class power. The emergence and generalization of this populist ethos has much
longer, deeper, and wider roots than those ascribed to “hegemonic neoliberalism”. And it also points towards the extent to which
easily the most widely resonant political rationality in the world today is not right-wing market liberalism at all, but is, rather, the
polyvalent discourse of “democracy” (see Barnett and Low, 2004).

Recent theories of “neoliberalism” have retreated from the appreciation of the long-term
rhythms of socio-cultural change, which Stuart Hall once developed in his influential account of Thatcherism as a variant
of authoritarian populism. Instead, they favour elite-focused analyses of state bureaucracies, policy
networks, and the like. One consequence of the residualization of the social is that theories of
“neoliberalism” have great difficulty accounting for, or indeed even in recognizing, new forms of
“individualized collective-action” (Marchetti, 2003) that have emerged in tandem with the apparent ascendancy
of “neoliberal hegemony”: environmental politics and the politics of sustainability; new forms of
consumer activism oriented by an ethics of assistance and global solidarity; the identity politics of
sexuality related to demands for changes in modes of health care provision, and so on (see Norris,
2002). All of these might be thought of as variants of what we might want to call bottom-up governmentality. This refers to the
notion that non-state and non-corporate actors are also engaged in trying to govern various fields of activity, both by acting on the
conduct and contexts of ordinary everyday life, but also by acting on the conduct of state and corporate actors as well. Rose (1999,
pp. 281–284) hints at the outlines of such an analysis, at the very end of his paradigmatic account of governmentality, but
investigation of this phenomenon is poorly developed at present. Instead,
the trouble-free amalgamation of Foucault’s
ideas into the Marxist narrative of “neoliberalism” sets up a simplistic image of the world divided
between the forces of hegemony and the spirits of subversion (see Sedgwick, 2003, pp. 11–12). And
clinging to this image only makes it all the more difficult to acknowledge the possibility of
positive political action that does not conform to a romanticized picture of rebellion, contestation,
or protest against domination (see Touraine, 2001).

Theories of “neoliberalism” are unable to recognize the emergence of new and innovative forms of individualized collective action
because their critical imagination turns on a simple evaluative opposition between individualism and collectivism, the private and
the public. The radical
academic discourse of “neoliberalism” frames the relationship between
collective action and individualism simplistically as an opposition between the good and the
bad. In confirming a narrow account of liberalism, understood primarily as an economic doctrine of
free markets and individual choice, there is a peculiar convergence between the radical academic left
and the right-wing interpretation of liberal thought exemplified by Hayekian conservatism. By obliterating the
political origins of modern liberalism—understood as answering the problem of how to live freely in societies divided by
interminable conflicts of value, interest, and faith— the
discourse of “neoliberalism” reiterates a longer problem
for radical academic theory of being unable to account for its own normative priorities in a compelling way.
And by denigrating the value of individualism as just an ideological ploy by the right, the
pejorative vocabulary of “neoliberalism” invites us to take solace in an image of collective
decision-making as a practically and normatively unproblematic procedure.

Perm do both --- only that solves --- proposing alternative non-capitalist
economics out of nowhere is of zero value --- reform is possible and desirable.
John BARRY 07, Director of the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research and
Co-Director of the Centre for Sustainability and Environmental Governance at Queen’s
University Belfast

[“Towards a model of green political economy: from ecological modernisation to economic

security,” Int. J. Green Economics, Vol. 1, No. 3/4, 2007 p. 446-464,
http://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1504/IJGE.2007.013071] #ADAPacket

Economic analysis has been one of the weakest and least developed areas of broadly
green/sustainable development thinking. For example, whatever analysis there is within the
green political canon is largely utopian – usually based on an argument for the complete
transformation of modern society and economy as the only way to deal with ecological
catastrophe, an often linked to a critique of the socioeconomic failings of capitalism that
echoed a broadly radical Marxist/socialist or anarchist analysis ; or underdeveloped – due, in
part, to the need to outline and develop other aspects of green political theory. However, this gap within
green thinking has recently been filled by a number of scholars, activists, think tanks, and environmental
NGOs who have outlined various models of green political economy to underpin sustainable
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of
development political aims, principles and objectives.
a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the economic
dimensions of radical views about sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to
encouraging others to think through this aspect of sustainable development in a collaborative manner.
Combined realism and radicalism marks this article, which starts with the point that we
cannot build or seek to create a sustainable economy ab nihlo, but must begin from where
we are, with the structures, institutions, modes of production, laws and regulations that
we already have. Of course, this does not mean simply accepting these as immutable or set
in stone; after all, some of the current institutions, principles and structures underpinning the dominant
economic model are the very causes of unsustainable development. We do need to recognise,
however, that we must work with (and ‘through’ – in the terms of the original German Green
Party’s slogan of ‘marching through the institutions’) these existing structures, as well as change and
reform and in some cases, abandon them as either unnecessary or positively harmful to the creation and
maintenance of a sustainable economy and society. Equally, this article also recognises that an
alternative economy and society must be based in the reality that most people (in the
West) will not democratically vote for a completely different type of society and
economy. That reality must also accept that a ‘green economy’ is one that is recognisable
to most people and that indeed safeguards and guarantees not just their basic needs but
also aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article
accepts that consumption and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay (so long as they do not
transgress any of the critical thresholds of the triple bottom line) and indeed there is little to be
gained by proposing alternative economic systems, which start from a complete rejection
of consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is in part an attempt to correct
the common misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics
requiring an excessive degree of self-denial and a puritanical asceticism (Goodin, 1992, p.18;
Allison, 1991, p.170–178). While rejecting the claim that green political theory calls for the complete
disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it is true that green politics does require the collective reassessment
of such lifestyles, and does require a degree of shared sacrifice. It does not mean, however, that we
There must
necessarily require the complete and across-the-board rejection of materialistic lifestyles.
be room and tolerance in a green economy for people to live ‘ungreen lives’ so long as
they do not ‘harm’ others, threaten long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust
levels of socioeconomic inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part another name
for the acceptance of a broadly ‘liberal’ or ‘post-liberal’ (but certainly not anti-liberal) green
perspective.1
Perm - Need politics to solve climate change

The political demands of climate change require reformist politics—the

alternatives all or nothing attitude guarantees extinction. Perm is the best way
out
Parenti 13 -- professor of sustainable development at the School for International Training,
Graduate Institute, (Christian “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis,” Dissent, Summer 2013,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-radical-approach-to-the-climate-crisis)

Hard Facts

The scientific consensus, expressed in peer-reviewed and professionally vetted and published scientific literature, runs as
follows: For the last 650,000 years atmospheric levels of CO2—the primary heat-trapping gas—have hovered at around 280 parts
per million (ppm). At no point in the preindustrial era did CO2 concentrations go above 300 ppm . By
1959, they had reached 316 ppm and are now over 400 ppm. And the rate of emissions is accelerating.
Since 2000, the world has pumped almost 100 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere —about a
quarter of all CO2 emissions since 1750. At current rates, CO2 levels will double by mid-century.

Climate scientists believe that any increase in average global temperatures beyond 2 degrees
Celsius above preindustrial levels will lead to dangerous climate change, causing large-scale
desertification, crop failure, inundation of coastal cities, mass migration to higher and cooler
ground, widespread extinctions of flora and fauna, proliferating disease, and possible social collapse .
Furthermore, scientists now understand that the earth’s climate system has not evolved in a smooth linear fashion.
Paleoclimatology has uncovered evidence of sudden shifts in the earth’s climate regimes . Ice ages
have stopped and started not in a matter of centuries, but decades. Sea levels (which are actually uneven across the globe)
have risen and fallen more rapidly than was once believed .

Throughout the climate system, there exist dangerous positive-feedback loops and tipping points . A
positive-feedback loop is a dynamic in which effects compound, accelerate, or amplify the original cause. Tipping points in
the climate system reflect the fact that causes can build up while effects lag . Then, when the effects
kick in, they do so all at once, causing the relatively sudden shift from one climate regime to
another.

Thus, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says

rich countries like the United States must cut
emissions 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020—only seven years away—and thereafter
make precipitous cuts to 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. This would require global targets
of 10 percent reductions in emissions per annum , starting now. Those sorts of emissions reductions have
only occurred during economic depressions. Russia’s near total economic collapse in the early 1990s saw a 37
percent decrease in CO2 emissions from 1990 to 1995, under conditions that nobody wants to experience.

The political implications of all this are mind-bending. As daunting as it may sound, it means that it is this
society and these institutions that must cut emissions. That means, in the short-term, realistic
climate politics are reformist politics, even if they are conceived of as part of a longer-term
anti-capitalist project of totally economic re-organization.
Perm – need both

Climate change mitigation and adaptation requires a revamped role of the state
—their total insistence n overthrow of capitalism is a delusion
Parenti 13 -- professor of sustainable development at the School for International Training,
Graduate Institute, (Christian “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis,” Dissent, Summer 2013,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-radical-approach-to-the-climate-crisis)

Climate change is a problem of an entirely different order of magnitude, but these past solutions
to smaller environmental crises offer lessons. Ultimately, solving the climate crisis—like the nineteenth-
century victory over urban squalor and epidemic contagions—will require a re-legitimation of the state’s role in
the economy.
The modern story of local air pollution offers another example of the “rebellion of nature.” As Jim McNeil outlines in Something New
Under The Sun, smog inundations in industrial cities of the United States and Europe used to kill many people. In 1879–1880 smog
killed 3,000 Londoners, and in Glasgow a 1909 inversion—where cold air filled with smoke from burning coal was trapped near the
ground—killed 1,063. As late as 1952, a pattern of cold and still air killed 4,000 people in London, according to McNeil, and even
more according to others. By 1956, the Britons had passed a clean air act that drove coal out of the major cities. In the United States
there was a similar process. In 1953, smog in New York killed between 170 and 260 people, and as late as 1966 a smog inversion
killed 169 New Yorkers. All of this helped generate pressure for the Clean Air Act of 1970.

Today, a similar process is underway in China. Local air quality is so bad that it is forcing changes to Chinese energy policy. A major
World Bank study has estimated that “the combined health and non-health cost of outdoor air and water pollution for China’s
economy comes to around $US 100 billion a year (or about 5.8% of the country’s GDP).” People across China are protesting
pollution. Foreign executives are turning down positions in Beijing because of the toxic atmospheric stew that western visitors have
taken to calling “airpocalypse.” The film director Chen Kaige, who won the Palme d’Or for his 1993 film Farewell My Concubine, told
the world he couldn’t think or make films because of the Chinese capital’s appallingly bad air.

These local pressures are a large part of what is driving Chinese investment in renewable energy. Last year China added more energy
capacity from wind than from the coal sector.

Capitalism vs. Nature?

Some of the first thinkers to note a conflict between capitalism and non-human nature were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They
came to their ecology through examining the local problem of relations between town and country—expressed simultaneously as
urban pollution and rural soil depletion. In exploring this question they relied on the pioneering work of soil chemist Justus von
Liebig. And from this small-scale problem, they developed the idea of capitalism creating a rift in the metabolism of natural
processes.

Here is how Marx explained the dilemma:

Capitalist production collects the population together in great centers, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing
preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it
disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements
consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting
fertility of the soil….All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the
soil.

And as with “soil robbing,” so too concentrations of atmospheric CO2: the natural systems are
out of sync; their elements are being rearranged and redistributed, ending up as garbage and
pollution.
It may well be true that capitalism is incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural
world. But that is not the same question as whether or not capitalism can solve the climate
crisis. Climate mitigation and adaptation are merely an effort to buy time to address the other
larger set of problems that is the whole ecological crisis .

This is both a pessimistic and an optimistic view. Although capitalism has not overcome the
fundamental conflict between its infinite growth potential and the finite parameters of the
planet’s pollution sinks, it has, in the past, addressed specific environmental crises.

Anyone who thinks the existing economic system must be totally transformed before we can
deal with the impending climate crisis is delusional or in willful denial of the very clear findings
of climate science. If the climate system unravels , all bets are off. The many progressive visions born
of the Enlightenment will be swallowed and forgotten by the rising seas or smashed to pieces
by the wrathful storms of climate chaos .
Alternatives to Capitalism Fail
Alts Generally Fail
The alt locks in extinction if they’re right about environmental sustainability---
there isn’t time for a global transition from capitalism and no certainty it ends
emissions.
Polychroniou et al. '20 [CJ; 9/16/20; PhD in Political Science from the University of
Delaware; Noam Chomsky, Professor & Professor of Linguistics emeritus at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political
Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts; "The Political Economy of Saving
the Planet," https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-global-justice/noam-chomsky-robert-
pollin-c-j-polychroniou-political-economy-saving]

There are important elements of truth in such views, but we should also be careful to not push this point too far. Some
commentators have argued that one silver lining outcome of the pandemic was that, because of
the economic lockdown, fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions plunged alongside overall
economic activity during the recession. While this is true, I do not see any positive lessons here with
respect to advancing a viable emissions program that can get us to net zero emissions by 2050.
Rather, the experience demonstrates why a degrowth approach to emissions reduction is
unworkable. Emissions did indeed fall sharply because of the pandemic and the recession. But that is
only because incomes collapsed and unemployment spiked over this same period. This only
reinforces the conclusion that the only effective climate stabilization path is the Green New
Deal, as it is the only one that does not require a drastic contraction (or “degrowth”) of jobs and
incomes to drive down emissions.

A genuinely positive development of the pandemic and recession is that progressive activists around
the world have fought to include Green New Deal investments in their countries’ economic
stimulus programs. It is critical to keep pushing the development and success of these initiatives.

In support of that end, we must seriously consider how to best maximize both the short-term
stimulus benefits and long-term impacts of Green New Deal programs . I know the importance of such
considerations from personal experience working on the green investment components of the 2009 Obama American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, in which $90 billion of the $800 billion total was allocated to clean energy investments in the United States. The
principles underlying these investment components were sound, but the people who worked on the program in its various stages,
including myself, did not adequately calculate the time necessary to execute many of the projects. We knew that it was critical to
identify “shovel-ready” projects—ones that could be quickly implemented on a large scale and provide an immediate economic
boost. But relatively few green investment projects were truly shovel-ready at that time, as the green energy industry was still a
newly emerging enterprise. Therefore, the backlog of significant new projects was thin. It is only moderately less thin today.

This means that people designing Green New Deal stimulus programs must identify the subgroup of green investment projects that
can realistically roll into action at scale within a matter of months. One example that should be applicable in almost every country
would be energy efficiency retrofits of all public and commercial buildings. This would entail improving insulation, sealing window
frames and doors, switching over all lightbulbs to LEDs, and replacing aging heating and air conditioning systems with efficient ones
(preferably heat pumps). These programs could quickly generate large numbers of jobs for secretaries, truck drivers, accountants,
construction workers, and climate engineers. They could also save energy and reduce emissions quickly and relatively cheaply.
Building off of such truly shovel-ready projects, the rest of the clean energy investment program could then accelerate and provide a
strong foundation for economies moving out of recession and onto a sustainable recovery path.

CP: Eco-socialism is becoming a major tenet of the ideological repertoire of green parties in European
countries and elsewhere, which may be the reason for their increasing appeal with voters and especially the youth. Is eco-socialism a
cohesive enough political project to be taken seriously as an alternative for the future?
NC: Insofar as I understand eco-socialism—not in great depth—it overlaps greatly with other left socialist currents. That being said, I
don’t think we’re at a stage where adopting a specific “political project” is very helpful. There
are crucial issues that have to be addressed, right now. Our efforts should be informed by the
kind of future society that we want, and the kind that can be constructed within our existing
society. It’s fine to stake out specific positions about the future in more or less detail, but for now these seem to me at best ways
of sharpening ideas rather that platforms to latch on to.

A good argument can be made that inherent features of capitalism lead inexorably to the ruin of
the environment, and that ending capitalism must be a priority of the environmental
movement. But there’s one fundamental problem with this argument: time scales. Dismantling
capitalism is impossible in the time frame that we have for taking urgent action, which requires
national and international mobilization if severe crisis is to be averted.

Furthermore, the whole discussion around eco-socialism is misleading. The two efforts—averting
environmental disaster, and dismantling capitalism in favor of a freer and more just society—
should and can proceed in parallel. One example is Tony Mazzocchi’s efforts to forge a labor
coalition that would not only challenge owner-management control of the workplace, but also
be at the forefront of the environmental movement while attempting to socialize major sectors
of U.S. industry. There’s no time to waste. The struggle must be, and can be, undertaken on all
fronts.
CP: Bob, in your view, can eco-socialism coexist with the Green New Deal project? And, if not, what type of a politico-ideological
agenda might be needed to generate broad political participation in the struggle to create a green future?

RP: In my view, details

of rhetoric and emphasis aside, eco-socialism and the Green New Deal are
fundamentally the same project. The Green New Deal, as we have discussed the term, offers the
only path to climate stabilization that can also expand good job opportunities and raise living
standards in all regions of the world. It defines an explicit and viable alternative to austerity
economics on a global scale. My coworkers and I have worked on this issue—advancing the Green New Deal as an
alternative to austerity economics—in different country settings over the past few years, including in Spain, Puerto Rico, and Greece.
In my view, the Green New Deal is the only approach to climate stabilization also capable of
reversing rising inequality and defeating global neoliberalism and ascendant neofascism.

Beyond the Green New Deal, I don’t know what exactly “eco-socialism” could mean. Does it
mean the overthrow of all private ownership of productive assets for public ownership? As Noam
suggested, do people seriously think that this could happen within the time frame we have to
stabilize the climate, that is, within less than thirty years? And are we certain that eliminating all
private ownership would be workable or desirable from a social justice standpoint—i.e. from the
standpoint of advancing well-being for the global working class and poor? How do we deal with the fact that most of
the world’s energy assets are already publicly owned? How, more specifically, can we be certain
that a transition to complete public ownership would itself deliver zero net emissions by 2050?
To me, the overarching challenge is trying to understand alternative pathways to most
effectively building truly egalitarian, democratic, and ecologically sustainable societies —putting
all labels aside and being willing, as Marx himself insisted, to employ “ruthless criticism” toward
all that exists, including all past experiences with Communism and Socialism. And, for that matter, being
open to criticizing all authors, including Marx himself. Indeed, my favorite quote from Marx is “I am not a Marxist.”
Alt is impossible – human nature
Rees 14 (William E, PhD, FRSC UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, ecological
economist Professor Emeritus and former director of the University of British Columbia’s School
of Community and Regional Planning, “Avoiding Collapse,”
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/BC%20Office/
2014/06/ccpa-bc_AvoidingCollapse_Rees.pdf)

In theory, opting for this alternative should not be a difficult choice for Homo sapiens . Would
an osten - sibly intelligent, forward-thinking,
morally conscious, compassionate species continue to defend an economic system that wrecks its planetary

home, exacerbates inequality, undermines social cohesion, generates greater net costs than benefits and ultimately threatens to lead to systemic
collapse? Remarkably, the answer so far seems to be “ yes .” There are simply no strong voices for caution among contemporary leaders and
certainly no political constituencies for degrowth. There is no nascent plan for a World Assembly for
Mutual Survival. Humanity’s unique capacities for collective intelligence, rational analysis and planning ahead for the common good play no
major role in the political arena, particularly when they challenge conventional myths, corporate values and monied elites. On present evidence,
there is little possibility that anything like the proposals outlined above will be implemented in time for a smooth
transition to sustainability. Daly was right: “evidentally, things still have to get much worse before we will muster the courage and clarity to try to
make them better.” 61 We are our own worst enemy. People are naturally both short-sighted and optimistic and thus discount the future; we

generally react emotionally/instinctively to things that threaten our social status or

political/economic power; those most vested in the status quo therefore vigorously resist
significant change; corruption and greed (all but sanctioned by contemporary morality) over - shadow the public interest. Mindless
dedication to entrenched beliefs is a particularly powerful blinder to otherwise obvious truths. History shows that the
resultant “Woodenheadedness...plays a remarkably large role in gov - ernment. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed
notions (i.e. ideology) while ignoring any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.” 62
Neuroscientists have long recognized the general phenomenon , but the means by which people become
so deeply committed to particular concepts has only recently been revealed. In the course of individual development,
repeated social, cultural and sensory experiences actually trace a semi-permanent record in the
individual’s synaptic circuitry — cultural norms, beliefs and values can acquire a physical
presence in the brain. Once entrenched, these neural structures alter the individual’s
perception of subsequent experiences. People tend to seek out situations, people and information
that reinforce their neural “presets.” Conversely, “when faced with info rmation that does not
agree with their internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret, or forget that info rmation.”
63

The alt justifies harming everyone if it evenly distributes wealth

Allison 12 - American businessman, director at Moelis & Company, former CEO and president
of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. (John A. Allison IV, “The Financial Crisis and the Free
Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy’s Only Hope”, Published September
2012,
https://learning-oreilly-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/library/view/The+Financial+Crisis+and+the+Fre
e+Market+Cure:+Why+Pure+Capitalism+is+the+World+Economy's+Only+Hope/
9780071806787/ch21.html#ch21)//IB

21 The Deepest Cause Is Philosophical

THE DEEPEST CAUSE OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS IS NOT ECONOMIC policy. The fundamental
cause is philosophical. The financial crisis is a result of the philosophical ideas that have been
taught in the liberal arts departments of the most prestigious universities in America for more
than 50 years.

The fundamental cause of the financial crisis is a combination of altruism and pragmatism.
Altruism does not mean kindness toward others; it literally means “other-ism.” Altruism is
defined as selflessness, that is, believing that everyone else is more important than you are. The
good of the individual is irrelevant. It is only the good of “others” that matters, and this is
interpreted by liberals as being the good of “society.” This assumes that society is a living entity
and that the effect on actual individuals does not matter. In reality, however, there are only
individuals. There is no such entity as society.1

The “common good” (or the “public interest”) is an indefinable concept. There is no such thing
as the public. The public is only a number of individual people. When the common good of a
society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its
members, the good of some people takes precedence over the good of other people, with
those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.2

Altruism should not be confused with benevolence. Altruism means that other people (society
or the tribe) are more important than you are. Altruism is an unquestioning duty to others. It is
not about being nice to people. It is about self-sacrifice.

A classic economic error made by liberals is to assume that good intentions produce good
outcomes. Economic theory unquestionably demonstrates that so-called good intentions often
produce very bad outcomes. This is the “law of unintended consequences” that is so relevant
to policy makers and others who not only fail to achieve their aims, but also cause results that
are directly opposed to their aims—as when central banks and regulators seek to ensure “safe
and sound” banking, but instead make banks and the system more dangerous and precarious.
However, if you are an altruist, moral good is defined by your intentions to help others, not by
the actual outcome. In fact, altruism often serves as an excuse for bad behavior (and bad
intentions).

Where did the idea of “affordable housing” (that is, subprime home finance ) come from?
Everyone has a right to a house. Provided by whom? Everyone has a right to free medical care.
Provided by whom? My right to free medical care is my right to imprison a doctor to make him
provide that care or to force someone else to pay for the doctor. This is exactly the opposite of
the American concept of rights. America’s Founding Fathers believed that each of us has the
right to what we produce and what we create, not to what someone else has created.

Altruism leads to a redistribution from the productive to the non-productive. In fact, it implies
that no one has a right to her own life. Everyone is everyone else’s property. This is a rejection
of the concept of rights.3
In business, altruism is combined with pragmatism. A business cannot survive in a globally competitive economy if it is actually
altruistic. While businesspeople may be altruistic in their individual lives, if they attempt to be seriously altruistic in their business,
they will go out of business. Bill Gates has chosen to personally become an altruist. However, anyone who competes (or does
business) with Microsoft knows that Microsoft is a tough competitor. The company is not altruistic.
The backup philosophy for business is pragmatism. In fact, pragmatism is systematically taught in business schools. Many business
leaders are proud to be called pragmatists. Pragmatists do “what works.” They are “practical.” However, actually being practical
requires that we act on principle. Nothing is less practical than doing what works in the short term. The pragmatic philosophy is
based on the concept that there is no permanent truth—that truth is what works today. The validity of a truth is based on its
consequences this afternoon, not on any fundamental principles. According to pragmatists, nothing can be known with certainty in
advance. Meaning and truth are determined by the short-term practical consequences.

Unfortunately, many things work very effectively in the short run but are extremely
destructive in the long term. Negative-amortization mortgages (pick-a-payment mortgages)
were “successful” for more than 10 years and then did tremendous economic damage.
Subprime lending was “successful” for a number of years and then resulted in a massive
destruction of wealth.
A pragmatist cannot be rational. Rationality requires a long-term perspective. It is a virtue that is based on fundamental truths
consistent with the pursuit of long-term goals. A rational person acts in a way that is consistent with his principles and moves him
toward long-term success and happiness.

A pragmatist cannot have integrity. Integrity is acting in a way that is consistent with one’s principles. If you do not have clearly
defined principles, you cannot act “on principle.” It is not surprising that so many business leaders lack integrity. They are proud to
be pragmatists. Because they are pragmatists, they do not have principles. They do what “works.”

Many commentators have raised the issue of why more business leaders did not see the future economic consequences of their
risky housing investments. However, if your goal in decision making is to do what works (that is, if you are a pragmatist), you will
keep doing what you are doing as long as it works. Pick-a-payment mortgages appeared to be working until the market crashed and
burned. Charlie Prince, the CEO of Citigroup, was famously quoted as implying that he knew Citigroup was taking huge economic
risks but that the company would keep “dancing” as long as the band was playing. Of course, he was fired a few months later, and
Citi subsequently collapsed.4

The combination of altruism and pragmatism leads to the “free lunch” mentality. Despite the huge deficits in social security and
Medicare, in the current presidential election neither candidate has proposed a meaningful solution to these deficits, and if either
did make a meaningful proposal that required some sacrifice, he would not be elected.

The free lunch mentality leads to a lack of personal responsibility, which is ultimately the death of democracies. The Founding
Fathers were very concerned with the potential for the “tyranny of the majority.” They were primarily focused on the protection of
individual rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, property rights, and so on. However, they realized that when 51 percent of
the people can vote a free lunch from 49 percent, fairly soon the party will be over. Because then 60 percent will want a free lunch
from 40 percent. And then, 70 percent will want a free lunch from 30 percent. And, finally, the 30 percent will quit.

A lot of the intensity from the Tea Party movement and conservatives in general is over the issue of whether the United States has
gone over the 51 percent line. Are there so many voters who receive a free lunch from the government that we are headed toward a
statist or totalitarian society?

It is important not to underestimate the power of a moral code. Altruists would far prefer that
everyone be equally poor rather than having everyone be wealthier, but with substantial
differences in wealth. Altruists will support economic policies (such as raising taxes on high-
income households in the middle of a recession) where there is overwhelming evidence that
the policy will result in less economic growth if they believe that the policy will result in a
more even distribution of income. Their view of justice is based on equal outcomes, not equal opportunities.
The fundamental battle for a free society is over ethics and, specifically, personal responsibility.
Socialism Fails

Socialism fails and causes a reversion back to capitalism – empirics

Muravchik 19 (Joshua, distinguished fellow @ World Affairs Institute, adjunct professor @
Institute of World Politics, former fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced International Studies, “Socialism Fails Every Time,” Wall Street
Journal, 4/9/19, https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-fails-every-time-11554851786, ccm)
Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders has become a favorite of young voters by posing as an apostle of daring new ideas.
Socialism, however, is anything but new. It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed
as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.

The term “socialism” was coined by followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), whom Karl Marx would label a “utopian
socialist.” In 1825 Owen founded New Harmony , an Indiana commune, to demonstrate the superiority of what was first
called the “social system.” The same year, Owen explained his experiment to a joint session of Congress attended by Supreme Court
justices, President James Monroe and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Although Owen poured his fortune into it, New
Harmony collapsed in disarray and recrimination within two years.
Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen salvaged the community by implementing what he called “a policy the very reverse” of socialism:
“giving each respectable citizen every facility and encouragement to become (what every adult ought to be) a landed proprietor.”

Undeterred, others
founded some 40 to 50 similar communes during the 19th century, and all
collapsed quickly. New Harmony’s two years proved to be their median lifespan.

Based on the uniformly dismal results, the idea of socialism might have died a quiet death were it not for Marx (1818-83),
who transformed socialism from an experiment—tried, tested and failed—into a prophecy, “the riddle of history solved.” Ironically,
he called his vision “scientific socialism.”

Inspired by the dream of proletarian revolution overthrowing capitalist immiseration, socialist parties sprouted across Europe. Yet
instead of growing poorer, workers in industrialized countries saw improvement in their living standards; and instead of
disappearing, middle classes expanded—all disproving Marx.

It took Vladimir Lenin’s “vanguard” and the horrors of World War I to give socialism new life. In Russia, Lenin pioneered modern
communism, which in the 20th century was imposed on 18 countries and one-third of mankind. Repression
was justified
by socialism’s purported economic benefits, but the actual trade-off entailed economic misery
and the snuffing out of as many as 100 million lives.
Today Communist parties rule six countries. Most follow the lead of China, where the party redefined itself to include entrepreneurs.
A 2012 Wall Street Journal report identified 160 people with an average net worth of more than $1 billion holding high government
or party seats. No Chinese Bernie Sanders rails against them.

“Social democrats” and “democratic socialists” rejected Lenin’s methods. But their goals remained transformational.
As British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, who became prime minister in 1945, explained: “Our policy was not a
reformed capitalism but progress toward a democratic socialism .” Labour sought to bring “main factors in
the economic system”—including banks, mining and energy—under “public ownership and control.” Nationalization worked
so badly, however, that Attlee soon beat a retreat and was voted out in 1951.

In 1981 Socialist François Mitterrand was elected president of France promising a clean
“rupture” with capitalism. The results of his spending and nationalizations were so alarming
that in 1982 Mitterrand reversed course and implemented austerity measures, which he dubbed
“socialist rigor” to save face. “The aim is to bring about a real reconciliation between the left and the economy,” explained Socialist
Party chief Lionel Jospin.

American socialists like Mr. Sanders, while often defending the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás
Maduro, prefer to point
to Scandinavia as a model. But Scandinavian social democrats learned to settle
for dense social safety nets underwritten by remarkably free, capitalist economies. On the World
Bank’s Ease of Doing Business scale, Denmark ranks third of 190 countries, Norway seventh and Sweden 12th.

Still other forms of socialism arose in the Third World. Encouraged by United Nations development experts,
virtually all newly decolonized states adopted “African Socialism,” “Arab Socialism” or other
variants. The result was years of economic stagnation until the successful models of East Asia
began to reverse their thinking.

Successful socialism has been created in only one place on earth, the kibbutzim of Israel. They were
democratic and egalitarian; sharing possessions, meals, even child rearing. But once the Jewish state was securely on
its feet, kibbutzniks chose to switch to private enterprise. Socialism, they learned to their surprise, was
not a happy way to live.

Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried—even where it succeeded. Surely today’s young people
can create their own ideas and make their own mistakes rather than repeat those that darkened the times of their parents,
grandparents and the generations before.

The alt collapses the economy – Britain proves

Cohen & Del Villar 20 (Lee Cohen1 & Clara Del Villar2, 1: fellow of the Danube Institute,
adviser on Europe to the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, founded the
Congressional United Kingdom Caucus; 2: director of senior initiatives at FreedomWorks
Foundation, previously was a senior executive in investment management, private asset
management and capital markets on Wall Street, “Socialism ruined post-war Britain — and
could do the same in the US,” The Hill, 1/25/20, https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/479355-
socialism-ruined-post-war-britain-and-could-do-the-same-in-the-us, ccm)

Churchill’s successor, Labor’s Clement

Attlee, worked to dissolve the empire, nationalize industry and
put in place massive welfare programs. By the time Churchill regained power in 1951, many of
these programs had become entrenched, embedding socialism into the economy even during
successive Conservative governments.

Because of the economic policies of democratic socialists, from the mid-1960s until the late 1970s, Britain
experienced a precipitous decline in global and economic power. State socialism ravaged the
economy as powerful unions crippled [undermined] industry with strikes. Since much of industry
was nationalized and no longer profit-driven, it had to be supported by the government .
Consequently, British industry was significantly outpaced by American, Japanese and European
competitors. The economic situation remained hopeless until Margaret Thatcher revived the
nation through private ownership and free enterprise.
Returning to our 2020 elections, one wonders why the United States, whose economic furnace is firing on all cylinders, would
consider socialist
policies that have always spelled doom for prosperity. These policies would not only
burden those who drive the economy, they also would reduce prospects for the disadvantaged .

Warren’s and Sanders’s ideas come straight from the socialist

playbook that ravaged post-war Britain. Both
senators want to fundamentally re-order a society that is producing jobs and wealth for everyone.
Their fairy
tale rhetoric promises to reward the working class and middle class by penalizing high
earners and corporations in the same way that Britain’s post-war economy did: through massive
taxation and government intervention.

While today’s corporate

earnings trailblazers — large financial services and technology firms — hardly
resemble their post-war counterparts, punishing them through more government intervention,
taxation and oversight would reverse the unprecedented growth of jobs in recent years. Likewise,
Sanders’s and Warren’s intention to empower unions, socialize medicine and impose the
draconian regulations of the Green New Deal harkens back to the ruinous Labour Party policies
that crippled [undermined] post-war Britain.
Sanders and Warren have no realistic way to fund more than a portion of their plans. But that does not seem to matter to many
progressive Democrats. Planned taxes on the financial, energy, pharmaceutical and real estate industries would be unprecedented in
scope. Anyone with an awareness of the global failures of socialism — Venezuela, Greece and 1930s
Spain, for example — should know that the plans of these Democratic frontrunners would collapse an
American economy that is performing for all sectors. We need a more determined way to sound the alarm.

Extinction
Zoë Baird 20, A.B. Phi Beta Kappa and J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Member
of the Aspen Strategy Group, CEO and President of the Markle Foundation, Former Trustee at
the Council on Foreign Relations and Partner in the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, “Equitable
Economic Recovery Is a National Security Imperative”, in Domestic and International (Dis)Order:
A Strategic Response, Ed. Bitounis and King, October 2020, p. 89-90

Broadly shared economic prosperity is a bedrock of America’s economic and political strength—
both domestically and in the international arena. A strong and equitable recovery from the
economic crisis created by COVID-19 would be a powerful testament to the resilience of the
American system and its ability to create prosperity at a time of seismic change and persistent
global crisis. Such a recovery could attack the profound economic inequities that have developed over the past several decades.
Without bold action to help all workers access good jobs as the economy returns, the United States risks
undermining the legitimacy of its institutions and its international standing. The outcome will
be a key determinant of America’s national security for years to come.
An equitable recovery requires a national commitment to help all workers obtain good jobs—particularly the two-thirds of adults
without a bachelor’s degree and people of color who have been most affected by the crisis and were denied opportunity before it.
As the nation engages in a historic debate about how to accelerate economic recovery, ambitious public investment is necessary to
put Americans back to work with dignity and opportunity. We need an intentional effort to make sure that the jobs that come back
are good jobs with decent wages, benefits, and mobility and to empower workers to access these opportunities in a profoundly
changed labor market.

To achieve these goals, American policy makers need to establish job growth strategies that
address urgent public needs through major programs in green energy, infrastructure, and
health. Alongside these job growth strategies, we need to recognize and develop the talents of workers by creating an adult
learning system that meets workers’ needs and develops skills for the digital economy. The national security community must lend
its support to this cause. And as it does so, it can bring home the lessons from the advances made in these areas in other countries,
particularly our European allies, and consider this a realm of international cooperation and international engagement.

Shared Economic Prosperity Is a National Security Asset

A strong economy is essential to America’s security and diplomatic strategy. Economic strength
increases our influence on the global stage, expands markets, and funds a strong and agile
military and national defense. Yet it is not enough for America’s economy to be strong for some
—prosperity must be broadly shared. Widespread belief in the ability of the American economic
system to create economic security and mobility for all—the American Dream— creates
credibility and legitimacy for America’s values, governance, and alliances around the world.

After World War II, the United States grew the middle class to historic size and strength. This
achievement made America the model of the free world—setting the stage for decades of
American political and economic leadership. Domestically, broad participation in the economy is
core to the legitimacy of our democracy and the strength of our political institutions. A belief that the
economic system works for millions is an important part of creating trust in a democratic government’s ability to meet the needs of
the people.

The COVID-19 Crisis Puts Millions of American Workers at Risk

For the last several decades, the American Dream has been on the wane. Opportunity has been increasingly concentrated in the
hands of a small share of workers able to access the knowledge economy. Too many Americans, particularly those without four-year
degrees, experienced stagnant wages, less stability, and fewer opportunities for advancement.

Since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs or income and are struggling to meet their basic needs—including food, housing, and
medical care.1 The crisis has impacted sectors like hospitality, leisure, and retail, which employ a large share of America’s most
economically vulnerable workers, resulting in alarming disparities in unemployment rates along education and racial lines. In August,
the unemployment rate for those with a high school degree or less was more than double the rate for those with a bachelor’s
degree.2 Black and Hispanic Americans are experiencing disproportionately high unemployment, with the gulf widening as the crisis
continues.3

The experience of the Great Recession shows that without intentional effort to drive an inclusive recovery, inequality may get worse:
while workers with a high school education or less experienced the majority of job losses, nearly all new jobs went to workers with
postsecondary education. Inequalities across racial lines also increased as workers of color worked in the hardest-hit sectors and
were slower to recover earnings and income than White workers.4

The Case for an Inclusive Recovery

A recovery that promotes broad economic participation, renewed opportunity, and equity will
strengthen American moral and political authority around the world. It will send a strong
message about the strength and resilience of democratic government and the American
people’s ability to adapt to a changing global economic landscape . An inclusive recovery will reaffirm
American leadership as core to the success of our most critical international alliances, which are rooted in the notion of shared
destiny and interdependence. For example, NATO, which has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and a force of global stability
for decades, has suffered from American disengagement in recent years. A
strong American recovery—coupled with a
renewed openness to international collaboration— is core to NATO’s ability to solve shared geopolitical and
security challenges. A renewed partnership with our European allies from a position of economic
strength will enable us to address global crises such as climate change, global pandemics, and
refugees. Together, the United States and Europe can pursue a commitment to investing in workers for shared economic
competitiveness, innovation, and long-term prosperity.

The U.S. has unique advantages that give it the tools to emerge from the crisis with
tremendous economic strength— including an entrepreneurial spirit and the technological and scientific infrastructure
to lead global efforts in developing industries like green energy and biosciences that will shape the international economy for
decades to come.
Alternatives are worse, they have tried and failed—violence starvation and
misery have followed
James 18- President of The Heritage Foundation, leader in government, academia and the
conservative movement. (Kay C James, “Socialism vs. Capitalism: One Clear Winner,” The
Heritage foundation,
https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/socialism-vs-capitalism-one-
clear-winner)//mcu
There's a reason that Amazon gives plenty of space for customer reviews on its site: People naturally want to make sure a product is
good before they buy it. Well, if that's the case when it comes to books, stereos, refrigerators and thousands of other items,
shouldn't it also apply to something as important as your form of government? I can't help but think about that whenever I read
about some poll indicating that a large number of Americans prefer socialism to capitalism. To me, it begs the
question: Do they really know the "product" they're touting, or have they been fooled by some vapid slogans? Take Venezuela.
I'm curious, for example, how many of the pro-socialism crowd are familiar with what's happened to
that oil-rich nation over the last two decades. Looking at it today - plagued by empty store shelves,
chronic hyperinflation, widespread looting, and severe shortages of food and medicine - you'd never
know that before 1999, it was one of the wealthiest countries in South America. When The
Heritage Foundation published its first edition of the Index of Economic Freedom in 1995,
Venezuela scored two points above the worldwide average. So what happened? According to The Atlantic:
"The experiment with '21st-century socialism' as introduced by the late President Hugo Chavez,
a self-described champion of the poor who vowed to distribute the country's wealth among the
masses, and instead steered the nation toward the catastrophe the world is witnessing under
his handpicked successor (Nicolas) Maduro, has been a cruel failure." That's putting it mildly. And
the track record elsewhere isn't much better. From Albania and Angola to Vietnam and Yemen, socialism has
produced little but violence, starvation and misery. Some defenders point to Norway and other
Scandinavian countries that enjoy a degree of prosperity well above the ones already
mentioned. But as columnist David Harsanyi points out, you can hardly call countries that are
"operating generous welfare states programs propped up by underlying vibrant capitalism"
poster children for socialism. The fact remains that wherever unalloyed socialism has been tried, the
result has been disastrous for the citizens it's inflicted on. Take any economy run by an all-
powerful state, and it's only a question of when, not if, it winds up being run completely into the
ground. Take another example much closer to home: Cuba. The vibrant, modern island nation that existed
prior to 1959 stands in stark contrast to the Cuba of 2018, a brutally repressive regime where
struggling workers who don't even earn a living wage can be thrown in jail for saying something
that offends the ruling elite. Contrast that with the experience of those who live in capitalist
societies, where rights are protected, life spans are longer, and people enjoy a higher standard
of living. The Index of Economic Freedom, which has graded every country in the world annually for nearly 25 years,
bears this out. Again and again, it finds per capita incomes are much higher in nations that are more
economically free. Economies rated "free" or "mostly free" in the latest edition enjoy incomes
more than double the average levels in other countries, and more than five times higher than
the incomes of people living in "repressed" economies such as Venezuela and Cuba. The evidence is
hard to refute. Consider what Bono, humanitarian and rock singer, says he's learned in the course of spearheading numerous anti-
poverty initiatives over the years: "As a person who's spent nearly 30 years fighting to get people out of poverty, it was somewhat
humbling to realize that commerce played a bigger job than development. I'd say that's my biggest transformation in 10 years:
understanding the power of commerce to make or break lives." By "power of commerce," of course, he means capitalism. But
should we be surprised that it has socialism beat when it comes to generating human health and wealth? When people are free to
make their own decisions and follow their dreams, it's only natural that their everyday life is better than that experienced by people
under the thumb of a dominating, all-controlling state. If you doubt that, remember the many people who have risked their lives and
even died trying to escape Cuba. They flee to America. It's never the other way around. That's
not to say life in a
capitalist society is some sort of utopia. People everywhere have problems. But even if you can't be
guaranteed a perfect life, ask yourself: Who should make the decisions in your life? You, or the government?

Socialism has no effective system to direct resources where they are needed or
care for what is available
Perry 95 - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the
University of Michigan’s Flint campus, where he teaches graduate classes in economics and
finance. (Mark J. Perry, “Why Socialism Failed,” FEE, 5/31/1995, https://fee.org/articles/why-
socialism-failed/)//mcu

Profits and Losses

Socialism also collapsed because of its failure to operate under a competitive, profit-and-loss
system of accounting. A profit system is an effective monitoring mechanism which continually
evaluates the economic performance of every business enterprise. The firms that are the most
efficient and most successful at serving the public interest are rewarded with profits. Firms that
operate inefficiently and fail to serve the public interest are penalized with losses. Under central
planning, there is no profit-and-loss system of accounting to accurately measure the success or failure of various programs.
By rewarding success and penalizing failure, the profit system provides a strong disciplinary
mechanism which continually redirects resources away from weak, failing, and inefficient firms
toward those firms which are the most efficient and successful at serving the public. A competitive
profit system ensures a constant re-optimization of resources and moves the economy toward greater levels of efficiency. Unsuccessful firms cannot
escape the strong discipline of the marketplace under a profit/loss system. Competition forces companies to serve the public interest or suffer the
consequences. Under central planning, there is no profit-and-loss system of accounting to accurately measure the success or failure of various
programs. Without profits, there is no way to discipline firms that fail to serve the public interest and no way to reward firms that do. There is no
efficient way to determine which programs should be expanded and which ones should be contracted or terminated. Without competition,
centrally planned economies do not have an effective incentive structure to coordinate
economic activity. Without incentives, the results are a spiraling cycle of poverty and misery.
Instead of continually reallocating resources towards greater efficiency, socialism falls into a vortex of inefficiency and

failure. Private Property Rights A third fatal defect of socialism is its blatant disregard for the role of private
property rights in creating incentives that foster economic growth and development. The failure of socialism around the world is a “tragedy of
commons” on a global scale. If everyone owns an asset, people act as if no one owns it. And when no one

owns it, no one really takes care of it. The “tragedy of the commons” refers to the British
experience of the Sixteenth century when certain grazing lands were communally owned by
villages and were made available for public use. The land was quickly overgrazed and eventually
became worthless as villagers exploited the communally owned resource. When assets are
publicly owned, there are no incentives in place to encourage wise stewardship. While private
property creates incentives for conservation and the responsible use of property, public
property encourages irresponsibility and waste. If everyone owns an asset, people act as if no one owns it. And when no one
owns it, no one really takes care of it. Public ownership encourages neglect and mismanagement. Since socialism, by

definition, is a system marked by the “common ownership of the means of production,” the failure of socialism is a “tragedy of

the commons” on a national scale. Much of the economic stagnation of socialism can be traced
to the failure to establish and promote private property rights. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto remarked,
you can travel in rural communities around the world and you will hear dogs barking because even dogs understand property rights. It is only statist
governments that have failed to understand property rights. Socialist
countries are just now starting to recognize the
importance of private property as they privatize assets and property in Eastern Europe.

Socialism fails—economic systems wihtout incentives lead to stagnation and

work against human behavior
Perry 95 - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the
University of Michigan’s Flint campus, where he teaches graduate classes in economics and
finance. (Mark J. Perry, “Why Socialism Failed,” FEE, 5/31/1995, https://fee.org/articles/why-
socialism-failed/)//mcu

Socialism is the Big Lie of the Twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and
security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that
everyone was equal in his or her misery. In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter
initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show early signs of success. But any
accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning emerge. It is
the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious, seductive appeal.
In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery. Socialism
Ignores Incentives A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty
principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it is a flawed theory.
Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human
behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical
defect: it is a system that ignores incentives. Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal
role or are ignored totally. In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance.
Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an
efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is
based on the theory that incentives matter! Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal
role or are ignored totally. A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where
property is owned by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct
economic activity. By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with
human nature and is therefore doomed to fail. Socialism is based on the theory that incentives
don’t matter!

Socialism fails— natural resources can’t overcome incentive-based

inefficiencies
Perry 95 - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the
University of Michigan’s Flint campus, where he teaches graduate classes in economics and
finance. (Mark J. Perry, “Why Socialism Failed,” FEE, 5/31/1995, https://fee.org/articles/why-
socialism-failed/)//mcu

Incentives Matter Without the incentives of market prices, profit-and-loss accounting, and
well-defined property rights, socialist economies stagnate and wither. The economic atrophy
that occurs under socialism is a direct consequence of its neglect of economic incentives. No
bounty of natural resources can ever compensate a country for its lack of an efficient system
of incentives. Russia, for example, is one of the world’s wealthiest countries in terms of natural
resources; it has some of the world’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, diamonds, and gold. Its
valuable farmland, lakes, rivers, and streams stretch across a land area that encompasses 11
time zones. Yet Russia remains poor. Natural resources are helpful, but the ultimate resources
of any country are the unlimited resources of its people–human resources. Socialism fails
because it kills and destroys the human spirit. By their failure to foster, promote, and nurture
the potential of their people through incentive-enhancing institutions, centrally planned
economies deprive the human spirit of full development. Socialism fails because it kills and
destroys the human spirit — just ask the people leaving Cuba in homemade rafts and boats. As
the former centrally planned economies move toward free markets, capitalism, and democracy,
they look to the United States for guidance and support during the transition. With an
unparalleled 250-year tradition of open markets and limited government, the United States is
uniquely qualified to be the guiding light in the worldwide transition to freedom and liberty. We
have an obligation to continue to provide a framework of free markets and democracy for the
global transition to freedom. Our responsibility to the rest of the world is to continue to fight
the seductiveness of statism around the world and here at home. The seductive nature of
statism continues to tempt and lure us into the Barmecidal illusion that the government can
create wealth. The temptress of socialism is constantly luring us with the offer: “give up a little
of your freedom and I will give you a little more security.” As the experience of this century has
demonstrated, the bargain is tempting but never pays off. We end up losing both our freedom
and our security. Programs like socialized medicine, welfare, Social Security, and minimum wage
laws will continue to entice us because on the surface they appear to be expedient and
beneficial. Those programs, like all socialist programs, will fail in the long run regardless of initial
appearances. These programs are part of the Big Lie of socialism because they ignore the
important role of incentives. By providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift,
hard work, and efficiency, capitalism creates wealth. Socialism will remain a constant
temptation. We must be vigilant in our fight against socialism not only around the globe but also
here in the United States. The failure of socialism inspired a worldwide renaissance of freedom
and liberty. For the first time in the history of the world, the day is coming very soon when a
majority of the people in the world will live in free societies or societies rapidly moving toward
freedom. Capitalism will play a major role in the global revival of liberty and prosperity because
it nurtures the human spirit, inspires human creativity, and promotes the spirit of enterprise. By
providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift, hard work, and efficiency,
capitalism creates wealth. The main difference between capitalism and socialism is this:
Capitalism works.

Their model is flawed—they compare perfect socialism to imperfect capitalism

creating the illusion their alt works
Perry 95 - a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the
University of Michigan’s Flint campus, where he teaches graduate classes in economics and
finance. (Mark J. Perry, “Why Socialism Failed,” FEE, 5/31/1995, https://fee.org/articles/why-
socialism-failed/)//mcu
"Pure" Socialism
In a radio debate several months ago with a Marxist professor from the University of Minnesota, I pointed out the obvious failures of
socialism around the world in Cuba, Eastern Europe, and China. At the time of our debate, Haitian refugees were risking their lives
trying to get to Florida in homemade boats. Why was it, I asked him, that people were fleeing Haiti and traveling almost 500 miles by
ocean to get to the “evil capitalist empire” when they were only 50 miles from the “workers’ paradise” of Cuba? If perfection really
were an available option, the choice of economic and political systems would be irrelevant. The Marxist admitted that many
“socialist” countries around the world were failing. However, according to him, the reason for failure is not that socialism is
deficient, but that the socialist economies are not practicing “pure” socialism. The perfect version of socialism would work; it is just
the imperfect socialism that doesn’t work. Marxists like to compare a theoretically perfect version of
socialism with practical, imperfect capitalism which allows them to claim that socialism is
superior to capitalism. If perfection really were an available option, the choice of economic and
political systems would be irrelevant. In a world with perfect beings and infinite abundance, any
economic or political system–socialism, capitalism, fascism, or communism–would work perfectly. However, the
choice of economic and political institutions is crucial in an imperfect universe with imperfect beings and limited resources. In a
world of scarcity, it is essential for an economic system to be based on a clear incentive
structure to promote economic efficiency. The real choice we face is between imperfect
capitalism and imperfect socialism. Given that choice, the evidence of history overwhelmingly
favors capitalism as the greatest wealth-producing economic system available. The strength of
capitalism can be attributed to an incentive structure based upon the three Ps: (1) prices determined by market forces, (2) a profit-
and-loss system of accounting and (3) private property rights. The failure of socialism can be traced to its neglect of these three
incentive-enhancing components. Prices The
price system in a market economy guides economic activity so
flawlessly that most people don’t appreciate its importance. Market prices transmit information
about relative scarcity and then efficiently coordinate economic activity. The economic content
of prices provides incentives that promote economic efficiency. For example , when the OPEC cartel
restricted the supply of oil in the 1970s, oil prices rose dramatically . The higher prices for oil and
gasoline transmitted valuable information to both buyers and sellers. Consumers received a strong, clear message
about the scarcity of oil by the higher prices at the pump and were forced to change their behavior
dramatically. People reacted to the scarcity by driving less, carpooling more, taking public
transportation, and buying smaller cars. Producers reacted to the higher price by increasing their
efforts at exploration for more oil. In addition, higher oil prices gave producers an incentive to
explore and develop alternative fuel and energy sources. From our experience with price controls on
gasoline, we get an insight into what happens under socialism where every price is controlled. The information transmitted by higher
oil prices provided the appropriate incentive structure to both buyers and sellers. Buyers increased their effort to conserve a now
more precious resource and sellers increased their effort to find more of this now scarcer resource.The only alternative to a market
price is a controlled or fixed price which always transmits misleading information about relative scarcity. Inappropriate behavior
results from a controlled price because false information has been transmitted by an artificial, non-market price. Look at what
happened during the 1970s when U.S. gas prices were controlled. Long lines developed at
service stations all over the country because the price for gasoline was kept artificially low by
government fiat. The full impact of scarcity was not accurately conveyed . As Milton Friedman pointed out
at the time, we could have eliminated the lines at the pump in one day by allowing the price to rise to clear the market. From our
experience with price controls on gasoline and the long lines at the pump and general inconvenience, we get an insight into what
happens under socialism where every price in the economy is controlled . The collapse of socialism is due in part to
the chaos and inefficiency that result from artificial prices. The information content of a controlled price is
always distorted. This, in turn, distorts the incentives mechanism of prices under socialism. Administered prices are
always either too high or too low, which then creates constant shortages and surpluses. Market
prices are the only way to transmit information that will create the incentives to ensure
economic efficiency.
Extension – Resistance Fails

The alt fails – Occupy and Bernie prove that attempts to transform the system
lack political support
Conor Lynch, 6/12/19, [Conor Lynch is a journalist in New York City. His work has appeared in
Salon, The Huffington Post, and Alternet.], The New Republic, "The left's failure to envision a
world without capitalism," https://newrepublic.com/article/154186/bernie-sanders-democratic-
socialist-failure-envision-world-without-capitalism, mm
There is a common saying on the left, usually attributed to the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, that “it is easier to imagine the end of
the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” The late writer Mark Fisher once described this as “capitalist realism,” or the
not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is
“widespread sense that
now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it .” This sense has prevailed since the collapse of
communism three decades ago, which led to a triumphalism throughout the capitalist world right up until the 2008 financial crisis
and ensuing global recession, which triggered different anti-capitalist movements. But in the ten years since then, a true political and
economic alternative has yet to materialize. Though many now believe that capitalism should end, this doesn’t
make it any more likely—not even if Senator Bernie Sanders becomes president. The Vermont senator made that clear with
a speech on Wednesday whose very title proves the limits of his revolution: “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat
Oligarchy.” He did not denounce capitalism itself, but “unfettered capitalism” specifically, and even used “socialism” as a sort of
epithet. “Let us never forget the unbelievable hypocrisy of Wall Street, the high priests of unfettered capitalism,” he said. “In 2008,
after their greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression—with millions of
Americans losing their jobs, losing their homes, losing their life savings—Wall Street’s religious adherence to unfettered capitalism
suddenly came to an end. Overnight, Wall Street became big government socialists and begged for the largest federal bailout in
American history.” Sanders’ hesitance to go any further may come as a disappointment to many on the far left today, but it’s not
surprising given recent history. One of the first major signs of a socialist resurgence was the outbreak of Occupy Wall Street back
in 2011. Though decentralized and leaderless, it was perhaps the
biggest anti-capitalist movement since “the end
of history” was declared 20 years earlier. While the movement spread globally and the “occupations” lasted for
months, it didn’t produce any coherent vision of what was to replace capitalism. At the time, Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Žižek commented that the Occupy movement recalled Herman Melville’s famous short story about the law clerk Bartleby:
“The message of Occupy Wall Street is ‘I would prefer not to play the existing [capitalist] game.’... Beyond this they don’t have an
answer.” A few years after Occupy, Thomas Piketty published his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which became one of the
best-selling academic works of all time and prompted an international debate about inequality. Though centrist and right-wing critics
labeled Piketty a “modern Marx,” the French economist was hardly calling for an end to capitalism or promoting some grand theory
of capital. With an impressive slew of data, Piketty confirmed what those on the left had long known: that extreme inequality and
the concentration of wealth is a natural outcome of capitalism. Unlike Marx, however, Piketty didn’t even attempt to imagine a
radical alternative to the system of capitalism. (His prescription was ultimately a global wealth tax, which manages to be both
underwhelming and unrealistic.) A year after Capital was published in English, Sanders launched his 2016 presidential run, which
became another important display of the growing anti-capitalist mood that had spread since the financial crisis.
Sanders openly identified as a “democratic socialist”—a radical gesture in itself—and provided an alternative to the “progressive
neoliberalism” that had come to dominate the Democratic Party since the nineties. (I borrow this term from Nancy Fraser to
describe an alliance between emancipatory movements such as feminism and anti-racism with “neoliberal forces aiming to
financialize the capitalist economy,” who, according to Fraser, use the “charisma of their progressive allies to spread a veneer of
emancipation over their own regressive project of massive upward redistribution.”) Though Sanders reintroduced class politics to
the debate and inspired a generation of young people to embrace the socialist label, he was ultimately offering an
upgraded version of New Deal liberalism rather than a true socialist alternative to capitalism. The fact that
his most “radical” policy—public universal healthcare—has been the status quo in European countries like the United Kingdom since
the mid-twentieth century was telling enough. As many commentators noted at the time, Sanders was less a democratic socialist in
the tradition of Eugene Debs than he was a social democrat in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. Sanders is now embracing that
comparison. His speech on Wednesday was an effective love letter to FDR (with no mention of Debs). He called for the Democratic
Party to take up the “unfinished business of the New Deal,” and proposed a twenty-first-century version of the FDR’s “economic bill
of rights.” Though the senator continues to call himself a democratic socialist, his vague definition of socialism is still closer to the
social democracy that FDR ushered in. According to Sanders, democratic socialism is the belief that “economic rights are human
rights,” which means the right to a living wage, quality healthcare, education, affordable housing, and a secure retirement; it means
“requiring and achieving political and economic freedom in every community in this country,” he said. These are all worthy and
important goals, but only right-wing critics would honestly call this socialism. In the three years since Sanders lost his primary bid,
more and more Americans share his view, loosely speaking. According to a survey released by Axios just this week, four in ten
respondents would prefer to live in a socialist country over a capitalist one, and 55 percent of women between 18 and 54 reject
capitalism. That would seem to work in Sanders’s favor, but the size of the primary field has not. He does not have a sole
establishment candidate to contrast himself with, and moreover, many of his competitors have embraced much of his agenda—
albeit without the confrontational class-politics that defined his first campaign. Sanders is still the only candidate who
is remotely anti-capitalist, and the only candidate who calls himself a socialist. But his policies aren’t quite as unique as
they were in 2016. Though no doubt “radical” in the American setting, Sanders’ economic agenda would be considered center-left in
the rest of the developed world, and in practical terms there’s not much separating him from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has
insisted that she is “capitalist to [her] bones.” There’s a degree of nostalgia for mid-twentieth century social democracy among
today’s leading leftists, who long for the days when income taxes were high, unions were strong, and reformist policies found a
middle ground between the extremes of “socialism” and “capitalism.” Commonly referred to as the “golden age” of capitalism, the
postwar era saw a reduction in inequality, growth in wages and living standards, and increased social mobility. This was all made
possible—in part—by the policies implemented by New Dealers in America and Social Democrats in Western Europe. There is a real
problem with trying to emulate the social democratic policies of the twentieth century today, however, and it’s
not clear
whether the middle-of-the-road approach is still viable in the twenty-first century. We live in a far more
globalized world than we did 75 years ago . Capital is more flexible and mobile than ever before
and the rapid economic growth experienced during the postwar era is unlikely to be repeated, which makes national welfare states
harder to sustain. In Capital, Piketty provided ample evidence that the trends during the mid-twentieth century were historically
anomalous, and that today’s extreme inequality is a return to the norm. “A concentration of circumstances (wartime destruction,
progressive tax policies made possible by the shocks of 1914-1945, and exceptional growth during the three decades following the
end of World War II),” he wrote, “created a historically unprecedented situation which lasted for nearly a century. All signs are,
however, that it is about to end.” He added, “Broadly speaking, it was the wars of the twentieth century that wiped away the past to
create the illusion that capitalism had been structurally transformed.” Social democratic policies were originally designed to “save
capitalism from itself.” Like Marx, John Maynard Keynes recognized the inherent instability of capitalism, but unlike the German
revolutionary, he believed the system’s contradictions could be limited and its tensions mediated through state intervention—in
other words, that the system was reformable. When Keynes was alive, it was still possible to imagine the end of capitalism (indeed,
it was impossible not to), and the British economist devoted his life’s work to preserving the system. Today, even if you aren’t
“capitalist to your bones” and believe that capitalism is “irredeemable ,” as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
does, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the end of capitalism (or at least a viable alternative replacing it). It’s even
difficult to imagine a return to the capitalism of the mid-twentieth century. Sanders is an anti-capitalist at heart—otherwise he
wouldn’t call himself a socialist—but we continue to live in an age where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism (and with climate change and other ecological disasters threatening humanity, it doesn’t take H. G. Wells to imagine the
end of the world these days). The question for today’s left seems to be whether the ultimate goal is to reform or to replace
capitalism—and if the latter is indeed the goal, then what will a post-capitalist world actually look like? If Sanders wants to set
himself apart from a candidate like Warren, he can start by giving these questions serious thought, and go beyond a simple critique
of what he calls “unfettered capitalism.”

The alt fails – no mass support for a revolution – capitalist power structures
short-circuit attempts to sabotage the system
Byung-Chul Han, 10/23/15, [Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han teaches
philosophy and cultural studies at Berlin's University of the Arts (UdK). His recent books include
The Expulsion of the Other, published in English by Polity in 2018. ], openDemocracy, "Why
revolution is no longer possible," mm
A year ago, I responded to Antonio Negri’s presentation at the Berliner Schaubühne, where two critiques of capitalism collided.
Negri had enthused about global resistance to “Empire,” the neoliberal system of domination. He presented himself as a Communist
revolutionary and referred to me as a skeptical academic. Zealously, he invoked the “Multitude” — the networked mass of protest
and revolution that he clearly trusted to bring the Empire to a fall. The standpoint of the Communist revolutionary struck me as
overly naïve and removed from reality. Accordingly, I tried to say why revolution is no longer possible today. Why is
the neoliberal system of domination so stable? Why is there so little resistance to it? Why does the resistance that does occur so
quickly come to naught? Why, despite the ever-expanding divide between rich and poor, is revolution no longer possible? To explain
this state of affairs, we need a precise understanding of how power and domination function today. Anyone wishing to
install a new system of rule must eliminate resistance. The same holds for the neoliberal order.
Implementing a new system of dominion requires an instance of power that posits; often, this entails the use of
force. However, power that posits a system is not identical to power that stabilizes a system internally. As is well known, Margaret
Thatcher, the standard bearer of neoliberalism, treated unions as “internal enemies” and combated them violently. For all that,
using force to establish the neoliberal agenda does not amount to system-preserving power. System-preserving power is
not repressive, but seductive. In disciplinary and industrial society, system-preserving power was
repressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners. Such violent exploitation of others’
labor entailed acts of protest and resistance. There, it was possible for a revolution to topple the
standing relations of production. In that system of repression, both the oppressors and the oppressed were visible.
There was a concrete opponent — a visible enemy —and one could offer resistance. The neoliberal system of
domination has a wholly different structure. Now, system-preserving power no longer works through
repression, but through seduction — that is, it leads us astray. It is no longer visible, as was the case under the regime of
discipline. Now, there is no longer a concrete opponent, no enemy suppressing freedom that one might resist. Neoliberalism
turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting
worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an
internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves,
not society, as the problem. The subjugated subject is not even aware of its subjugation Any disciplinary power that expends effort
to force human beings into a straitjacket of commandments and prohibitions proves inefficient. It is significantly more efficient to
ensure that people subordinate themselves to domination on their own. The efficacy defining the system today stems from the fact
that, instead of operating through prohibition and privation, it aims to please and fulfill. Instead of making people compliant, it
endeavors to make them dependent. This logic of neoliberal efficiency also holds for surveillance . In the 1980s,
to cite one example, there were vehement protests against the German national census. Even schoolchildren took to the streets.
From today’s perspective, the information requested therein— profession, education levels, and distance from the workplace —
seem almost laughable. At the time, people believed that they were facing the state as an instance of domination wresting data
from citizens against their will. That time is long past. Today,
people expose themselves willingly . Precisely this
sense of freedom is what makes protest impossible . In contrast to the days of the census, hardly anyone protests
against surveillance. Free self-disclosure and self-exposure follow the same logic of efficiency as free self-exploitation. What is there
to protest against? Oneself? Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has formulated the paradox of the present situation: “Protect me from
what I want.” It is important to distinguish between power that posits and power that preserves. Today, power
that
maintains the system assumes a “smart” and friendly guise. In so doing, it makes itself invisible
and unassailable. The subjugated subject does not even recognize that it has been subjugated. The subject thinks she is free.
This mode of domination neutralizes resistance quite effectively. Domination that represses and attacks freedom is
not stable. The neoliberal regime proves stable by immunizing itself against all resistance , because
it makes use of freedom instead of repressing it. Suppressing freedom quickly provokes resistance; exploiting
freedom does not. After the Asian financial crisis, South Korea stood paralyzed and shocked. The IMF intervened and extended
credit. In return, the government had to assert its neoliberal agenda by force. This was repressive, positing power — the kind that
often proves violent and differs from system-preserving power, which manages to pass itself off as freedom. According to Naomi
Klein, the state of social shock following catastrophes such as the financial crisis in South Korea — or the current crisis in Greece —
offers the chance to radically reprogram society by force. Today, there is hardly any resistance in South Korea. Quite the opposite: a
vast consensus prevails — as well as depression and burnout. South Korea now has the world’s highest suicide rate. People enact
violence on themselves instead of seeking to change society. Aggression directed outward, which would entail revolution, has
yielded to aggression directed inward, against oneself. Today, no collaborative, networked multitude
exists that
might rise up in a global mass of protest and revolution. Instead, the prevailing mode of production is based on
lonesome and isolated self-entrepreneurs, who are also estranged from themselves. Companies used to compete with each other.
Within each enterprise, however, solidarity could occur. Today, everyone is competing against everyone else — and within the same
enterprise, too. Even though such competition heightens productivity by leaps and bounds, it destroys solidarity and communal
spirit. No revolutionary mass can arise from exhausted, depressive, and isolated individuals.
ALT fails--- Even the best resistance can’t collapse it wholesale
Igor Guardiancich 17, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public
Management of the University of Southern Denmark, 3/3/2017, “Absorb, Coopt and Recast:
Global Neoliberalism’s Resilience through Local Translation”,
http://www.euvisions.eu/neoliberalisms-resilience-translation/

One powerful message permeating the book, and which gives a forceful explanation to Colin Crouch’s punchy title is that: “ rather
than a mass-produced, slightly shrunk, and off-the-rack ideological suit, neoliberalism is a
bespoke outfit made from a dynamic fabric that absorbs local color ” (5). Even under a full-out
attack against some of its basic assumptions, such as the one unleashed in the immediate wake
of the global financial crisis, neoliberalism proved resilient beyond its many architects’ wildest
dreams. Its capacity to absorb, coopt and recast selected ideas of oppositional social forces has
been the most valuable asset guaranteeing its survival. Again, the comparison of the responses to the crisis in
Spain and Romania show such adaptability in full.¶ The socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
tried to salvage the social-democratic legacies

of the Spanish economy by engineering a Keynesian rescue package. Only later, when the
disaster of the cajas became apparent and the emergency intensified, did conservative PM
Mariano Rajoy embrace more deregulation in the labour market (inspired by the Hartz IV reform) and extensive cuts
in the public sector under the strong external pressure of the European Central Bank and of international financial markets. ¶ In
Romania, local policymakers further radicalized in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers’ crisis,
thereby outbidding the IMF on austerity and structural reforms. Instead of shielding lower-
income groups, the opposite strategy of upward redistribution was chosen . By heroically withstanding
the external attempts at moderation, the Romanian economy retained an unenviable mix of libertarian achievements (flat-tax rates),
experimental neoliberalism (privatized pensions) and mainstream neoliberal orthodoxy (sound finance, labour market deregulation,
social policy targeting, privatization of all public companies). Pure laissez-faire ideas such as the replacement of the welfare state by
a voluntary, private, Christian charity system were not unheard of.¶ Hence, through an insightful analysis of the ideational
underpinnings of its local interpretations, this book shows us that, despite the challenges, neoliberalism is alive
and kicking. Ban guides us through half a century of policymaking in Spain and Romania, and embeds his analysis within the
related nuances of contemporary liberal economic thought. The research is a valuable addition to a growing literature on the origin
of current ideational frames and comfortably sits alongside contemporary classics, such as Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a
Dangerous Idea.

Critique without programmatic planning and political involvement fails and

turns the alt – hundreds of years of failed protests prove our argument
Berman 20 [Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia
University, “Crises Only Sometimes Lead to Change. Here’s Why.”, July 4 th,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/04/coronavirus-crisis-turning-point-change/]

Answering these questions requires distinguishing between crises and transformation . It is

easy to assume that crises trigger the collapse of an existing order and its replacement by a
new one. But this view is fundamentally flawed , most obviously because it does not fit the
historical record. Crises are fairly common; fundamental transformations are rare .

As Leon Trotsky, one of history’s great revolutionaries, wrote in 1932: The “ mere existence of
privations is not enough to cause an insurrection ; if it were, the masses would be always in
revolt.” Instead, he argued, “it is necessary that the bankruptcy of the social regime, being
conclusively revealed, should make these privations intolerable.” And only at that point, he
maintained, could “new conditions and new ideas … open the prospect of a revolutionary way
out.”

Crises are fairly common; fundamental transformations are rare.

Trotsky, like all revolutionaries, understood that some crises lead to lasting transformation
while others do not . And history provides lessons for those who believe or hope that this crisis
will be one of those that does.

The first is that during periods of rapid change and uncertainty it is easier to be directed by
events than to direct them —and it is easier to generate discontent against an old order than
consensus for a new one . Concretely, this means that the key determinants of whether crises
and discontent trigger transformation are political : In particular, planning and power are
necessary . Without agreed-on plans for what sort of new order should replace the old one ,
opposition movements easily collapse into infighting , and discontent often peters out . And if
such plans are not championed by a political force with the power to implement them, good
ideas can remain footnotes to history, and the status quo can stumble on .

Take 1848, when uprisings fueled by massive discontent against existing monarchical
dictatorships exploded across Europe and other parts of the globe. As the historian Eric
Hobsbawm observed, few revolutions in history “spread more rapidly and widely , running like
a brushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans.” Indeed, within months, dictatorships
that seemed completely secure crumbled under the onslaught of massive popular
mobilizations.

Without agreed-on plans for what sort of new order should replace the old one, opposition
movements easily collapse into infighting, and discontent often peters out.

But almost as soon as dictatorships began collapsing, divisions among the discontented came
to the fore . Middle-class liberals wanted political and economic liberalization but opposed
mass enfranchisement and anything smacking of socialism, while workers and others on the
left demanded full democratization and structural economic reforms. Meanwhile, freed from
the shackles of dictatorship, various ethnic groups demanded control over their fates and
territories but were often unwilling to recognize the rights of other groups to do the same .

marked
once the old order began collapsing, the lack of agreed-on
In short,
plans for what should replace it led revolutionary groups to begin
fighting among themselves, enabling supporters of the old order to
buy some off and crush the rest . Quickly, dictatorships returned to virtually every
place from which they had disappeared. Historians, accordingly, often refer to 1848 as “the
turning point at which history failed to turn.”

Between 1918 and 1939, another such pattern unfolded in Europe . However, the expectation
that crisis would inevitably bring transformation everywhere was naive—and leftists’ hopes
for revolutionary change on their terms were quashed once again . In some countries, interwar
crises did not lead history to turn. In others, they did—but in dramatically different directions
depending on which politicians and parties had the plans and power to make this happen.

World War I killed millions of people, ended an era of growth and globalization, and brought a
flu pandemic, massive unemployment, and hyperinflation in its wake. Before countries could
recuperate, the Great Depression hit, causing an explosion of dissatisfaction with capitalism and
the status quo more generally.

In most countries, however, the left was unable to unify around a plan in response to the
Depression. Communists wanted to use the crisis to bury capitalism and democracy. Traditional
socialists, influenced by Marxism, viewed capitalism as impossible to fundamentally reform and
so did nothing. Only social democrats believed the crisis provided the perfect opportunity to
transform the relationship between governments, economies, and societies.

In France, not only the left but also the right was unable to unite around transformative plans in
response to the Great Depression and the more general dissatisfaction pervading French
society. The result was continued political drift and polarization and a country left weak and
vulnerable to Nazi assault.

In a few places, such as the United States and Sweden, leftist parties did champion a social
democratic Depression-fighting strategy, and progressive economic and political
transformations occurred. In other countries, the left’s infighting and inaction facilitated the
ability of fascists to exploit the Depression , and reactionary economic and political
transformations occurred instead.

The clearest and most consequential example of this was Germany . During the Depression,
Communists increased their attacks on the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest left party
and the bulwark of German democracy, and joined with the Nazis in strikes, uprisings, and
political maneuvers designed to hasten the Weimar Republic’s demise.
The SPD, meanwhile, despite the clamoring of its supporters and the rest of German society for
an activist response to the catastrophe befalling them, remained largely on the sidelines. Its
leaders rejected plans put forward by social democratic reformers for a Keynesian-type
response to the Depression, which called for government spending and other programs to
actively fight the economic downturn in general and unemployment in particular.

Stymied by Marxists, who insisted any reform of capitalism was pointless, the party’s leadership
believed, as its main economic theorist Rudolf Hilferding put it, that an “offensive economic
policy” would be ineffective because the ultimate arbiter of developments was the “logic of
capitalism.” The frustrated union leader Fritz Tarnow summed up the dilemmas of the SPD’s
stance in the following manner:

Are we standing at the sickbed of capitalism not only as doctors who want to heal the
patient but also as prospective heirs who can’t wait for the end and would gladly help
the process along with a little poison? … We are damned, I think, to be doctors who
seriously want to cure, and yet we have to maintain the feeling that we are heirs who
wish to receive the entire legacy of the capitalist system today rather than tomorrow.
This double role, doctor and heir, is a damned difficult task.

Although there are many reasons for fascism’s success in Germany and other parts of Europe,
the Nazis’ ability to take advantage of a crisis, and the left’s inability to do so, was critical .

The Nazis, on the other hand, had no time for healing the dying old order. They recognized the
opportunity the crisis presented: a chance to inherit power. Adolf Hitler responded vigorously to
the Depression, attacking the SPD and advocates of liberal democracy more generally for their
passivity and inability to respond to widespread suffering.

In the 1928 elections, before the Depression hit, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
received only 2.6 percent of the vote. Four years later, in the campaign leading up to crucial
elections in July 1932, the Nazi Party ran on an economic platform that promised to “solve the
problem of unemployment,” conquer the Depression, and restructure the economy to serve
“the people.” The elections made the Nazis the largest party in Germany. Within six months,
they were burying the Weimar Republic. Although there are many reasons for fascism’s success
in Germany and other parts of Europe, the Nazis’ ability to take advantage of a crisis, and the
left’s inability to do so, was critical.

In contrast to 1918, after 1945 a progressive transformation occurred across Western Europe.
The tragedy of the interwar years and the Great Depression led to a unified belief on both sides
of the Atlantic that a new order capable of ensuring economic prosperity and social stability was
necessary for democracy to succeed in Europe. This consensus led to extraordinary efforts to
change political and economic dynamics at the international, regional, and domestic levels.

Friedman understood what the left didn’t grasp: Neoliberal ideas were implemented because
they became embedded within the economics profession, think tanks, and international
organizations.

The United States helped construct new international security and economic orders to promote
the peace and prosperity necessary for postwar democratic success. At the regional level, a
process of European integration began, spurred by a recognition that democratic success
required overcoming challenges too great to be achieved by the uncoordinated efforts of
national governments acting alone. And at the domestic level, European center-left and center-
right parties agreed on the need for a new order and social contract between governments and
citizens, with the former committed to promoting growth and protecting the latter from
capitalism’s downsides. Both the mainstream left and right recognized that such a
transformation would be necessary to avoid the economic crises and political extremism that
doomed democracy during the interwar period.

This order worked remarkably well until the 1970s, when a combination of rising inflation,
increasing unemployment, and slow growth created an opportunity for another transformation.
During the proceeding decades, neoliberals in groups like the Mont Pelerin Society and the
Chicago and Virginia schools of economics and political economy had been thinking about
what they saw as the downsides of the postwar order and what should replace it . When
problems and discontent emerged in the 1970s, they were therefore prepared with a
narrative of the old order’s failures as well as plans for a new one .

As Milton Friedman, an intellectual godfather of this movement, put it, “Only a crisis—actual or
perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on
the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to
existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes
politically inevitable.” Friedman understood what the left didn’t grasp: Neoliberal ideas were
implemented because they became embedded within the economics profession, think tanks,
and international organizations as well as championed by powerful political leaders like
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

When the crisis hit in 2008, the left lacked a coherent narrative of the existing order’s
problems as well as convincing plans for transforming it .

Interestingly, when this neoliberal order experienced its own crisis in 2008, no significant
economic shift occurred, despite an initial widespread assumption, even by conservatives like
France’s then-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that the era of neoliberalism was over. That problems
and discontent did not lead to the end of an old order and the rise of a new one was at least
partially a consequence, as the Economist put it, of the left’s inability “to capitalise on an
economic crisis tailor-made for critics of the free market .”

A key reason why the left was unable to do this, and therefore play the same transformative
role its neoliberal predecessors had played a few decades earlier, was that it was divided and
unprepared . During the previous decades, some parts of the left—epitomized by Tony Blair’s
British Labour Party, Gerhard Schröder’s SPD, and Bill Clinton’s Democrats—had become
content with a technocratic management of capitalism, forgetting that it was constantly evolving
and inherently dangerous. Others on the left stopped focusing on capitalism entirely during the
late 20th and early 21st centuries, turning their attention instead to intellectual currents such as
postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, and postcolonialism, which were cultural rather
than economic in nature. Thus, when the crisis hit in 2008, the left lacked a coherent narrative
of the existing order’s problems as well as convincing plans for transforming it.

The same problem—an inability to capitalize on a crisis—could arise once again today unless
those committed to creating a more just and egalitarian society heed the lessons of the past.

Figuring out whether the United States and wealthy European countries are on the cusp of a
fundamental transformation of their economies, governments, societies, and the relationship
among them requires looking beyond the severity of the current crisis and the unprecedented
measures already taken in response to it. As history makes clear, crises create opportunities for
change—but not all opportunities are seized.

Whether today’s left seizes the current opportunity and this period becomes a historical
turning point in a progressive direction—rather than another instance of a decaying old order
being patched up and hobbling on —will depend on whether those favoring transformation
are able to avoid the mistakes made by their predecessors in 1848, the 1930s, and 2008 and are
able to unite around convincing critiques of the old order and plans for a new one as well as
turn widespread discontent into a powerful coalition in favor of transformative change.

Whether today’s left seizes the current opportunity and this period becomes a historical turning
point in a progressive direction will depend on whether those favoring transformation are able
to unite around convincing critiques of the old order and plans for a new one.

For progressives, there are potentially positive signs. There are more useful transformative ideas
lying around than there were a decade ago. In the realm of economic thinking, for example,
scholars like Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Mariana Mazzucato, Adam
Tooze, Anne Case, and Angus Deaton have risen to the forefront of debate over the past years,
highlighting problems with the existing economic order as well as developing potential
responses to them.

At the same time, progressive think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute and the Washington
Center for Equitable Growth have been developing and disseminating plans for long-term
structural change. Even before the remarkable outpouring of protests spurred by the killing of
George Floyd, there had been a surge in mass mobilization over the past decade. As the political
scientist Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues have documented, the period from 2010 to 2019
“saw more mass movements demanding radical change around the world” than in any period
since World War II.

History teaches us that new ideas and the mobilization of discontent are necessary but not
sufficient to trigger transformation . Ideas need to be forged into coherent critiques of the old
order as well as attractive, viable plans for a new one . And advocates of change need to unite
around such plans to help protect against infighting , the dissipation of discontent , and
pushback from defenders of the status quo . Only then can they gain and maintain the power
necessary to implement plans for long-term change .
Wholesale rejection of rationality and mastery is incoherent---debate, the
ballot, and their argument all rely on those behaviors, and rejecting them
ignores their strategic utility for emancipatory politics
Ruti 17 (Mari, Professor of critical theory and of sexual diversity studies at the University of
Toronto, “The Ethiscs of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects,” Page 155-156)

While I am at it, let me put some pressure on the wholesale rejection of reason that tends to
characterize posthumanist theory, including some versions of queer theory. I am of course
aware of the historical violences of Enlightenment reason, including its connection to Western
imperialism’s “civilizing” mission. Furthermore, as a feminist, I am familiar with arguments
regarding reason’s masculinist biases. And as a psychoanalytic thinker, I recognize the brutality
of models of life that overvalue our rational agency at the expense of the body, the passions, the
unconscious, and so on. I therefore agree that rationality is not the defining ingredient of human
beings. Yet a blanket condemnation of reason seems both reductive and hypocritical—
reductive because it discounts the considerable role that rationality plays in human life and
hypocritical because it denies that, as academics, we rely on our rational capacities to stage
our arguments.

Is it not the case that my ability to speak to you on these pages—and your capacity to process
my arguments, critique them, and (hopefully) use them in your own thinking—is predicated on
a degree of reason? Indeed, do we not spend much of our careers trying to reason with, and
sometimes even outreason, each other? Furthermore, are we not usually trying (at least
partially) to “master” something, such as the movement of thought, the organization of ideas,
or the craft of writing? This may be idiosyncratic, but I spend a lot of time telling the graduate
students whose dissertations I supervise that the organization of their ideas could use some
work and that the syntax of their sentences (sometimes) sucks. And I spend even more time
rereading my manuscripts in an attempt to make sure that my syntax does not (always) entirely
suck. Perhaps this is why I find the unqualified rejection of both reason and mastery that has
become habitual in contemporary progressive theory so absurd. True, none of us is fully
rational. Nor can we ever fully master anything . Yes, my syntax still sometimes slips. But
fortunately it is considerably better than it was when I was nineteen and barely spoke English.
Have I tried to master the damn language? Hell yes.

It is in part for such banal reasons that I appreciate Amy Allen’s observation that there is an
enormous difference between categorically rejecting reason on the one hand and trying to
reenvision it along less tyrannical lines on the other. Referring to Huffer’s interpretation of
Foucault in particular, Allen maintains that it is erroneous to assume—as Huffer does—that
Foucault’s celebration of madness amounts to an attempt to do away with reason. According to
Allen, Foucault undertook “neither a rejection of reason nor a romanticized idealization of
unreason” (2013, 22). In other words, Foucault was not interested in destroying reason but
rather in historicizing it by examining how it had been constructed at various points in time, how
it had been shaped by disciplinary power, and how it had been deployed to meet specific
socioeconomic and political goals.
There is no question that this project entailed a critique of the failings of Enlightenment reason.
There is also no doubt that reason, for Foucault, was always impure (biased) in being socially
contingent. This is why it must be diligently questioned, why we are right to ask how our
dominant models of rationality have been implicated in various relations of power. But this does
not mean that reason is altogether useless. For example, Allen observes that even though
feminists have been at the forefront of criticizing the abuses of reason, they have frequently
also found it enabling because it has allowed them to mount their intricate critiques of social
hegemonies, including, somewhat ironically, reason’s patriarchal underpinnings. Furthermore,
it is precisely the impurity of reason that opens up the possibility of alternative— less
repressive, less objectionable—forms of reason. As Foucault explains, “If critical thought itself
has a function . . . it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of
rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and, at the same time, to its
intrinsic dangers” (2000, 358). Reason, for Foucault, was always contaminated by its context but
this, far from negating its value, was what made the reconceptualization of reason feasible in
the first place.

Academia isn’t a singular monolith – believing it is makes negative aspects

inevitable and makes it impossible to engage in targeted, ethical resistance.
Heath et al. 13 – (2013, Mary Heath, Associate Professor at Flinders Law School, and Peter
Burdon, Associate Professor at the Adelaide Law School, “Academic Resistance to the Neoliberal
University,” 23 Legal Educ. Rev. 379, SSRN)
A Desirable Change and Ethical Resistance

Academics who identify as activists need a clear conception of who or what they are resisting .
Put simply, not everything that occurs in universities is neoliberal or undesirable . The
university consists of a complex assemblage of structures, values and practices . Like other
social institutions, it has evolved over time with reference to the projects of individuals,
political groups and other social institutions. Sometimes these forces are place-specific and
sometimes they are national (or even international). Projects can also have lives of their own
and are reproduced in unpredictable ways as they come together to constitute a particular
institution.86 As the outcomes of our efforts and those of others become apparent, further
critique and action may be called for, and our strategies and analyses of resistance may require
revision.

we suggest that academic activists conceptualise the university as a set of practices

For these reasons,

that are historically contingent and capable of transformation . This perspective is important,
first, because it brings into view the potential for alternatives to the prevailing state of legal
education . In contrast, the construction of neoliberalism as ‘necessary and inevitable’ forestalls
the possibility of resistance 87 and makes critique appear foolish.88 Second, it means that
resistance can also be nuanced and directed at particular structures , practices or values
rather than at the university or the tertiary system as a whole . This has obvious implications
for the prospects of successful action and for our sense of agency as activists .

The flip side to this conceptualisation is also important. Desirable changes in legal education as
well as in Australian universities have taken place during the last few decades as neoliberal
practices have also become more and more embedded. As academic activists we need to
choose forms of resistance that we believe are ethical and meaningful . We are in no way
obliged to oppose every form of change . We might instead choose virtuous compliance with
changes we think are desirable,89 or support goals we believe are desirable while opposing
forms of implementation we believe are not.

Infrapolitics are a disaster – they assume a transformative potential from small

moments of resistance that simply does not exist.
Reed 16 (Adolph, Jr., Prof. of Political Science @ Penn., “Splendors and Miseries of the
Antiracist “Left”” Nonsite, http://nonsite.org/editorial/splendors-and-miseries-of-the-antiracist-
left-2)

More than a
decade and a half ago I criticized similar formulations of a notion of “infrapolitics,” understood as the
domain of pre-political acts of everyday “resistance” undertaken by subordinated populations,
which was then all the rage in cultural studies programs. Proponents of the political importance of
this domain insisted that, because insurgent movements emerge within such cultures of
quotidian resistance, a) examining them could help in understanding the processes through
which insurgencies develop and/or b) they therefore ought to be considered as expressions of an
insurgent politics themselves. Several factors accounted for the popularity of that version of the
argument, which mainly had to do to with the political economy of academic life, including the
self-propulsion of academic trendiness and the atrophy of the left outside the academy, which
encouraged flights into fantasy for the sake of optimism. The infrapolitics idea also resonated with
the substantive but generally unadmitted group essentialism underlying claims that esoteric,
insider knowledge is necessary to decipher the “hidden transcripts” of the subordinate
populations; put more bluntly, elevating infrapolitics to the domain on which the oppressed express
their politics most authentically increased its interpreters’ academic capital.8
I discussed those factors in my critique. However, the point in that argument most pertinent for evaluating Birch and Heideman’s
confidence that the contradictions they acknowledge in BLM should be seen only as growing pains of a “new movement” is the
following:

At best, those
who romanticize “everyday resistance” or “cultural politics” read the evolution of political
movements teleologically; they presume that those conditions necessarily, or even typically,
lead to political action. They don’t. Not any more than the presence of carbon and water
necessarily leads to the evolution of Homo sapiens. Think about it: infrapolitics is ubiquitous,
developed political movements are rare.9
Communalism Fails

Communalism focus risks replicating protofascist impulses and parochial

hostility
Matthias Zick Varul 13. Sociology at the University of Exeter. “Towards a consumerist critique
of capitalism: A socialist defence of consumer culture,” Ephemera, Vol. 13, No. 2, May 2013, p.
293-315.

Note: Marcos is the former military leader and spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation

Any alternative to capitalism, if it is not to relapse into a frozen world in which everybody has
their place, must find a functional equivalent to this alterity-facilitating function of consumer
culture. Currently even the most radically left anti-consumerist movements seem to have a
tendency to create island communities (e.g. Chatzidakis et al., 2012: 502) where, on the one hand, alternative
forms of sociality can be lived among politically like-minded people, but where, on the other hand, a
valuation of a sense of place translates into a borderline parochial hostility to mobility. Migration within a
globalized world is viewed with suspicion. Subcommandante Marcos [whom Naomi Klein adopts as hero of the anti-
consumerist movement, a universal avatar for he 'is simply us, we are the leader we've been looking for' (2002: 3)] speaks of
the 'nightmare of migration', which 'continues to grow' (2001: 565). He is rightfully concerned about
xenophobia and the marginalization of large groups of migrants, but anyone who knows a bit about migration
will be troubled by the blanket notion of a 'nightmare'. More significantly, he adds the 'loss of
cultural identity', a genuine conservative concern, as equally devastating as hunger and police
repression. Such an attitude condemns people to their ethnic identities - while commoditization
offers an exit:

Anti-modernists often bemoan that ethnic identities today are no longer 'authentic', but are
rather superficial, made up of musical tropes and clothing styles and exaggerated gestures that aren't
passed down from generation to generation, but chosen through the influence of the mass media . But it is
precisely this commodification that allows people to choose elements from various cultural traditions and blend them into a new
identity. The same process also makes it easier for people to stray from their 'original' identities - or
in conventional terms, to integrate into society. Uncommodified ethnic identities are closed to outsider, and raise
the costs for straying outside their walls: one either is or isn't. (Sznaider, 2000: 307)

Nobody knows that better than Subcommandante Marcos himself - hence his engagement in the literary market8.

Like all societies, capitalist societies are built on expectations and mutual obligations. But while traditional networks of obligations
are first of all entangling webs of very specific normative expectations that can be negotiated only to a very limited extent, the
capitalist economy entails an anonymization and generalization of obligation that allows us to be tied up in a very liberal way (Varul,
2010: 63). The need to earn money can be understood as generalized debt - we owe our existence to society and we need to pay off
that debt somehow. According to David Graeber (2011) the ideology of indebtedness of the individual to society has a long history
and is at the heart of the fact of domination. But while most other societies have clear ideas about what is owed by whom, in a
liberal capitalist society we are neither told how to repay our debt (i.e. what to work at) nor to whom (i.e. who to work for - except,
of course, taxes to government). We are not liberated from serfdom as such, but we are no longer tied to a particular master and
our position of serfdom within society as a whole is sweetened by the reverse indebtedness of society to us - in the form of money
as generalized bills of exchange. In a preview of his Debt: The first 5000 years, Graeber explores the moral implications that arise:

The true ethos of our individualistic society may be found in this equation: We all owe an infinite debt to humanity, nature, or the
cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else can possibly tell us how to pay it. All systems of established authority -
religion, morality, politics, economics, the criminal-justice system - are revealed to be fraudulent ways of calculating what cannot be
calculated. Freedom, then, is the ability to decide for ourselves how to pay our debts. (Graeber, 2010)

Of course, Graeber (2011) sees any indebtedness as tied up in recurring relations of violence and violation, in which even the
balanced reciprocities of the neighbourly exchanges of favours, gestures and attention (be it among the British people or the Tiv
people) become a sinister symptom of repression. But in making his case, he cannot avoid emphasizing the universality of such
relations of mutual indebtedness. Assuming we cannot do away with indebtedness as such (i.e. here I disagree
with Graeber), the individualistic ethos looks like the best we can get . Whether such an individualistic ethos is
something worth having at all is an open question. The authors of The coming insurrection (The Invisible Committee, 2007),
for instance, start off by condemning this ethos (which they correctly identify as rooted in consumer
culture), and in response conjure up a world of militant communes - a trajectory denounced by
Johannes Thumfart (2010) as a leftist remake of antimodernist/protofascist ideologies such as those of Carl
Schmitt. If, however, the individualistic ethos is to be preserved (which, obviously, is what I am arguing for
here), change needs to be pursued through associationalist (as opposed to communalist)
approaches to political action in which the individual is emphatically affirmed both in means and
ends. And as part of this the new possibilities of collective action available in a consumer- capitalist society need to be recognized,
as does the role of consumer choice in a socialist society as proposed by Douglas Jay:

Socialists have been inclined to depreciate the value of free consumers' choice for no better reason
than that it has been used as a hypocritical defence of the unregulated price scramble . Complacent
defenders of laissez-faire have emphasized the great importance of allowing the individual to spend his income as he likes, and have
omitted to notice that he may have no income to spend. And socialists have rightly retorted that consumers' choice is of no more
use to a man who is penniless than liberty to a man who is starving. Gross inequality, in fact, turns consumers' choice into a
mockery. But may not the solution be to mitigate inequality rather than to abandon consumers'
choice? (Jay, 1938/1947: 255-256)2NC

Communism fails— lack of incentives and knowledge ensure that mass death,
starvation, and torture follow
Somin 17- law professor at George Mason University. He coauthored an amicus brief in
California v. Texas, with a cross-ideological group of legal scholars, arguing that the challenge to
the ACA as a whole should be rejected. (Ilya Somin, “Lessons from a century of communism,”
Washington post, 11/7/17,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/07/lessons-from-a-
century-of-communism/)//mcu
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, which led to the establishment of a communist regime in Russia
and eventually in many other nations around the world. It is an appropriate time to remember the vast tide of oppression, tyranny,
and mass murder that communist regimes unleashed upon the world. While historians and others have documented numerous
communist atrocities, much of the public remains unaware of their enormous scale. It is also a good time to consider what lessons
we can learn from this horrendous history. I. A Record of Mass Murder and Oppression. Collectively, communist states
killed as many as 100 million people, more than all other repressive regimes combined during the same time period. By
far the biggest toll arose from communist efforts to collectivize agriculture and eliminate
independent property-owning peasants . In China alone, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward led to a man-made famine
in which as many as 45 million people perished – the single biggest episode of mass murder in all of world history. In the Soviet
Union, Joseph Stalin’s collectivization – which served as a model for similar efforts in China and elsewhere – took some 6 to 10
million lives. Mass famines occurred in many other communist regimes, ranging from North Korea to Ethiopia. In each of these
cases, communist rulers were well aware that their policies were causing mass death, and in each they persisted nonetheless, often
because they considered the extermination of “Kulak” peasants a feature rather than a bug. While collectivization was the single
biggest killer, communist
regimes also engaged in other forms of mass murder on an epic scale.
Millions died in slave labor camps, such as the USSR’s Gulag system and its equivalents
elsewhere. Many others were killed in more conventional mass executions, such as those of
Stalin’s Great Purge, and the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia. The injustices of communism were not limited to
mass murder alone. Even those fortunate enough to survive still were subjected to severe repression,
including violations of freedom, of speech, freedom of religion, loss of property rights, and the
criminalization of ordinary economic activity. No previous tyranny sought such complete control
over nearly every aspect of people’s lives. Although the communists promised a utopian society in
which the working class would enjoy unprecedented prosperity, in reality they engendered
massive poverty. Wherever communist and noncommunist states existed in close proximity, it
was the communists who used walls and the threat of death to keep their people from fleeing to
societies with greater opportunity. II. Why Communism Failed. How did an ideology of liberation lead to so much
oppression, tyranny and death? Were its failures intrinsic to the communist project, or did they arise from avoidable flaws of
particular rulers or nations? Like any great historical development, thefailures of communism cannot be reduced
to any one single cause. But, by and large, they were indeed inherent . Two major factors were the
most important causes of the atrocities inflicted by communist regimes: perverse incentives and inadequate
knowledge. The establishment of the centrally planned economy and society required by socialist ideology necessitated an
enormous concentration of power. While communists looked forward to a utopian society in which the state could eventually
“wither away,” they believed they first had to establish a state-run economy in order to manage production in the interests of the
people. In that respect, they had much in common with other socialists. To make socialism work, government
planners needed to have the authority to direct the production and distribution of virtually all
the goods produced by the society. In addition, extensive coercion was necessary to force people to
give up their private property, and do the work that the state required. Famine and mass
murder was probably the only way the rulers of the USSR, China, and other communist states
could compel peasants to give up their land and livestock and accept a new form of serfdom on
collective farms – which most were then forbidden to leave without official permission, for fear that they might otherwise seek
an easier life elsewhere. The vast power necessary to establish and maintain the communist system
naturally attracted unscrupulous people, including many self-seekers who prioritized their own
interests over those of the cause. But it is striking that the biggest communist atrocities were
perpetrated not by corrupt party bosses, but by true believers like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Precisely
because they were true believers, they were willing to do whatever it might take to make their
utopian dreams a reality. Even as the socialist system created opportunities for vast atrocities by the rulers, it also
destroyed production incentives for ordinary people. In the absence of markets (at least legal ones),
there was little incentive for workers to either be productive or to focus on making goods that
might actually be useful to consumers. Many people tried to do as little work as possible at their official
jobs, where possible reserving their real efforts for black market activity. As the old Soviet saying goes,
workers had the attitude that “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay.” Even when socialist planners genuinely
sought to produce prosperity and meet consumer demands, they often lacked the information
to do so. As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek described in a famous article, a market
economy conveys vital information to producers and consumers alike through the price system.
Market prices enable producers to know the relative value of different goods and services, and
determine how much consumers value their products. Under socialist central planning , by contrast,
there is no substitute for this vital knowledge . As a result, socialist planners often had no way to
know what to produce, by what methods, or in way quantities. This is one of the reasons why
communists states routinely suffered from shortages of basic goods, while simultaneously
producing large quantities of shoddy products for which there was little demand.
Communism fails—leads to a lack of coordination for necessary products
Greaves 91- attended Ludwig von Mises’s New York University seminar for many years and is a
translator, editor, and bibliographer of his works. (Bettina Bien Greaves,” Why Communism
Failed,” FEE, Friday, March 1, 1991, https://fee.org/articles/why-communism-failed/)//mcu

Three years after the Russian Revolution, an Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises,
argued that Communism would
fail and explained why. Communism, or socialism, couldn’t succeed, Mises wrote in 1920, because it
had abolished free markets so that officials had no market prices to guide them in planning
production. Mises was relatively unknown when he made his controversial forecast, but he acquired some international renown
later as the leading spokesman of the Austrian (free market) school of economics. Since his death in 1973, his theories have gained
new adherents, some now even in Eastern Europe. The
Soviet Union was launched with high hopes. Planning
was to be done by a central committee, insuring plenty for everyone. The state was to wither
away. But things didn’t work out that way. The Soviet state soon became one of the most
oppressive in the world. Millions of Russians starved in the 1920s and 1930s. As Mises pointed out, the
raw materials, labor, tools, and machines used in socialist production are outside the market .
They are owned by government and controlled by government planners. No one can buy or sell them. No market prices can develop
for them because they aren’t exchangeable. Modern production is time-consuming and complicated. Producers
must consider alternatives when deciding what to produce. And they must consider various means of production when deciding how
to produce. Raw materials, tools, and machines must be devoted to the most urgent projects and not wasted on less urgent ones.
Consider, for instance, the planning of a new railroad. Should it be built at all? If so, where? And how? Is building the railroad more
urgent than constructing a bridge, building a dam to produce electricity, developing oil fields, or cultivating more land ?
No
central planner, even with a staff of statisticians, could master the countless possibilities. Machines
might be substituted to some extent for labor; wood, aluminum, or new synthetic materials might be substituted for iron. But how
will the planners decide? To
make these decisions, planners must know the relative values—the
exchange ratios or market prices—of the countless factors of production involved. But when
these factors are government-owned, there are no trades, and thus, no market prices . Without
market prices, the planners have no clues as to the relative values of iron, aluminum, lumber,
the new synthetics, or of railroads, oil fields, farm land, power plants, bridges, or housing.
Without market prices for the factors of production, the planners are at a loss as to how to coordinate
and channel production to satisfy the most urgent needs of consumers. More than 70 years have passed
since the Russian Revolution and 45 years since the end of World War n. Why then do the Russian people still lack adequate housing
and many everyday items? Why does agricultural produce rot in the fields for lack of equipment to harvest and transport it? Why are
factories and oil fields so poorly maintained that production declines? Because the raw materials, tools, machines, factories, and
farms are not privately owned. Without
the bids and offers of private owners, prices reflecting their
relative market values cannot develop. And without market prices, it is impossible to coordinate
production activities so that the goods and services consumers need will be available. That is
why Communism fails. In a competitive economy, where factors of production are privately owned, these
problems are solved daily as owners calculate the monetary values of the various factors and
then buy, sell, and trade them as seems desirable, As Mises wrote in 1920, “Every step that takes us
away from private ownership of the means of production and from the use of money also takes
us away from rational economics.” Today, even Communists are coming to recognize that
Mises was right. The U.S.S.R., a socialist society without private property and monetary calculation, is still
“floundering in the ocean of possible and conceivable economic combinations,” as Mises foresaw in
1920, “without the compass of economic calculation.” Will she now take the important step Mises recommended
of introducing private ownership of the means of production?
Historical examples do apply—they didn’t fail for purely “other reasons”
Somin 17- law professor at George Mason University. He coauthored an amicus brief in
California v. Texas, with a cross-ideological group of legal scholars, arguing that the challenge to
the ACA as a whole should be rejected. (Ilya Somin, “Lessons from a century of communism,”
Washington post, 11/7/17,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/07/lessons-from-a-
century-of-communism/)//mcu

III. Why the Failure Cannot be Explained Away. To this day, defenders
of socialist central planning argue that
communism failed for avoidable contingent reasons, rather than ones intrinsic to the nature of
the system. Perhaps the most popular claim of this sort is that a planned economy can work well so
long as it is democratic. The Soviet Union and other communist states were all dictatorships. But if they had been
democratic, perhaps the leaders would have had stronger incentives to make the system work for the benefit of the people. If they
failed to do so, the voters could “throw the bastards out” at the next election. Unfortunately ,
it is unlikely that a
communist state could remain democratic for long, even it started out that way. Democracy
requires effective opposition parties. And in order to function, such parties need to be able to put
out their message and mobilize voters, which in turn requires extensive resources. In an
economic system in which all or nearly all valuable resources are controlled by the state, the
incumbent government can easily strangle opposition by denying them access to those
resources. Under socialism, the opposition cannot function if they are not allowed to spread their
message on state-owned media, or use state-owned property for their rallies and meetings. It is
no accident that virtually every communist regime suppressed opposition parties soon after
coming to power. Even if a communist state could somehow remain democratic over the long run, it is
hard to see how it could solve the twin problems of knowledge and incentives. Whether democratic or
not, a socialist economy would still require enormous concentration of power, and extensive
coercion. And democratic socialist planners would run into much the same information
problems as their authoritarian counterparts. In addition, in a society where the government
controls all or most of the economy, it would be virtually impossible for voters to acquire enough
knowledge to monitor the state’s many activities. This would greatly exacerbate the already
severe problem of voter ignorance that plagues modern democracy. Another possible
explanation for the failures of communism is that the problem was bad leadership. If only communist
regimes were not led by monsters like Stalin or Mao, they might have done better. There is no doubt communist
governments had more than their share of cruel and even sociopathic leaders. But it is unlikely
that this was the decisive factor in their failure. Very similar results arose in communist regimes
with leaders who had a wide range of personalities. In the Soviet Union, it is important to
remember that the main institutions of repression (including the Gulags and the secret police) were
established not by Stalin, but by Vladimir Lenin, a far more “normal” person . After Lenin’s death, Stalin’s
main rival for power – Leon Trotsky – advocated policies that were in some respects even more
oppressive than Stalin’s own. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that either the personality of the
leader was not the main factor, or – alternatively – communist regimes tended to put horrible
people to positions of power. Or perhaps some of both. It is equally difficult to credit claims that
communism failed only because of defects in the culture of the countries that adopted it . It is
indeed true that Russia, the first communist nation, had a long history of corruption, authoritarianism, and
oppression. But it is also true that the communists engaged in oppression and mass murder on
a far greater scale than previous Russian governments . And communism also failed in many
other nations with very different cultures. In the cases of Korea, China, and Germany, people
with very similar initial cultural backgrounds endured terrible privation under communism, but
were much more successful under market economies. Overall, the atrocities and failures of
communism were the natural outcomes of an effort to establish a socialist economy in which all
or nearly all production is controlled by the state. If not always completely unavoidable, the
resulting oppression was at least highly likely.
Movements Fail
Alt fails---transition is impossible and causes conflict. Even if transition occurs, it
doesn’t solve
Smith 19 [Noah; 4/5/19; Bloomberg Opinion columnist, former assistant professor of finance
at Stony Brook University; "Dumping Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet,"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-05/capitalism-is-more-likely-to-limit-
climate-change-than-socialism]

It has become fashionable on social media and in certain publications to argue that capitalism is
killing the planet. Even renowned investor Jeremy Grantham, hardly a radical, made that assertion last year. The basic
idea is that the profit motive drives the private sector to spew carbon into the air with reckless abandon.
Though many economists and some climate activists believe that the problem is best addressed by modifying market incentives with
a carbon tax, many
activists believe that the problem can’t be addressed without rebuilding the
economy along centrally planned lines.

The climate threat is certainly dire, and carbon taxes are unlikely to be enough to solve the problem. But eco-
socialism is probably not going to be an effective method of addressing that threat. Dismantling an
entire economic system is never easy, and probably would touch off armed conflict and major
asdasd upheaval. In the scramble to win those battles, even the socialists would almost
certainly abandon their limitation on fossil-fuel use — either to support military efforts, or to
keep the population from turning against them. The precedent here is the Soviet Union, whose
multidecade effort to reshape its economy by force amid confrontation with the West led to
profound environmental degradation. The world's climate does not have several decades to
spare.

Even without international conflict, there’s little guarantee that moving away from capitalism
would mitigate our impact on the environment. Since socialist leader Evo Morales took power in Bolivia,
living standards have improved substantially for the average Bolivian, which is great. But this has come at
the cost of higher emissions. Meanwhile, the capitalist U.S managed to decrease its per capita
emissions a bit during this same period (though since the U.S. is a rich country, its absolute level of emissions is much higher).

In other words, in
terms of economic growth and carbon emissions, Bolivia looks similar to more
capitalist developing countries. That suggests that faced with a choice of enriching their people or
helping to save the climate, even socialist leaders will often choose the former. And that same
political calculus will probably hold in China and the U.S., the world’s top carbon emitters — leaders who
demand draconian cuts in living standards in pursuit of environmental goals will have trouble
staying in power.

The best hope for the climate therefore lies in reducing the tradeoff between material
prosperity and carbon emissions. That requires technology — solar, wind and nuclear power,
energy storage, electric cars and other vehicles, carbon-free cement production and so on. The
best climate policy plans all involve technological improvement as a key feature.
No one will join their movement
Buch-Hansen, 18—Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School
(Hubert, “The Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from Critical Political
Economy,” Ecological Economics Volume 146, April 2018, Pages 157-163, dml)

6. Consent

It is also safe to say that degrowthenjoys no “passive consent” from the majority of the population.
For the time being, degrowth remains unknown to most people. Yet, if it were to become generally
known, most people would probably not find the vision of a smaller economic system
appealing. This is not just a matter of degrowth being ‘a missile word that backfires’ because it triggers negative feelings in
people when they first hear it (Drews and Antal, 2016). It is also a matter of the actual content of the degrowth project.

Two issues in particular should be mentioned in this context. First, for

many, the anti-capitalist sentiments
embodied in the degrowth project will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow. Today, the vast
majority of people find it almost impossible to conceive of a world without capitalism . There is
a ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system,
but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2). As
Jameson (2003) famously observed, it is, in a sense, easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
However, not only is degrowth – like other anti-capitalist projects – up against the challenge that most
people consider capitalism the only system that can function; it is also up against the additional challenge
that it speaks against economic growth in a world where the desirability of growth is considered
common sense.

Second, degrowth is incompatible with the lifestyles to which many of us who live in rich
countries have become accustomed. Economic growth in the Western world is , to no small extent,
premised on the existence of consumer societies and an associated consumer culture most of us find it difficult
to completely escape. In this culture, social status, happiness, well-being and identity are linked to consumption (Jackson,
2009). Indeed, it is widely considered a natural right to lead an environmentally unsustainable
lifestyle – a lifestyle that includes car ownership, air travel, spacious accommodations, fashionable clothing, an omnivorous diet
and all sorts of electronic gadgets. This Western norm of consumption has increasingly been exported to
other parts of the world, the result being that never before have so many people taken part in consumption patterns that
used to be reserved for elites (Koch, 2012). If degrowth were to be institutionalised, many citizens in the rich
countries would have to adapt to a materially lower standard of living . That is, while the basic needs of the
global population can be met in a non-growing economy, not all wants and preferences can be fulfilled (Koch et al., 2017).
Undoubtedly, many
people in the rich countries would experience various limitations on their
consumption opportunities as a violent encroachment on their personal freedom. Indeed,
whereas many recognize that contemporary consumer societies are environmentally
unsustainable, fewer are prepared to actually change their own lifestyles to reverse/address
this.
Movements fail
Epstein 14 (Barbara, author, former Professor Emerita in the Humanities Division @ UC Santa
Cruz, “Prospects for a Resurgence of the U.S. Left”, Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 2014,
Project Muse)

The United States has no coherent, effective Left. Over the last four decades, since the movements of the sixties and seventies
went into decline, the problem of the degradation of the environment has reached a level that threatens the existence of humans and other species on
the planet. The neoliberal form of capitalism that has taken hold globally has caused the gap between the wealth and power of those at the top and the
rest of us to widen dramatically, undermining the quality of life of the majority and threatening the public arena itself. Despite the depth of the
economic crisis of 2008, there
is no substantial movement for the abandonment of neoliberalism , the
regulation of industry, or the creation of a more egalitarian economy . The environmental movement has grown,
but not to the point of having the capacity to reverse environmental degradation. There are undoubtedly more people and projects devoted to
economic and social justice—and to environmental sustainability—than there were in the sixties and seventies. The
problem has to do
with collective impact. No movements of the Left have emerged capable of making a real
difference in the conditions that we face . Why is this? And what can be done about it?¶ A Fatalistic Approach to Gradual Crises¶
The weakness of the Left is partly due to the fact that these problems have come upon us gradually, allowing us to

accommodate ourselves to them. The widening of the gap in wealth and power has been for the
most part incremental; it is only in retrospect that one can see how dramatic the effect has been. The same is true of the
working day, which has been lengthened, for most people, bit by bit, but at no point by enough to lead to a widespread revolt. Something
similar could be said about the environment. Environmental crises for the most part take place
somewhere other than where one lives. Such crises are increasingly severe and increasingly common, and there is widespread
awareness that at some point in the future we are all likely to be directly affected. But a future crisis does not have the

mobilizing capacity of a crisis that confronts one in the present . Most people, including those who are aware of the
depths of these problems, go about their business, doing what they—we—have always done, though with increasing apprehension about the future. ¶
“The environmental movement has grown, but not to the point of having the capacity to reverse environmental degradation,” Epstein writes.
Environmental activists march in Detroit to protest its air-polluting incinerator. ¶ “The environmental movement has grown, but not to the point of
having the capacity to reverse environmental degradation,” Epstein writes. Environmental activists march in Detroit to protest its air-polluting
incinerator.¶ A
widespread sense that nothing can be done is probably an even more significant
obstacle to effective, collective action than the gradual character of these changes . Mobilization against
a system, an institution, or a ruling elite is most likely to take place when it seems not only oppressive but also outmoded, on the way out, or at least on
the defensive. The Civil Rights Movement had existed since World War II but gained momentum in the late fifties and early sixties, when the
international aspirations of the United States made racism at home a serious embarrassment. Feminism likewise took hold on a mass basis when the
entry of women into the labor force on a large scale placed patriarchal authority in question and gave women the leverage to demand equality.
Movements for change are most likely to take hold when change seems possible, when there
are levers that can be grasped, as when oppressive institutions seem ready to collapse or are widely
seen as illegitimate. It helps when some of those in positions of power agree that the existing system is not working and support change. The
depression of the 1930s affected the corporate class as well as the rest of society, though not nearly as badly; fear of a continuing downward economic
spiral led some among the elite to agree that changes of some sort were necessary. In the wake of 2008, while most people have
suffered economic reverses, corporate profits have more than recovered. Neoliberal capitalism
is thriving, at least if measured by corporate profits.¶ The Left is weakened by its deep generational divide and by the fact that “white leftists tend
to know little about movements of the Left among people of color,” Epstein writes. Here, members of a Latina immigrant organization participate in a
May Day rally in San Francisco.¶ Click for larger view¶ The Left is weakened by its deep generational divide and by the fact that “white leftists tend to
know little about movements of the Left among people of color,” Epstein writes. Here, members of a Latina immigrant organization participate in a May
Day rally in San Francisco.¶ This is not to argue that movements of the Left take shape and grow only when conditions are propitious. Left-led resistance
movements formed in the major ghettos of German-occupied Central and Eastern Europe, despite the fact that the deaths of those involved seemed
the most likely outcome. Slave revolts took place in the West Indies and the American South under similar circumstances. But when circumstances are
difficult, oppositional movements are most likely to take hold when there are stable organizations that provide a sustained, reliable framework for
action, and when such movements have compelling goals and a clear conception of how to achieve these goals—that is, a strategic perspective. The
current U.S. Left has none of these.¶ Fragmentation and Generational Divides¶ The major organizations of the Left that once provided the framework
for ongoing collective action and strategic discussion either no longer exist or have atrophied. There are large numbers of progressive nonprofits but
few organizations that those who want to make a difference, but lack special skills or expertise, can join and work with. Among young people, leftist

activist projects thrive, but they tend to come and go. The most stable and influential institutions of the Left are its media outlets:
published and online journals, radio stations, a few left-wing presses, and books with a left-wing perspective published by mainstream presses. The
central role of media leads to a Left that is defined more by what people read and what opinions they hold than by their associations or their practical
activity.¶ We
have a fragmented Left held together by a vague commitment to a more just,
egalitarian, and sustainable world, but in practical terms lacking a common focus or basis for
coordinated action. The fragmented and fluid character of the Left reflects the fragmentation and fluidity of contemporary society: there is
probably no going back to the structured and stable organizations of the past (the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, or even the Students for a
Democratic Society) consisting of members who were likely to remain active and engaged for many years. But a
Left based on individuals
with leftist views and a plethora of frequently ephemeral projects has little ability to consider its
collective direction and less influence than its numbers would warrant .¶ The Left is weakened especially by the
deep divide between the older generation, veterans of the movements of the sixties and seventies, now in their sixties or older, and the younger
generation, in their early forties or younger. The outlook and vocabulary of the older generation, shaped for the most part by perspectives ranging from
Marxism to social democracy, tends to clash with the outlook of the younger generation, among whom anarchism has been a major influence. The
result is little contact and less cooperation between activists of the two generations. In addition, white
leftists tend to know little
about (and have little contact with) movements of the Left among people of color . And the sector of the Left
that consists largely of professionals and intellectuals has little contact with the labor Left .¶ The
most promising sector of the U.S. Left is the arena of youth activism that tilts toward anarchism and that was at the center of the Occupy movement.
Activists in this arena share an opposition to all forms of oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, and others), a dislike of hierarchy and a deep
suspicion of the state, a vision of an egalitarian, cooperative, and decentralized society, and a desire to model that society in their political practice.
Many would include an explicit opposition to capitalism.¶ The Occupy movement was shaped by the idealism, energy, and commitment of a politics
influenced by what some call anarchism and others call anti-authoritarianism. Occupy’s
protest against the consolidation of
wealth and power among the few plus the utopian quality of Occupy communities led to
explosive growth of the movement and massive public support. But when police closed the
encampments, the movement, as a mass movement, soon collapsed . Valuable organizing projects spun off, but
these are quite different from Occupy. One may criticize Occupy activists for not having given much thought to what form the movement would take
after the inevitable police closures. But the episodic, fleeting character of Occupy is shared by movements
around the world: an incident sets off protest over long-standing grievances, protest mushrooms into a mass movement, the protest is
repressed, and the movement collapses, having altered public discourse but leaving no organization or institution capable of bringing about social
change. This is the weakness of the ascendant form of leftist or protest politics that emphasizes spontaneity and avoids organizational forms able to
last.

Movements Alt fails

Petar Kurecic 16, Assistant Professor of Economics at University North, Croatia, 12/26/2016,
“Social movements as (in)effective way of struggle against neoliberal geopolitics (i.e. essentially
detrimental ideology aimed at destruction of the welfare state)?”,
https://www.academia.edu/32030532/Social_Movements_and_Neoliberal_Geopolitics

Recognition of neoliberalism’s geographies of poverty, inequality, and violence as intertwined

across a multiplicity of sites impels us to view its geographies of protest, resistance, and
contestation in the same light (Springer, 2011: 553). Because the changes associated with
neoliberal policies often had negative distributional impacts on the working class, the poor, the
small-business sector, and the environment, diverse forms of resistance and contestation have
emerged (Kurecic, 2016: 35)¶ Anyhow, if we have the TNC on one side, then it should probably
be most effective to fight its goals and actions with means of social action that transcends
national borders – transnational social movements . In other words, transnational demos should
be able to fight “the Cabal”.¶ What actually are social movements? Nilsen (2015: 4-5) points out
that social movements can be seen as “being simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of
praxis, and thus as being situated at the very heart of the making and unmaking of the
structures and processes that underpin both social order and social change. Social movements
should be understood according to the way how they play a role in shaping and reshaping the
current form of given institutional fields and political economies, and taking seriously the basic
intention that animates social movements, that is, the intention of moving, of becoming more
than what they currently are.”¶ Although neoliberalism’s power to “press upon” stems from its
institutional arrangement and hegemonic discourses backed by the United States’ military might
(Harvey 2003; Peet 2007), the presence of power that “presses upon” does not negate the
possibility of subaltern counter-politics. In fact, the presence of power that presses upon also
gives rise to productive power, or the power to resist and transform (Foucault, 1979). The power
of those adversely affected by neoliberalism is dependent on their alliances, relations, networks
and counterhegemonic discourses (Waquar, 2012: 1063). ¶ Social movements typically grow
from “cramped spaces”, situations that are constricted by the impossibilities of the existing
world with a way out barely imaginable. But precisely because they are cramped, these spaces
act as incubators or greenhouses for creativity and innovation (The Free Association, 2007). ¶
Social movements of the present day world are definitely thriving because of the two main
processes. The first process is the neo-liberally inspired internationalization (which the
ideologists of globalization refer to as “globalization”) that increases social inequality in both
rich and poor states, concurrently increasing inequalities between the developed and non-
developed states, increasing the number of least-developed states. The second is the revolution
in information technologies that has invented “new media” and then made them available to
significant parts of the world population (in developed states, the percentage of Internet users
well surpasses 50%). Internet and its tools have become ubiquitous (Kurecic, 2016: 35). ¶
Unfortunately, social movements usually pursue only their national agenda, and their
transborder actions are in most cases ineffective. On the other hand, it is very difficult for a
politician connected with social movements to be elected in office, on any level, and in any
country, hence all the influence, funds, media, and state security apparatuses are acting to
prevent any such event to occur. Therefore, the pursuers of progressive agendas always carry an
immense burden even before they start a race for office. ¶ Castells (2012) has identified over a
100 diffused and on social networks active social movements that have thrived in 2009-2012
period, in various parts of the world, in democratic and developed states (various movements in
European states, Occupy Wall Street Movement etc.), as well as in the autocratic regimes of the
developing world (for instance, the Arabian Spring movements, protests in Russia against Putin).
All these movements used social media as a means of coordinating their actions and announcing
their messages to their supporters and to the outside world. ¶ However, we have to ask
ourselves – what is the results of all these social movements? What has Arab Spring brought to
the Arab countries? Stability, prosperity? Not a chance. On the other hand, we are witnessing
chaos, terrorism and destruction after the rise of the political Islam. Is Russia a more democratic
country than in 2012 before Putin was elected (again) as President? Is Wall Street less predatory
and more socially responsible than it was before the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall
Street Movement actions? Maybe it is a bit more regulated. Anything more than that – hardly.¶
In that sense, in their fight against neoliberal geopolitics and the bourgeois capitalist state, social
movements have not been very successful. Usually, the elite would make a couple of superficial
moves that lowered the levels of tension and social action in a certain society that witnessed the
build-up of grievance and social action, manifested through social movements. Then the level of
dissatisfaction of the “masses” would exhaust and everything would return to normal, one way
or the other. This is, unfortunately a rule when it comes to social action tied with social
movements. The trends of neoliberal totalitarian dominance over the economy and politics in
most countries of the world have not been reversed. If 62 people have more money than the
poorer half of the world’s populations, then it is clear that everything and not just something is
deeply wrong. The system needs a reset. Nevertheless, social movements have not been able
to reset the system, at least so far.
Collapse bad
Collapse turns all their impacts
Monbiot 9 (George, columnist for The Guardian, has held visiting fellowships or professorships
at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), Oxford
Brookes (planning), and East London (environmental science), August 17, 2009, “Is there any
point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?,” online:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-
change)

The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the
collapse of industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good
likely

may come of it? I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this
apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we
can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous : the breakdown of the
systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war . These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on,
however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come

out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement. Here are three observations: 1 Our
species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths
take over ; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes. From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans,
you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost
all others . However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow
on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo
sapiens can no longer survive . This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable
thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint.
AT: Central Econ Planning
Central economic planning fails—planning an economy becomes too complex
without market mechanisms
Bourne 19- the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato. He has
written on a number of economic issues, including fiscal policy, inequality, minimum wages,
infrastructure spending, and rent control.(“No, Walmart Is Not Evidence That Centrally‐Planned
Economies Work” Cato institute, https://www.cato.org/commentary/no-walmart-not-evidence-
centrally-planned-economies-work
It’s fair to say the modern left has schizophrenic views about Walmart. Back in 2005, the left‐leaning economist and future head of
President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman wrote a paean to the company. He argued that the big‐box chain
supermarket was a “progressive success story,” due to its role in driving down retail food prices for poor consumers. In a new
Jacobin book, People’s Republic of Walmart, neo‐socialists Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworksi ferociously disagree, calling Walmart
an “execrable, sinister, low‐down dirty villain of a company.” Believe it or not though, their new book is predicated on admiration for
the company which, if it were a country, would be roughly the size of Switzerland or Sweden. For Phillips and Rozworksi’s see
Walmart’s success as a sign that modern socialism can work. Their argument is essentially this: free‐market economists are wrong to
denounce the possibility of economic planning, because major companies such as Amazon and Walmart plan extensively every day.
They have developed algorithms, tracking tools, logistics and distribution networks that allow them to react in real time to changing
demands for their products. Nobel prize‐winning economist Friedrich Hayek, then, was wrong to say socialism couldn’t work
because information was inherently decentralised. In fact, modern technology means information can be acted upon centrally and
swiftly. Planning is easier and more accurate than ever. The problem, in Phillips and Rozworkski’s view, is that these planning tools
are currently being put to the ends of generating profits. But what is profitable is not always socially useful. Rural broadband and
solving the problem of antibiotic resistance are socially needed, but they would not be delivered by private companies. Therefore,
they conclude, what we need is a planned socialist economy harnessing the techniques of Walmart and others to socially productive
ends. It’s difficult to know where to start with this line of reasoning. From the work of Ronald Coase, free market economists have
understood that firms are islands of planning of various sizes within a sea of markets and that in different sectors, the efficient scale
of organisations varies considerably (especially over time and depending on technologies). Most free‐market economists
acknowledge too that there are public goods and externality problems inherent in markets
(although these are often overplayed). But it’s difficult to see how evidence of market failures or
corporate success stories translates into the conclusion that a completely planned, socialist,
non‐profit economy is optimal. The empirical evidence of attempts at central government
planning is clear. So much so that this book tries to skirt over it. The Soviet Union, it implies, did not fail because of planning,
but authoritarianism which diminished the quality of feedback information from planning. Chile’s Allende regime, apparently, was
on the brink of a technological revolution that offered promise but was undermined by anti‐communist forces. The NHS’s problems
are being starved of cash and not being democratic enough at lower levels. On the pro‐planning side, the only robust argument is
But their speculative conclusions of what could
that war economies show planning can achieve communal ends.
be achieved under socialist planning today are difficult to counter, because the authors wisely
do not really define a vision for what their socialism is. There is an obvious reason for this. The old
definition of “government ownership of the means of production and exchange” clearly would
not work. Ludwig von Mises’ critique of the socialist calculation problem has never been
debunked. Absent private ownership and trade of property, there are no prices. Without prices,
there is no effective way to allocate resources at a societal level in service of consumers. The
authors even acknowledge that Walmart and other companies operate in broader markets where they react to prices in making
decisions and are subject to competitive pressures. So the existence of Walmart’s planning cannot be extrapolated to justify
traditional socialism. Instead, then, the authors hat tip to other forms of communal ownership, acknowledging “nationalisation is not
enough”. They are left reaching around for various alternatives or supplements: interventions, worker‐owner models (so‐called
“market socialism”) and eradicating or redistributing profits. They
never settle on any clear plan though for
what planning would entail. This makes it almost impossible to critique their model
objectively. At a high level though, there are two glaringly obvious problems that stem from a non‐profit,
communal ownership world of economic planning. The first is that which is outlined by Thomas Sowell, who wrote: “ while
capitalism has a visible cost — profit — that does not exist under socialism, socialism has an
invisible cost — inefficiency — that gets weeded out by losses and bankruptcy under
capitalism.” While one could imagine theoretically a supercomputer that could plan the allocation of resources to their most
efficient use at a single point in time across given products with fixed production methods, the true gains from market
capitalism over time come from the efficiency generated by innovation. Absent profit and loss,
there is no incentive to carve out those niches, to differentiate products, to search for the
continual improvement in the efficiency of the production process, or for entrepreneurs to
dream up new ideas to tap into latent demands to capture profits. One saw this in the Soviet
Union. A country full of scientists did just fine at inventing things and in raw accumulation, but
didn’t have the institutional arrangements to turn inventions into marketable or consumer
products. A non‐profit planned economic world cannot generate the dynamic efficiency which
drives long‐term economic growth. The second major flaw is that while planning can clearly be
appropriate when one has a clear aim: winning a war, or generating profits or revenue growth
within a firm, things are much messier when one considers an agenda for the whole economy.
In a capitalist market economy, our starting point is that each individual has their own
preferences and ambitions, and that a free economy allows them to pursue their own goals in
maximising their own welfare. Sure, there are problems. Western nations do, as the authors argue “experience
mismatches between what is produced and what is required”, and there are collective action problems. But broadly, a world
of prices, markets, free choice and profit and loss allows people to serve individuals’ wants and
needs. People can fulfil their own desires to such an extent that they can, should they wish, set
up worker‐owned companies to compete with shareholder ‐owned firms. If instead there’s some broader
aggregated social objective, then what happens when consumers or workers or an individual firm deviate from the plan,
democratically or otherwise? Under the supposed democratic socialist Green New Deal resolution, for example, there is an objective
to renovate all buildings to make them energy efficient. This is clearly feasible, if enough resources were thrown at it. But would it be
desirable? The economic cost would be extortionate. If individual firms were not making the decisions according to their own
profitability concerns, then the government or someone else would have to trade off from a top‐down decision — hitting the
efficiency target or spurning it for more growth. Ultimately, someone, somewhere in a planned economy ends up imposing their
preferences on others. Planning,
of course, works in the trivial sense that many of us, and many businesses, plan
every day. Technology has indeed made this process easier and is constantly changing the scale at
which it is possible. But all this planning takes place in environments of market prices, with
clear firm aims, and with incentives that induce longer‐term innovation and efficiency. Strip out
the prices, through abolishing private property, and the socialist calculation problem returns.
Keep markets but try to suppress profits or intervene extensively, and you sacrifice innovation
and individuals’ dreams and goal. That Walmart can instigate plans in pursuit of profits tells us nothing about the
desirability of planning a whole economy.
Alt Fails – Won’t Change the System

Critique of neoliberalism is politically useless—economic elites don’t identify

with the title and dismiss social criticism as ‘economically illiterate.’
Rajesh VENUGOPAL 15, Assistant Professor in the Department of International Development
at the London School of Economics

[“Neoliberalism as concept,” Economy and Society, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2015, p. 165-187] #ADAPacket

Beyond conceptual proliferation and incoherence, there is an important third terminological feature of neoliberalism that more
clearly distinguishes it from the multitude of other stressed and stretched concepts that dot the social sciences: it dares
not
speak its own name. While there are many who give out and are given the title of neoliberal, there
are none who will embrace this moniker of power and call themselves as such. There is no contemporary
body of knowledge that calls itself neoliberalism, no self-described neoliberal theorists that
elaborate it, nor policy-makers or practitioners that implement it. There are no primers or advanced
textbooks on the subject matter, no pedagogues, courses or students of neoliberalism, no
policies or election manifestoes that promise to implement it (although there are many that
promise to dismantle it). Pedantic as it may seem, this is a point that warrants repetition if only because there is a
considerable body of critical literature that deploys neoliberalism under the mistaken
assumption that, in doing so, it is being transported into the front-lines of hand-to-hand
combat with free-market economics.
Advocates of market deregulation, private-sector-led growth or any of the various shifting components that might be part of
neoliberalism do not describe themselves or their policies as such. Instead, neoliberalism is defined, conceptualized and
deployed exclusively by those who stand in evident opposition to it, such that the act of using the word has
the twofold effect of identifying oneself as non-neoliberal, and of passing negative moral judgment over it. Consequently,
neoliberalism often features, even in sober academic tracts, in the rhetorical toolkit of caricature and
dismissal, rather than of analysis and deliberation .
Boas and Gans-Morse (2009, p. 152) find that the inversion in its usage from positive to negative arose during the Pinochet regime in
Chile. Until then, Latin American debates over economic policy in the 1960s and 1970s used the term largely in the positive sense,
often with reference to West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder, whereas it became steadily negative in the 1980s. Importantly,
neoliberalism, which was always a marginal part of the vocabulary in mainstream academic economics, even before its negative
association, has since disappeared almost entirely in that arena in parallel with its growing influence and usage in the rest of the
social sciences. As a result, the
one-sided usage of neoliberalism extends not just to the way it is used
only by self-consciously non-neoliberal critics, but also as a term used only by non-economists ,
and that, too, when referring to economic phenomena and economic forms of reasoning.

Indeed, the word neoliberalism is so utterly absent in modern economics that it is impossible to reconcile Ferguson's above
definition of it as ‘macro-economic doctrine’ with the corpus of contemporary macro-economic theory at hand. For example, the
word neoliberalism does not appear at all in any of the major macro-economic textbooks, including Mankiw's Principles of
macroeconomics (2012), Blanchard's Macroeconomics (2012), Obstfeld and Rogoff's Foundations of international macroeconomics
(1996), Krugman, Obstfeld and Melitz's International economics or Agénor and Montiel's Development macroeconomics (2008).
Neither does it appear at all in a host of other widely read texts in the field, including Debraj Ray's Development economics (1998),
Banerjee and Duflo's Poor economics (2011) or Barr's The economics of the welfare state (1993). Even the more unorthodox
economists critical of market-based solutions, such as Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz, find no need to use the concept.
Neoliberalism is absent entirely from Krugman's End this depression now! and finds mention only once (in a footnote to the preface)
in Stiglitz's The price of inequality: The avoidable causes and the invisible costs of inequality (2012).
Moreover, neoliberalism has, since 1966, only ever appeared twice in the pages of The American Economic Review, on both
occasions as fleeting mentions. It has not appeared at all in The Quarterly Journal of Economics since 1960, nor in Journal of Political
Economy since 1956. It has never appeared in Journal of Development Economics at all. In comparison, in 2012, it appeared in 10
papers in The Journal of Development Studies, eight papers in World Development, 17 papers in Development and Change and 10
papers in Journal of International Development. 5

What these strikingly different patterns of usage between economics and non-economics
indicate is that, beyond dysfunctionality, neoliberalism signifies and reproduces the mutual
incomprehensibility and the deep cognitive divide between these two domains (Jackson, 2013;
Milonakis & Fine, 2013). Ha-Joon Chang notes that ‘critics of neoliberalism are routinely dismissed as
“economically illiterate”’ (Chang, 2003, pp. 42–43). Indeed, for the rest of the social sciences, economics
is an entirely alien discipline that is found to be intellectually vapid on the one hand, but also
inscrutable and impenetrable due to the mathematical sophistication of its theory and empirics .

Neoliberalism purports to provide a lens through which this mysterious and hostile terrain can be
surveyed, simplified, labelled and rendered understandable from a safe distance. Economic theory
can thus be vicariously critiqued and dismissed without one having to encounter it, much less
understand it. Not unsurprisingly, what emerges as a result is inadequate and often bears the character
of dispatches from trench warfare, in which sketchy and vague outlines of enemy activity are
reported from across a foggy and impassable no-man's land.
For example, David Harvey's history of neoliberalism, a standard and widely quoted primer on the subject, makes frequent
references to and locks horns with a body of knowledge it calls neoliberal theory. Leaving aside the shifting amalgam of idiosyncratic
postulates that Harvey describes as constitutive of and flowing from it, the book contains no reference to any contemporary
academic work of what it considers to be neoliberal theory. 6 This is of course not surprising because there is for all practical
purposes no such thing: it is an artifice willed into existence not by its theorists but by its critics and can
as such be cut to shape to fit whichever conceptual variant serves their purpose .
Alt Fails – Utopian

Utopian rejection of neoliberalism fails—utilizing alternatives within and

outside of neoliberal logics is necessary to avoid fatalism and forge a post-
neoliberal politics.
Jamie PECK 13, Department of Geography University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

[“Explaining (with) Neoliberalism,” Territory, Politics, Governance, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2013]

#ADAPacket

To say that neoliberalism is still with us is not the same as saying that this is a permanent condition or that neoliberalism is always,
transcendentally, the same. This is one reason why simple
invocations of neoliberalism as an all-purpose,
omnibus explanation for the contemporary condition can never be enough. Citing the process of
neoliberalization must not be a substitute for explanation; it should be an occasion for explanation, involving the specification of
particular causal mechanisms, modes of intervention, hybrid formations, social forms and foibles, counter-mobilizations, and so
forth. It might be said that the concept does define a problem space and a zone of (possible) pertinence, and as such represents the
beginning of a process of analysis. But it is here that the task of excavating contextual forms and connective flows really begins; it is
here that analysts really have to ‘pay the full price’ of invoking this more-than-local concept .

If ‘neoliberalism did it’ should never be a fig leaf for preemptive explanation, neither should
invocations of neoliberalism be a prelude to unbounded analytical (or indeed political) fatalism, of the
‘we're all doomed to endless market rule’ variety . As an always-thwarted totalization, the neoliberal circle
is never squared. Even hegemonies have their outsides and others; their construction is a
continuing and contradictory process, not a fixed condition. Those skeptical of the utility of the concept of
neoliberalism sometimes complain that its deployment, even the dropping of the name, somehow throws gasoline on the flames
while effectively denigrating alternatives, both actual and potential. Some of this skepticism, clearly, stems from a deeper concern
with all forms of explanation that invoke structural rationalities, big processes, and hegemonic forces, but quite often these are
stereotyped as mechanistic forms of template theorizing rather than for what they actually are. Process-based approaches to
neoliberalization, in fact, work explicitly with and across difference, problematizing the (re)production of that difference, and they
are no less attentive to the contradictions and limits of neoliberalism in both theory and practice. These
approaches do not
necessitate the automatic or preemptive dismissal of non-neoliberal alternatives or
postneoliberal trajectories, but they do require that such (emergent) developments are
understood, in the current context at any rate, in relation to hegemonically neoliberalized fields of power
and their associated domains of transformative practice . Searching questions are therefore likely to be raised
about one-sided projections of enclavist alt-models, if the advocacy of these is detached from an assessment of the challenges of
scaling up or networking out. ‘Alternatives’ must be analyzed relationally too, not in utopian isolation
(see Peck, forthcoming).

Squaring up to neoliberalism, in such a context, need not mean genuflecting before the altar of
limitless market rule (see Leitner et al., 2007b). Applying the principles of relationality ‘all the way down’ (or all the way out),
however, calls for an understanding of the ways in which hegemonic forms of neoliberalization both inhabit, and tendentially
remake, the field of difference. There are few bright lines, these days, between neoliberalism and its others, irrespective of whether
these others are progressive or conservative, liberal or authoritarian. So it
is ill-advised to code the world ‘beyond’
neoliberalism in blanket terms, as a space of somehow untouched alternatives or as a
generalized zone of resistance. Two conditions of neoliberalism's contradictory existence—its apparent facility for shape-
shifting survival and the fact that perhaps its signal, enduring achievement has been the incapacitation of bases for ideological
opposition—suggest that it may be less likely to meet its ultimate end in some epic, dialectical contest
between a muscular Neoliberalism in the blue corner and plucky Resistance in the red. Perhaps
it is still likely that the contradictions of neoliberalism will get it in the end, but the end may well
be a protracted one—maybe one in which the complex of neoliberal projects and programs is eventually exhausted, and
incrementally outflanked or exceeded. Meanwhile, if no big-bang failure of neoliberal rule is imminently
expected, then what are currently styled as alternatives will have to do more (even) than stand
their ground in local enclaves; they will have to stake claims on enemy territory while rewriting
the rules of extra-local redistribution, reciprocity, and competition.

Optimism of the will can and must be replenished by the diverse alternatives, real utopias, and
counter-projects to neoliberalism, many of which are to be found at the local scale, but pessimism of the
intellect should also caution that neoliberalism's ‘permanent economic tribunal’ (Foucault, 2008)
continues to exhibit a capacity to crimp, contain, and co-opt these more progressive others,
especially where they issue a challenge to the governing imperatives of financialized and
corporatized market rule (see Crouch, 2011). Meanwhile, neoliberalism itself is never static, but as a flexible
credo constantly reanimated by crisis and contradiction is persistently generating market-friendly alternatives of its own. As long as
neoliberal rules continue to hold sway at the scale of inter-local relations, ‘local’ alternatives are likely to remain just that, local.
(Indeed, it might provide a clue as to why they are local in the first place.) The intensifying capillary, infrastructural, and normative
reach of market rule at the transnational scale (cf. Mann, 1984; Simmons et al., 2008), threatens to further entrench, as one of the
many perverse outcomes of the crisis, the ‘dull compulsion’ of competitive relations and the pernicious logic of regulatory
undercutting.

Doing away with the concept of neoliberalism will not do away with the conditions of its still-hegemonic existence; neither, on its
own, would it render alternatives any more realizable. Rather, it
is imperative that the array of alternatives—
from the reformist though to the radical—are positioned relationally in ideational, ideological, and
institutional terms. This is not, then, a plea for a relentlessly ‘neoliberalocentric’ perspective, for it is arguably more
important than ever to ensure that the reach and ambition of critical endeavors—methodological, theoretical, and political—extend
across the entire field of socioeconomic difference, a task in which Polanyian forms of comparative socioeconomics, for instance,
might have constructive roles to play (see Peck, forthcoming). Consistent with such an approach is the observation that the
necessary incompleteness of the neoliberal program of free-market reform means that it must
always dwell among its others, along with the rather cold comfort that its ultimate destination is unattainable.
Actually existing alternatives (progressive and otherwise) will never be completely expunged.
The residues of preexisting social formations will never be entirely erased or rendered inert .
Double movements against the overextension of market rule will not only continue, but can be expected to intensify, presenting
new challenges but also opening up new moments for social action. Crises, in forms old and new, will recur. Realistically speaking, it
is on this uncertain and uneven terrain that all forms of postneoliberal politics will have to be
forged. And there is analytical work to be done too , not least across the interdisciplinary field of critical urban and
regional studies. There is much to be gained from this work being conducted across, as well as
within, methodological traditions and theoretical registers , although a particularly important contribution
remains to be made by the ‘ethnographic archeologist’, as Burawoy (2003, p. 251) dubbed them some time ago, ‘who seeks out local
experiments, new institutional forms, real utopias if you wish, who places them in their context, translates them into a common
language, and links them one to another across the globe’.
Alt Fails – Need Specificity

Specific alternatives are key to evaluate whether the critique is better—don’t

optimistically assume that dismantling capitalism will solve all social ills.
Andrew SAYER 95, Reader in Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University

[Radical Political Economy: A Critique, 1995, p. 33-34] #ADAPacket

Any criticism presupposes the possibility of a better way of life ; to expose something as illusory or
contradictory is to imply the possibility and desirability of a life without those illusions and contradictions. This much has been
established by critical theorists such as Habermas and Apel. Yet the notion that critique implies a quest for the good is a highly
abstract one. Up to a point, particular critiques do imply something a little more specific than the
standpoint of a better life. The critique of capitalism's anarchic and uneven development implies a critical
standpoint or contrast space of an imagined society with a rationally ordered and even process of
development. The critique of class points to the desirability of a classless society . Naturally, society
would be better if its illusions, conflicts and contradictions were reduced, but we naturally want to know how this could
be achieved. The desirability of a life without contradictions or illusions does not make it feasible.
Critical social science does not merely identify illusions, irrationality or contradictions but attempts to provide explanations of their
sources, locating the 'unwanted determinations' of behaviour, as Bhaskar (1989) puts it. It
would be strange, to say the least,
if an analysis of the causes of problems such as hunger and exploitation were unable to indicate
anything about alternatives which would eliminate them. If a critical theory cannot begin to
indicate how to eliminate problems we must inevitably be suspicious of its claims to have identified
their causes. If the alternative implied by a critical standpoint is not feasible, then any critique made
from that standpoint is thereby seriously weakened. Not to put too fine a point on it, the critique of, say,
capitalism's anarchic and uneven development would lose much of its force if all [END PAGE 33] advanced
economies were necessarily anarchic and uneven in their development, though one could still criticize advanced
economies - not just capitalist ones - from the very different standpoint of a 'deep ecology', calling for a return to small-scale, more
primitive economies (Dobson, 1990).

We need to know enough about the critical standpoint and the implied alternative to be able to judge first
whether it really is feasible and desirable . Since knowledge is 'situated' and bears the mark of its author's social
position, this includes assessing whose standpoint it is made from. Does it privilege the position of a particular group (e.g. male
workers, advanced countries)? Does it imply a society without difference? If it suggests greater equality on whose terms is equality
to be defined?7 We have also to ask whether remedying one set of problems would generate others (it
usually does), and whether these would be worse than the original problems. This is rarely considered in
radical political economy, the usual implicit assumption being that all bad things go together in
capitalism and all good things under socialism/communism . Yet it is possible that some of the
'contradictions' involve dilemmas which can't be eliminated along with capitalism. Evaluations in terms of
desirability therefore need to be cross-checked with assessments of feasibility, and optimistic
assumptions of inevitable improvement suspended.

There are two kinds of feasibility which might be considered:

1 whether a certain desired end-state or goal can be realized - for example, how people can be
politically mobilized to make it happen; and

2 whether, assuming enough people are willing to try to make it happen, the goal or end-state is feasible
in itself, e.g. could one have an advanced economy without money?

It is usually only the first of these questions that radicals address , the standard response to utopian discussions
being not 'would it work?' but 'yes but how are you going to get from here to there?' But while many might think it idle to ignore (1),
it is surprising how little attention is given to (2), as
if the journey mattered more than the destination . I fully
accept that I am not offering suggestions on (1) in this book, and only ideas pertinent to (2): but then I
don't see how large-
scale political mobilization can precede a well-worked out conception of a feasible alternative .

Radical economic critiques must provide specific alternatives. Failure to

specifically explain an alternative crushes hope for transition.
Andrew SAYER 95, Reader in Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University

[Radical Political Economy: A Critique, 1995, p. 7-8] #ADAPacket

Radical political economy is of course a critical social science, both explaining and criticizing the practices it studies, with
the explicit aim of reducing illusion and freeing people from domination and unwanted forces. But it can only hope to have
an emancipatory effect if it considers its own critical standpoints and the alternative social
arrangements they imply. Unfortunately it rarely does this, with the result that its standpoints and
implicit alternatives are often contradictory, infeasible, or undesirable even if they are feasible .
Marxist-influenced work still bears the traces of the tension between the standpoints of a socialist or communist society which has
pre-industrial communitarian qualities and one in which the forces of production are developed beyond current levels of
industrialization. More generally, there is a strong modernist tendency in which it is assumed that problems can be
progressively unravelled without creating new ones at the same time, as if eventually all trade-offs or dilemmas could
be overcome through a triumph of reason. We shall argue through substantive examples that such optimism is not only
misplaced but likely to be counterproductive, limiting [END PAGE 7] progress. There are always likely to be 'dilemmas of
development' (Toye, 1987).

The problem of critical standpoints has become more acute in recent years, indeed it is central to the crisis of the Left. There is
no longer a single standpoint or alternative (socialism/communism) counterposed to a single,
overarching target (capitalism). Now there are many targets – patriarchy, racism, homophobia, militarism, industrialism – and
correspondingly many critical standpoints with complex relations between them. That critical social science is no longer seen as
synonymous with a socialist perspective is a sign of considerable progress, and cause for optimism too, as failure on the traditional
front of class politics is compensated by progress on other, newer fronts such as the politics of gender. But it is also a source of
heightened uncertainty. While there was always a problem of inconsistencies between critical standpoints, it has deepened and
widened with the rise of 'green' concerns, for they bring into question the feasibility and desirability of non-capitalist as well as
capitalist industrial societies. Is the problem capitalism, industrial society in general, or modernity?; and what are the alternatives?
Equally, increasing awareness of problems of ethnocentrism and value pluralism throws doubt over the familiar, implicit critical
stand- points of Western radical social science. How
do we decide what is a problem? What if we cannot
reach a consensus on this? Until recently, it seemed that the problems or targets of critical social science could be relied
upon to emerge from the investigation of existing practices, where one would encounter the felt needs, frustrations and suffering of
actors, and in discovering the sources of these problems, work out what changes would lead towards emancipation (e.g. Fay, 1975,
1987; Collier, 1994b). This was coupled with an implicit view that emancipation was a form of escape
from domination, illusion and unwanted constraints, with little or no acknowledgement that it depended
on the construction of superior, alternative , progressive frameworks which could replace the old
ones. But it is now increasingly apparent that normative questions of possible alternatives and what is good or
bad about them cannot be evaded. How, without addressing such questions, could one decide
what constitutes a superior alternative? Should there be a presumption in favour of community
as a basis of social organization over other forms? Does liberalism provide the best framework for multicultural societies?
What should be people's rights and responsibilities? What are our responsibilities to distant others, future generations, and to other
species? There
is little hope of achieving the goal of an emancipatory social science if it shuns
normative discussions of issues such as these.
Alternative Fails/AT Radical Democracy/Commons Alternative
The alternative can’t solve – critique of neoliberalism idealizes “the commons”
and “radical democracy” while denouncing the procedural and institutional
mechanisms necessary to realize them – either the permutation solves because
legalization is a necessary step in realization of social justice, or the alternative
is too vague to solve any of its own impacts
Barnett 10
(Clive Barnett, Faculty of Social Sciences @ The Open University, “Publics and Markets: What’s
wrong with Neoliberalism?”, The Handbook of Social Geography, edited by Susan Smith, Sallie
Marston, Rachel Pain, and John Paul Jones III. London and New York: Sage)

In accepting the same simplistic opposition between individual freedom and social justice
presented by Hayek, but simply reversing the evaluation of the two terms, critics of
neoliberalism end up presenting highly moralistic forms of analysis of contemporary political
processes. In resisting the idealization of the market as the embodiment of public virtue, they
end up embracing an equally idealized view of the forum as the alternative figure of collective
life (see Elster 1986). For example, while Harvey insists that neoliberalism is a process driven by
the aim of restoring class power, he ends his analysis by arguing that it is the anti-democratic
character of neoliberalism that should be the focal point of opposition (Harvey 2005, 205-206).
But it is far from clear whether the theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization developed by
political economists, sometimes with the help of governmentality studies, can contribute to
reconstructing a theory and practice of radical democratic justice. In Harvey’s analysis, the
withdrawal of the state is taken for granted, and leads to the destruction of previous solidarities,
unleashing pathologies of anomie, anti-social behaviour and criminality (ibid, 81). In turn, the
vacuum created by the withdrawal of the state leads to social solidarities being reconstructed
around other axes, of religion and morality, associationism, and nationalism. What has been described as the rise of the “movement society”, expressed in the
proliferation of contentious politics of rights-based struggles and identity politics, Harvey sees as one aspect of a spread of corrosive social forms triggered by the rolling-back of
states. In the wake of this rolling-back “[e]verything from gangs and criminal cartels, narco- trafficking networks, mini-mafias and favela bosses, through community, grassroots
and non-governmental organizations, to secular cults and religious sects proliferate” (ibid, 171). These are alternative social forms “that fill the void left behind as state powers,

¶ Harvey
political parties, and other institutional forms are actively dismantled or simply wither away as centres of collective endeavour and of social bonding” (ibid.).

suggests his own bundle of rights as an alternative to the neoliberal regime of rights. These
include ‘the right to life chances’, ‘control over production by the direct producers’, ‘to a decent
and healthy living environment’, and ‘to collective control of common property resources’ (ibid.
204). He provides little sense of how the inevitable tensions and trade-offs between these
sorts of rights would be negotiated and decided in practice (beyond the reiteration of Marx’s
comment that ‘Between equal rights, force decides’ as if this were both a matter of fact and of
principle). Harvey’s preference for ‘substantive’ democracy and social justice is associated with a
persistent denigration of procedural issues without which any meaningful practice of
democracy is unimaginable. Harvey casts struggles for cultural, civil, sexual or reproductive
rights since the 1960s as inevitably complicit with the ‘neoliberal frame’ favouring ‘individual
freedoms’ over ‘social justice’ (ibid., 41-43). Likewise the emergence of international human
rights movements and the development of non- governmental politics is damned as complicit
with the ‘neoliberal frame’ of individual rights and privatization (ibid. 176-177). This is a travesty
of complex political movements that have pioneered struggles for social justice along diverse
fronts, not least when Harvey claims that these movements have not focussed on developing
“substantive and open democratic governance structures” (ibid., 176). ¶ What’s really wrong with
neoliberalism, for critics who have constructed it as a coherent object of analysis, is the
unleashing of destructive pathologies through the combined withdrawal of the state and the
unfettered growth of market exchange. ‘Individual freedom’ is presented as a medium of
uninhibited hedonism, which if given too much free reign undermines the ascetic virtues of self-
denial upon which struggles for ‘social justice’ are supposed to depend. ¶ Underwritten by
simplistic moral denunciations of ‘the market’, these theories cover over a series of analytic,
explanatory, and normative questions. In the case of both the Marxist narrative of
neoliberalization, and the Foucauldian analysis of neoliberal governmentality, it remains unclear
whether either tradition can provide adequate resources for thinking about the practical
problems of democracy, rights and social justice. This is not helped by the systematic
denigration in both lines of thought of ‘liberalism’, a catch-all term used with little
discrimination. There is a tendency to present neoliberalism as the natural end-point or rolling-
out of a longer tradition of liberal thought – an argument only sustainable through the implicit
invocation of some notion of a liberal ‘episteme’ covering all varieties and providing a core of
meaning. One of the lessons drawn by diverse strands of radical political theory from the
experience of twentieth-century history is that struggles for social justice can create new forms
of domination and inequality. It is this that leads to a grudging appreciation of liberalism as a
potential source for insight into the politics of pluralistic associational life. The cost of the
careless disregard for ‘actually existing liberalisms’ is to remain blind to the diverse strands of
egalitarian thought about the relationships between democracy, rights and social justice that one finds in, for example: post-Rawslian political philosophy; post-
Habermasian theories of democracy, including their feminist variants; various postcolonial liberalisms; the flowering of agonistic liberalisms and theories of radical democracy;
and the revival of republican theories of democracy, freedom, and justice. No doubt theorists of neoliberalism would see all this as hopelessly trapped within the ‘neoliberal
frame’ of individualism, although if one takes this argument to its logical conclusion, even Marx’s critique of capitalist exploitation, dependent as it is on an ideal of self-

Any serious consideration of democracy, rights and

ownership, is nothing more than a variation on Lockean individual rights.¶

social justice cannot afford to ignore the fields of social science in which issues of rationality,
motivation, and agency are most fully theorized. These often turn out to be fields normally
considered too ‘liberal’ for the tastes of critical human geographers (cf. Sayer 1995). These fields
can serve as potential sources for revised understandings of the tasks of critical theory , ones
which do not fall back into ahistorical, overly sociologized criticisms of any appearance of
individualism or self-interest as menacing the very grounds of public virtue and the common
good. Problems of coordination, institutional design, and justification are central to any
normatively persuasive and empirically grounded critical theory of democracy. For example, the problem
central to social choice theory – the difficulty of arriving at collective preference functions by aggregating individual preferences – is a fundamental issue in democratic theory,
around which contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are increasingly focussed (Goodin 2003). Likewise, Amartya Sen’s (2002) critique of public choice theory’s
assumption that people are ‘rational fools’ provides the most compelling criticism of the one- dimensional understanding of rationality, motivation, and agency upon which
orthodox economic and public policy depends. This critique informs the “capabilities approach” which connects key problems in welfare economics to a theory of egalitarian
rights and political democracy (Sen 1999; Corbridge 2002). These are just two examples of work which takes seriously the problematization of agency, motivation and rationality
in ‘rational choice’ social science in order to move social theory beyond the consoling idea that rampant individualism can be tamed by moral injunctions of the public good and

The ascendancy of ‘neoliberalism’ as a theoretical object of approbation is

weak claims about social construction.¶

symptomatic of the negative interpretation of ‘critical’ in contemporary critical human

geography. Being critical, on this view, requires that one has a clear-sighted view of an object
that one is critical of. Theories of neoliberalism provide a compelling picture of such an object,
by providing an account of the displacement of socially embedded practices of reciprocity and
redistribution by the pathological rationalities of market exchange. This style of theorizing leads
to a mode of critical analysis in which change is always interpreted in zero-sum terms, as the
encroachment of neoliberal rationalities into realms of social solidarity. It is a style of analysis
that makes it impossible to acknowledge diverse dynamics of change, and in turn remains
blind to emergent public rationalities:¶ “If you believe in the implacable domination of
economic forces, you cannot believe in the possibility of social movements; at the very best, you
will see the movement of society as an expression of the systems’ internal contradictions, or as
a manifestation of objective suffering and poverty” (Touraine 2001, 3). ¶ Neoliberalism as an
object of analysis is certainly a critics’ term. The explicit formulation of neoliberalism into an
object of theoretical analysis in critical human geography has been associated with the turning-
in of intellectual curiosity around a very narrow space, bounded by Marxist political-economy
on the one side and poststructuralist political ontologies on the other. As long as this remains
the horizon of normative reflection, critical human geographers will continue to always know in
advance what they are expected to be critical of but will remain unable to articulate
convincingly what they are being critical for.
AT Do Nothing/Withdraw/Burn It Down Alt

The alt fails – withdrawing from capitalism/burning it down are incapable of

producing an alternative system of governance – prefer specific, institutional
alternatives
Srnicek 11
(Nick, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics, “Economics
and the Left”, The Oxford Left Review, Issue 5 | November 2011, pgs. 39)

As Alex Andrews notes, none of these approaches is suficient on its own. Yet even ¶ more
worryingly, I have been present at a number of events where it is argued that leftists needn’t
worry about such issues right now. Instead, it is suggested that all we need is to bring about a
revolution (as though revolutions were some clean break with the past, rather than being a
complex mixture of diverse social forces). The presumption implicit in this response is that once
leftists are given the opportunity to create a new society, the answers will just become clear.
Perhaps consensus decisionmaking – against all evidence – will provide a sophisticated answer! ¶
But the risk of relying on such unrelective ‘people power’ is that when the opportunity comes to
effectuate change, the actors involved fall back on habitual ideas simply because they can’t
imagine an alternative. This is a crisis of imagination, but also – more signiicantly – of cognitive
limits. Very few have done the hard work to think through an alternative economic system. And
as a result, we remain embedded within capitalist realism – unable to think outside the socio-
economic coordinates established by an all-encompassing capitalist imagination. Slavoj Žižek has
been a popular exception here by consistently arguing for the necessity of thinking about ‘the
day after tomorrow’. Yet few appear to have taken up his call, and he seems to have ignored it
himself.
AT Movements Alternative/Crisis  Transition
Neoliberalism is resilient and the alternative fails – their optimism that the
system will collapse on its own underestimates neoliberalism’s ability to re-
organize in response to financial crises – aftermath of 2008 recession proves
Mirowski 13
(Phillip, Prof. of Economics @ Notre Dame, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, pgs. 7-8)

Conjure, if you will, a primal sequence encountered in B-grade horror films, where the celluloid
protagonist suffers a terrifying encounter with doom, yet on the cusp of disaster abruptly wakes
to a different world, which initially seems normal, but eventually is revealed to be a second
nightmare more ghastly than the first.1 Something like that has become manifest in real life
since the onset of the crisis which started in 2007. From the crash onward, it was bad enough to
endure house prices sinking under water, dangling defaults and foreclosures, the collapse of
what remained of manufacturing employment, the reduction of whole neighborhoods to
bombed-out shells, the evaporation of pensions and savings accounts, the dismay of witnessing
the hope of a better life for our children shrivel up, neighbors stocking up on firearms and
people confusing bankruptcy with the Rapture. It was an unnerving interlude, with Nietzschean
Eternal Return reduced to an Excel graph with statistics from the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Fast forward to 2011. Whether it was true or not, people had just begun to hope that things
were finally turning around. Moreover, journalists in mainstream publications bandied about the
notion that academic economics had failed, and hinted that our best minds were poised to
rethink the doctrines that had led the world astray. Yet, as the year grew to a close, it slowly
dawned upon most of us that the natural presumption that we were capable of rousting
ourselves from the gasping nightmare, that we might proceed to learn from the mistakes and
fallacies of the era of Neoliberal Follies, was itself just one more insidious hallucination. A dark
slumber cloaked the land. Not only had the sense of crisis passed without any serious attempts
to rectify the flaws that had nearly caused the economy to grind to a halt, but unaccountably,
the political right had emerged from the tumult stronger, unapologetic, and even less restrained
in its rapacity and credulity than prior to the crash. In 2010, we were ushered into a grim era of
confusion and perplexity on the left. It took a rare degree of self-confidence or fortitude not to
gasp dumbfounded at the roaring resurgence of the right so soon after the most dramatic
catastrophic global economic collapse after the Great Depression of the 1930s. “Incongruity”
seems too polite a term to describe the unfolding of events; “contradiction” seems too
outmoded. Austerity became the watchword in almost every country; governments everywhere
became the scapegoats for dissatisfaction of every stripe, including that provoked by austerity.
In the name of probity, the working class was attacked from all sides, even by nominal “socialist”
parties. In the few instances when class mobilization was attempted by trade unions to
counterattack, as in the recall petition for Scott Walker in the state of Wisconsin, the birthplace
of American progressivism, it failed. The pervasive dominance of neoliberal doctrines and right-
wing parties worldwide from Europe to North America to Asia has flummoxed left parties that,
just a few short years ago, had been confident they had been finally making headway after
decades of neoliberal encroachment. Brazenly, in many cases parties on the left were
unceremoniously voted out because they had struggled to contain the worst fallout from the
crisis. By contrast, the financial institutions that had precipitated the crisis and had been rescued
by governmental action were doing just fine—nay, prospering at precrisis rates—and in a bald
display of uninflected ingratitude, were intently bankrolling the resurgent right. Indeed, the
astounding recovery of corporate profits practically guaranteed the luxuriant postcrisis
exfoliation of Think Tank Pontification. Nationalist protofascist movements sprouted in the most
unlikely places, and propounded arguments bereft of a scintilla of sense. “Nightmare” did not
register as hyperbolic; it was the banjax of the vanities.
2AC---Degrowth Good/Perm
Perm do both---Degrowth is essential for combatting capitalism---they redwash
growth
Parrique and Kallis 2-10 , 2-10-2021, (Kallis is an environmental scientist, Parrique holds a
PhD in economics) "Timothée Parrique, Giorgos Kallis- Degrowth: Socialism without Growth"
Brave New Europe, https://braveneweurope.com/timothee-parrique-giorgos-kallis-degrowth-
socialism-without-growth

Conclusions: Degrowth is as anti-capitalist as it gets

The ideology of growth has become the powerhouse of modern capitalism and we do not
understand why some socialists are reluctant to join the battle against a phenomenon that is
socially divisive and ecologically unsustainable. A socialism without growth but with well-being.
Socialism and degrowth are two of the most powerful concepts we have to criticise capitalism
and open-up the future.

As is evident by now, we do use the C-word, a lot. Certain Marxist commentators have accused
degrowth of never explicitly questioning capitalism. Phillips (2015 depicts degrowth as a “small-
scale steady-state capitalism.” The degrowth project some would think resembles the film
Downsizing (2017), where exuberant consumerism is made environmentally possible by
shrinking people down to a few centimetres.

So, let us be clear: degrowth is not miniature capitalism with tiny corporations , tiny speculative
financial instruments, and tiny free trade agreements. It is not austerity within capitalism. It is
an alternative system of provision altogether – not just smaller and slower, but different.

You may ask why focus on growth and not just capitalism? Well, try to compare the occurrence
of “economic growth” versus “capital accumulation” in the news. As Gareth Dale has forcefully
argued, economic growth is the ideology that has turned the specific interest of capital to grow
(for returns, and for keeping social peace) into a generalized social objective assimilated by the
population. This is not an ideology that will go away by refusing to confront it or beautifying it
with nice adjectives. The fact that this ideology survived even the end of capitalism (or at least
of a certain type of capitalism) in ex-socialist regimes should give pause for thought. Socialists
who defend growth must also think twice whether they are redwashing capital, redressing the
dreams that capitalism sells as socialist dreams.

Growth is the child of capitalism , but the child grew up and took over the head of the family .
Capitalism’s interest in accumulation is promoted and legitimised through – and in the name of
– “growth.” The critique of growth is the most fundamental critique of capitalism – one that
criticises not only the means capitalism uses but the very ends it sells . This makes degrowth and
(eco)socialism natural allies, not adversaries.
Alt fails---Phillips’ argument is riddled with flaws
Hussain 19 Talia Hussain, 09/01/21, MBA from imperial college London “THE 'SOCIALIST
GROWTH' SELF-DECEPTION” Talia Hussain,
http://taliahussain.com/journal/socialist_selfdeception

TO ACCEPT LEIGH PHILLIPS' ARGUMENTS IS TO ABANDON LOGIC AND EVIDENCE . EVEN THE
FLAMINGO STANDS ON ONE LEG.

I'm really annoyed to see apparently smart people making favourable comments about this article criticising de-growth on the
OpenDemocracy website. TLDR: PHILLIPS' ARTICLE IS WAY TOO LONG, DEFINITELY DON'T READ IT. HE MAKES A GOOD
ARGUMENT IN FAVOUR OF STRINGENT MARKET INTERVENTIONS TO REDUCE IRRATIONAL PRODUCTION AND IMPROVE
RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION. HE ALSO CLAIMS THAT YOU CAN HAVE GROWTH "WITHOUT LIMITS",
WHICH IS NONSENSE, AND THROWS IN THATCHER FOR NO REASON. HE DOESN'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE
SIZE OF THE ECONOMY IS NOT A DIRECT PROXY MEASUREMENT FOR HUMAN FLOURISHING.

At first glance, it looks well researched . It includes a lot of numbers, statistics, examples and references to
historical thought. It discusses how technological advances have solved difficult problems but also been hindered by perverse
economic incentives. But
who cares? None of that is relevant to the core argument the author is
trying to make. Which is that criticism of the doctrine of perpetual economic growth made by
advocates of de-growth is invalid. In his rambling exploration of everything but the kitchen sink, he proves
nothing of the kind.
IRRATIONAL PRODUCTION OF LOGICAL FALLACIES. The first section talks about irrational production, which directs
resources into activities which don't serve the public good. Phillips gives examples of perverse economic incentives which
mean that public goods like antibiotics are underinvested in, while destructive industries like oil & gas attract a lot of
investment. Obviously this is a problem, but it's not relevant to growth.

Phillips does make a good argument for market interventions that would advance a range of public goods. He calls this
"economic planning". Of course, all economies are "planned" because they all function within rules set by the state (leaving
aside black markets and crime). So, he's really advocating for a change in the rules that would produce outcomes different to
what's happening now. Fair enough, but nothing to do with growth.

Phillips claims that endless economic expansion within a finite physical system "is not the source
of the problem" of ecological challenges, pointing the finger at irrational production.
Unfortunately, both things can be a problem.

He goes on to position degrowth in opposition to "socialist growth: a boundless —if carefully

planned—increase in the creation of new value ". Sigh... First, this creates a false equating of
economic expansion with the creation of new value. New value creation also destroys value
(ooh, disruption!), so it is possible to create new value without automatically expanding the
economy. Steady-state advocates argue it's possible to create new value without "boundless" economic expansion. And you
have to because Earth's physical resources are not "boundless".

Unfortunately, the simple fact of the Earth's non-infiniteness seems to have escaped Phillips .
He's enlisted in the growth cult, and what follows is a longwinded combination of logical
fallacies and motivated reasoning.
PIE WITHOUT APPLES ≠ MARMALADE WITHOUT ORANGES. Phillips carries on his argument in favour of stringent market
intervention, with a load of examples including the reduction of CFCs and recovery of the ozone layer. He suggests that
because we've substituted other materials and technology for refrigeration, and thereby decoupled ozone depletion from
growth, we can do the same for energy. He
vastly overextends his argument saying that because
decoupling has happened in other areas, it "disproves the claim of the impossibility of absolute
decoupling". Like an anti-black swan: because he's seen white swans, the black ones therefore
must exist. (Unfortunately, all the evidence so far suggests this is not the case and we'll have to
learn to live within our energy budget from the sun.)
He goes on about Malthus, Engels etc. It's a genuinely tedious read, I'm getting bored, I skim... Democratically planned
economy? Fine, but it's nothing to do with growth.

He quotes from his own book: the

degrowther says "There's an upper limit to what humans can have."
the socialist says "through rational planning we can expand human flourishing without limit s".
Until the last bit, there is no conflict between degrowth and socialist viewpoints . Phillips sets
up a false antagonism in favour of something that can never be: expansion "without limits". The
degrowther is right, because the physical mass of resources available to us on Earth does have a
limit.
Do we need more effective distribution of those resources? Yes. Could we put them to better uses than now? Yes. Can we keep
distributing and consuming ad infinitum? No. Because eventually we'll hit the physical limit of what's possible. (Of course,
Phillips has only focussed on humans' limitless having, he fails to mention the flourishing of bison, sea cucumbers or
dandelions.)

GODWIN'S LAW OF ECONOMICS: AS AN ONLINE ARTICLE ABOUT SOCIALIST ECONOMICS GROWS LONGER, THE
PROBABILITY OF A COMPARISON INVOLVING THATCHER APPROACHES 1. Phillips' motivated reasoning kicks into high gear
as he throws in Margaret Thatcher, who's utterly irrelevant, to show just how despicable it is to point out that there is only so
much fresh water, arable land, copper, fish, etc etc on Earth. We're even running out of sand ffs. Honestly, I couldn't bother
reading this in detail. It's about money. Money isn't real. It's a tool to help us manage real resources like water, land, goats,
time, lithium, pumpkins and so on. There's a long bit about global mean income. He ignores the role of wealth and capital. He
accuses people of "woolly thinking". Rich.

Phillips proclaims the end of economic growth will be the "end

THE END OF CRITICAL THINKING. Finally
of progress". Progress to what? He hasn't a clue what he thinks we're progressing to, but mindlessly accepts
the notion that it's happening, it's good and is equal to economic growth.
He may mean progress toward increased "human flourishing". I imagine a lot of degrowth advocates
would see that as a great goal, but it doesn't negate their argument about the finiteness of the Earth.
No doubt there are advances that humans have made that have improved our health, wellbeing,
knowledge of the universe and understanding of existence. Long may such enquiry continue. But
this type of economic activity is not the same literal thing as economic expansion.

Living within planetary boundaries (which will be enforced by default eventually) doesn't mean an "end to
technological advancement" or "end to freedom " as Phillips grandly claims, with examples that
are simplistic at best. He talks about the artistic and consumer "freedom" gained when copyright laws are struck down. He
ignores that, as a writer, those laws ensure his ability to buy groceries while vast energy sucking server farms full of plastic and
rare earths are required to store his 'free' online articles. He describes a theoretically more efficient widget creating
"additional room" for economic growth as a proof of the "feasibility of decoupling". Caughtup in his own circular
logic he fails to see that a) no such widget exists in the energy sector, or that b) in his decoupled scenario the
size of the economy doesn't increase. Such increases in productivity do not require and
expansion of economic activity (although this has always resulted historically).

Combining socialist growth with planning is key to avert catastrophe

Parrique and Kallis 2-10 , 2-10-2021, (Kallis is an environmental scientist, Parrique holds a
PhD in economics) "Timothée Parrique, Giorgos Kallis- Degrowth: Socialism without Growth"
Brave New Europe, https://braveneweurope.com/timothee-parrique-giorgos-kallis-degrowth-
socialism-without-growth
Notable (eco)socialists
have recently criticized the idea of degrowth 1. Here we want to argue that such
criticism is misplaced. Growth is a problem over and above cap italism. A sustainable eco-
socialism should reject any association with the ideology and terminology of growth. 21st century
socialists should start thinking how we can plan for societies that prosper without growth. Like it
not, growth is bound to come to an end, the question is how ; and whether this will happen soon
or too late to avert planetary disasters.

Any form of endless growth is ecologically unsustainable

The typical socialist response to degrowth is that it is capitalism, and capitalist growth, that are
the problem, not economic growth. But here’s the thing: no economic growth can be
sustainable. An increase in material living standards will require, well, more materials. This is
independent of whether the economy at stake is capitalist, socialist, anarchist, or primitive.
Growth in the material standard of living requires growth in the extraction of materials and the
excretion of pollution (growth in the standard of living in general does not; we discuss this below). Result: as of today – and
very likely tomorrow as well – economic growth strongly correlates with energy and material use, at the global level which is the
only one that shows the full picture in a globalised economy.

Harvey calls the idea of compound growth the madness of economic

Leading Marxist theorist David
reason, and the most lethal of capitalism’s lethal contradictions (which makes us wonder why would
socialists spend their time trying to salvage this madness). To see how mad it is, consider the following. An innocent 3% growth each
year, means a doubling of the economy every 24 years, some ten times bigger by the end of the century, quickly growing to an
infinite size. Substitute the economy with whatever you like (‘energy’, ‘water’, ‘bicycles’, ‘massages’). The
idea of infinity is
pure madness, full stop. It is the generalisation of the logic of individual capitalists who expect to
pocket their 3-5% return every year, rain or shine. But it is not something that a society can sustain for long .

Some socialists dream of a Fully Automated Luxury Communism where new technologies enable
the absolute decoupling of economic output from the environment. So far, this has not
happened, not even close, and there are doubts as to whether the future holds better prospects. Like it or not,
economies too have to obey the laws of physics . For example, thermodynamics tells us that energy can neither be
created nor destroyed but only transformed, and that its quality moves inexorably towards a less usable or useful state. This
means there is no silver-bullet technology that can make an increase in the material standard of
living immaterial – economy is fundamentally embedded within ecology.
Of course, certain activities are more nature-intensive than others; and so potentially these could grow for a longer period without
disrupting the biosphere. For example,
fossil fuels are more disruptive than solar energy . But that does not
mean solar energy opens the door to boundless growth. A better organisation of production and new
technologies can increase productivity and lead to a relative decoupling with less resources used per product – e.g. more efficient
solar panels. But if the quantity of solar panels increases at a compound rate without limit, it will, one day, start to put pressure on
either resource availability or lead to ecological damage. In other words, nothing
material can be infinite, regardless
of whether the economy is capitalist, socialist, or anything else in between.

Furthermore, it
is one thing to decarbonise with renewable energies an energy system at its current
size, or one fifth of it (a reduction in energy use which studies show is feasible with existing
sufficiency and efficiency measures), and another to decarbonise a system that has grown ten
times bigger by the end of the century (remember 3% growth per year).

Our suggestion:
democratic socialist planning would have to consider the constraining requirement
of a degrowth use of energy and materials. This is not too much of a problem because, as we will soon argue,
many of the activities that are heavy in energy and materials today do not need to exist under
socialism. There is too much superfluous activity under capitalism, which serves nothing else but the need of capitalists to extract
surplus value and make profits. The goal instead should be socialism without growth, a sustainable
socialism – an economic system that manages to satisfy the needs of its people without clinging
to capitalist ideas of constant expansion and without of course overshooting planetary limits.

Focus on material relations key- without it the alt fails

Cameron 16 Emilie Cameron (PhD Queens university), 21 Mar 2016 The AAG Review OF
BOOKS Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary
Arctic https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2325548X.2016.1145982#page=57

This brings me to Braun’s questions about the relationship of this project to recent debates in political
ontology. As several reviewers emphasize, Far Off Metal River is not an ethnography of Inuit, and neither is it a study of Inuit
ontologies per se. Although the book is partly based on many years of research in Nunavut, it is not “about” Inuit. Readers might be
skeptical of this claim—did I not just present an understanding of Inuit ontologies to make strange Qablunaaq relationships with
knowing and not knowing? What distinguishes my work from Holbraad, Pederson, and Viveiros de Castro’s (2014) call to be inspired
by different ontologies, to “pass through” them to elicit new forms? On
a certain level, not much. None of us
produces knowledge outside of colonial relations, and I am wary of any claims of exceptionalism
in this regard. But the intention behind my engagement with Inuit ontologies— whatever these are,
however partial and limited my understanding of Inuit ways of being–knowing–doing– accounting might be (see McGrath 2011)—
was not to represent them to others. It was to learn to learn from and with Inuit so that I might
better discern the contours and stakes of Qablunaaq relations with the Arctic. Inuit ontologies and
epistemologies are, whether Qablunaat attempt to reckon with them or not, and the choice so many feel they face in this regard—
between imperial appropriation at one extreme and a poststructuralist refusal to represent at the other1 —is a false (and
narcissistic) one. Here, I
am indebted to Hunt’s observation that one can center Indigenous claims and
agency without claiming to know and represent them. There is a difference between
acknowledging the “otherwise”— beginning from the premise that it exists and matters whether
one can perceive it or not—and seeking to make the otherwise visible, mobile, and relevant to
the hegemonic center. To the extent that political ontology aims in this latter direction, I think critics are right to suggest
that it is insufficiently attentive to its own imperial and modernist investments (see, e.g., Jackson 2013; Watts 2013; Hunt 2014;
Sundberg 2014; Todd 20142). Although
I think it is important that political ontology is attempting to
engage differently with the false choice I outline earlier, I am more interested in the material
relations through which ontologies are sustained and attacked than I am in the project of
decolonizing thought itself (although, of course, the two are interrelated). The “otherwise” is not just
threatened by imperial forms of knowledge, but also by continual dispossession of lands and
livelihoods. Any project that seeks to challenge the modernist compact must never be too far
from struggles on the ground, for this is where knowledge lives and dies.

Aff perm card- degrowth is a prerequisite to the alt ?

Barca 16 Stefania Barca, Senior researcher University of Coimbra, 7-28-2016, "The Labor(s) of
Degrowth," Taylor & Francis,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2017.1373300

What these cases exemplify is the fact that

there exist, at this historical conjuncture, concrete possibilities
for articulating degrowth and labor politics in new ways, via grassroots mobilizations in
community unionism and social movement unionism, pushing labor organizations toward a
radical critique of the growth paradigm (Bayon 2014). This articulation is a crucial starting point for
developing new forms of political-ecological consciousness that go beyond the current divisions
between organized labor and degrowth and environmental justice movements . In fact, they would
allow for the development of an emancipatory ecological class consciousness, premised upon a
reconceptualization of work in the sense of dealienation and commoning , which is a necessary
prerequisite for a socially just degrowth strategy . The articulation of degrowth and labor politics toward an
ecological class consciousness implies the important task of reconsidering ideas of class in general, and of working class in particular.
Class is still an important reality for most of the world population, even as it intersects with multiple other social differentiations.
Simply ignoring class politics will do a disservice to degrowth, e.g. it will obscure the (largely)
white middle-class nature of the movement and thus its possibilities for political action.
In order to reconsider class and its intersection with degrowth, a good starting point is enlarging the concept of class relations beyond the wage labor
relation and toward a broader conception of work as a mediator of social metabolism. Biophysical
throughput is largely the
result of work done in the factory, the field, the office, the retail center and the household, but
workers have very limited control over the process. In capitalist societies, wage relations and growth-
oriented state politics alienate workers from both the labor process and product. As ecofeminist political
economy has abundantly shown, production takes over and dominates reproduction, the surplus is accumulated or reinvested in the infinite expansion
of the system. This has negative consequences for the quality and quantity of resources available for the reproduction of life and for the entire
biosphere.
Logically speaking, working-class people – those who are located at the bottom of the
global labor hierarchy and who pay the higher price to its social costs – have a vested interest in
the subversion of this system. This is what I call an emancipatory ecological class consciousness:
the awareness that climate change (and environmental violence in general) is the newest form
of class war – as always, articulated with gender and racial domination – and that it needs to be
combated via struggles for dealienation and communing (Barca 2015). Being locked in the growth
society, however, working-class people have a limited ability to make sense of and struggle
against the current organization of social metabolism, as the Mapuche oil worker’s testimony makes clear. That is
why contributing to the emergence of ecological class consciousness is , I argue, a crucial task for
a degrowth movement that rejects authoritarian solutions to the ecological crisis and aims at
building large social alliances around a truly emancipatory transition to a post-carbon economy.

Degrowth is key to de-alienation---combination solves best

Brownhill 12 Leigh Brownhill, Terisa E. Turner & Wahu Kaara 10 Feb 2012 (Ph.D. University of
Toronto.) “Degrowth? How About Some “De-alienation”?,” Capitalism nature socialism,
https://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Brownhill-et-al-dealienation.pdf

The problem with trying to degrow the economy without simultaneously engaging in de-alienation is that
private property remains private, and therefore alienation continues. Marx and Engels in The Holy Family
pointed to the positive and negative sides of alienation. One class seeks its continuation, the other its cessation:

“Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence and thereby the existence of its
opposite, the proletariat. This is the positive side of the antagonism, private property satisfied with itself.

The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled to abolish itself and thereby its conditioning opposite*private property*which
makes it a proletariat. This is the negative side of the antagonism, its disturbance within itself, private property abolished and in the
process of abolishing itself.

The possessing class and the proletarian class represent one and the same human self-alienation. But the former feels satisfied and
affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human
existence. The latter, however, feels destroyed in this alienation, seeing in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman
existence. To use Hegel’s expression, this class is, within depravity, an indignation against this depravity, an indignation necessarily
aroused in this class by the contradiction between its human nature and its life-situation, which is a blatant, outright and all-
embracing denial of that very nature.” (Marx 1978b, 133-134).

The human experience of alienation*of induction and bondage within the capital relation*is one
of violent enclosure, occupation, enslavement, eviction, transportment, and detention. De-alienation, then, needs
both the degrowthers’ ‘‘economistic’’ reclaiming of the products and processes of production
(reappropriating land, storming the factories), but also the de-alienaters’ cultural, spiritual, and
social re-integration of people with their own and others’ common humanity and with nature,
the defense of the rights of which are a precondition of human species’ survival .

In reconceiving the species-being,

the process of de-alienation is a creative, resistance-centered project
to resolve the class conflict and abolish the capital relation . ‘‘Extreme de-alienation,’’ then, would be the total
replacement of the capital relation with ‘‘gendered commoning.’’ We have said elsewhere that this creative process is one of
recollecting and reconvening the powers of fertility, especially peoples’ control over seeds, water, land, food, and fuel, and women’s
(and men’s) control over our own bodies and labor. ‘‘De-alienation’’
tries to capture this double movement, of
the reclamation of the earthly commons (necessarily entailing class struggle against enclosures)
and the reconstitution of the social life necessary for human stewardship of those commons.
De-alienation is grounded firmly in peoples’ movements for what we would call ecosocialist, ecofeminist transformation. It is about
confronting capitalist power with peoples’ counter-power in every circuit of production, consumption, social reproduction, and
nature. We contend that this transformation, this double movement, is largely founded on women’s peace and subsistence
livelihood initiatives (and very importantly, the support by some men of these initiatives). The Kenyan case demonstrates that this
counter-power lies in part in social movements’ conceptions of peoples’ power in terms of ‘‘sovereignty’’*i.e., constitutional right to
control the resources of the country*and the varied urban and rural initiatives aimed at achieving this soveriengty through the
defense and reappropriation of the commons.

Baby perm card, AT degrowth can’t begin tomorrow

Fitz 13 Don Fitz, 3-25-2013, (PhD at the University of Texas Austin) "Should socialists support
degrowth?," Climate & Capitalism, https://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/03/25/should-
socialists-support-degrowth-2/

There is nothing that strikes to the heart of capitalism more than confronting its primal urge to
grow. A failure to identify the culprit as capitalist growth is the major limitation of liberal
movements to halt climate change, protect biodiversity, guard communities from toxins and
preserve natural resources. Rather than being dismissive toward ongoing struggles against
growth, socialists should enthusiastically participate and point to their anti-capitalist essence .

It makes no sense to abstain from ongoing challenges to growth with a claim that anti-growth
cannot begin tomorrow. Today’s anti-extraction (i.e., anti-growth) conflicts are the most intense
they have ever been. If those who stand back from supporting them claim that they wish to
build a new society, the society that they would create would be one whose economy grew and
grew until it made human existence impossible .
Etc
AT: Root Cause
No root cause
Larrivee 10— PF ECONOMICS AT MOUNT ST MARY’S UNIVERSITY – MASTERS FROM THE
HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL AND PHD IN ECONOMICS FROM WISCONSIN, 10 [JOHN, A
FRAMEWORK FOR THE MORAL ANALYSIS OF MARKETS, 10/1,
http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper-1.pdf]

The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in critical commentary on

capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: “I see X in our society. We have
a capitalist economy. Therefore capitalism causes X.” They draw their conclusion by looking at a phenomenon as it
appears only in one system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is particularly bad. 6 The solution to such

flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good and bad , in market and non-market systems.
Thus the following section considers a number of issues— greed, selfishness and human relationships, honesty and truth, alienation and work

satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participation—that have often been associated with capitalism, but have also been

problematic in other systems and usually in more extreme form . I conclude with some evidence for the view
that markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My purpose is not to smear communism or to make the simplistic argument that

The critical point is that certain people thought

“capitalism isn’t so bad because other systems have problems too.”

various social ills resulted from capitalism, and on this basis they took action to establish
alternative economic systems to solve the problems they had identified. That they failed
to solve the problems, and in fact exacerbated them while also creating new problems,
implies that capitalism itself wasn’t the cause of the problems in the first place , at least not to the
degree theorized.
Water Policy Link Turns
AT: Link---Top Level
Protecting water resources is unambiguously good, should use market
mechanisms, and outweighs the kritik.
Boyer '21 [Marcel; February 2021; Professor of Economics at the University of Montreal, PhD
in Economics from Carnegie-Mellon University; "Beyond ESG: Reforming Capitalism and Social-
Democracy," https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/2021s-03.pdf/]

Water is probably the resource with the greatest importance to humanity. From a relatively abundant
resource in ancient times, water has become a scarce resource with the explosive growth of the world’s
population and the phenomenal development of the world’s economies.

To the extent that the distribution of water resources differs from the distribution of the
population and water intensive economic activities, there is a need to trade or even market water if we are
to balance availability and needs. In a publication to be released in 2021, 27 Maria Kouyoumijian and I focus on two
main sets of issues related to water economics. First, the need to improve water management with
efficient instruments and institutions based on competitive markets, including appropriate
pricing and well-regulated trade. Socially responsible management of water resources has
become a global challenge and represents a major opportunity for development and wealth creation for all.

Second, the need to use all available means to inform all stakeholders of the increasing value
and cost of water: users, including individuals, households and businesses; public and private managers and operators of
natural freshwater resources; commercial and industrial water and ancillary service providers; operators of water and wastewater
treatment plants or centres; and developers of technologies and equipment for the exploitation, transportation, and management
of water resources.

The greatest danger on the horizon is that, through a lack of understanding, leadership, and
open communication, the international community of developed and developing countries will lag in
designing and implementing the governance mechanisms needed to manage our freshwater
resources, however abundant or scarce. Time is running out. The global water crisis is imminent and as
critical as climate change if not more, but far fewer resources are devoted to it .

Clearly, water is both a human right and an economic commodity with very special
characteristics: Its consumption momentarily destroys the good (the glass of water I drink is unavailable to anyone else, so
water is a private good in the economic sense of the term), but the water consumed regenerates and eventually
finds its way back into nature to be consumed again and again in an unending cycle. Identifying
and delivering the right balance between these two necessarily complementary visions, water as a human right
and water as a commodity with special characteristics, involves untangling a Gordian knot that
humanity must address today.

It is precisely because access to water is a human right that appropriate markets and
commercial arrangements (pricing and control) must be designed to make this right a reality
for all, rather than just a pipe dream.
We must ask questions that some still find extremely disconcerting: If water is considered a shared endowment, how can we keep it
from being over-exploited and over-consumed (the tragedy of the commons)? If water is assigned its due value, how can we avoid
the opposite problem, in which it is underused because some rights holders withhold it from the market (tragedy of the
anticommons)? How much should users pay for water (and wastewater treatment)? How to determine the “right” price? How is
water scarcity managed in practice? How can trade facilitate the transformation of a water-poor country into a country capable of
managing its local water in a sustainable if not self-sufficient manner?
Boyer and Kouyoumijian explore market
instruments that can be developed and applied to water
resources. This may be the most audacious challenge of all, as the creation of competitive water markets could
be a first step toward a more prosperous era for everyone: individuals and the agricultural, industrial, and residential sectors of the
economy. At the forefront are water
management technologies that can support the value chain,
including dikes and dams, transportation, and desalination plants.

Consumers of commodities, including water, respond to prices: Lower prices lead to higher demand.
When water is free, there is no reason to conserve or minimize the amount of water used.
Where water is scarce, providing water for free is a recipe for ensuring that demand exceeds
supply.

Maintaining water markets can be difficult . Potable water distribution and wastewater collection systems are natural
monopolies because it is not possible to build several parallel networks of pipes, as competition would require.28 However,
monopolies, whether private or public, do not work well. They are rarely efficient, effective, or
sensitive to the wishes of their customers and may overcharge because there is no competition to set a market price.

But going to the other extreme, setting the price of water at zero or artificially low, also causes
distortions. If there is no market to set the price, adequate regulation can ensure that the price
reflects the opportunity cost and is thus the best possible approximation to the dynamics of supply
and demand.

Whatever the case may be, the regulation of drinking water must be independent and free of
conflicts of interest. In an ideal system, operation of water treatment plants and pipelines will be separated from systems
oversight, which in turn will be separated from creation of the rules and standards with which the system must comply. We know
how to do all of that.

But many books and documentaries, as well as political organizations, NGOs and lobbies, present an
apocalyptic and ultimately dystopian vision of the use of market and commercial mechanisms
(pricing and markets) to help alleviate the impending global water shortage. To these authors and
leaders, this recourse to market mechanisms and the commodification of water is nothing less
than the embodiment of evil, designed to enslave the whole world.
In Canada, for example, Maude Barlow and the militants of the Council of Canadians have taken it upon themselves to block any
opening to market mechanisms by wrapping themselves in the flag and using (exploiting) many young children in their advertising
campaigns, asserting that the right to water is certainly a universal human right, but not access to OUR Canadian water. As one of
the members put it: “Water is best used where God put it.”29 Fortunately for Canadians, God put a lot of water in Canada!

They are oblivious to the fact that we are all increasingly in the same boat in the face of water
shortages, and that the division should not be between those who have a surplus of water and
those who suffer from shortages, but rather between those who advocate a reasoned use and an
incentive-based protection of water resources associated with effective and equitable
sharing (trade) and those who deny the reality of the urgent needs of humanity beyond their
borders while proffering hollow platitudes.

The political lobbying of this self-righteous coalition borders on extreme forms of policy
collusion and cronyism. It has no other solution to offer than to repeat clichés and falsehoods
about competition and markets, caricaturing their limitations as reflecting their true nature, in
order to virtually take over the water resources and in so doing create a tragedy of the
anticommons that hurts citizens both here and abroad.
AT: Link---Growth
Empirics validate the desirability of protection based public policy---only
harnessing growth can feasibly achieve environmental sustainability.
Cohen '20 [Steve; 1/27/20; PhD in Political Science from the State University of New York in
Buffalo, Senior Vice Dean of Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and a Professor in the
Practice of Public Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is
also Director of the Master of Public Administration Program in Environmental Science and
Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, Director of the Masters
of Science in Sustainability Management at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies,
and the Director of the Earth Institute’s Research Program on Sustainability Policy and
Management at Columbia University; "Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability,"
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/01/27/economic-growth-environmental-
sustainability/]

I find this dialogue a little amazing since it completely ignores the

history of America’s success in decoupling the
growth of GDP and the growth of environmental pollution. This fact of American environmental and economic
life began around 1980, a decade after the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and
continues today. It’s really quite simple: with public policies ranging from command-and-control
regulations to direct and indirect government subsidies, businesses and governments
developed and applied technologies that reduced pollution while allowing continued economic
growth. This is not a fantasy, it is history. In the 1960s you could not see the mountains from
downtown Los Angeles; today you can. In the 1960s you could not ride a bike on a path next to the
Hudson River; today you can. Until 1985 , we New Yorkers dumped raw sewage into the Hudson
River. Today, with rare exceptions, we treat our sewage waste. And both Los Angeles and New York City have larger
economies in 2020 than they had in 1980. In case you believe this progress was due to deindustrialization, the two largest sources of
air pollution are power plants and motor vehicles and we have many more of them today than we had in 1980. Both utilize pollution
control technology required by regulation under the law.

Environmental protection itself contributes to economic growth. Somebody makes and sells the air pollution control technologies
we put on power plants and motor vehicles. Somebody builds the sewage and water treatment facilities. Just as someone makes
money off of solar cells and windmills and whoever invents the 1,000-mile high capacity battery that will power electric cars
someday will become very, very rich. And environmental amenities are worth money. The cleaner Hudson made the waterfront
more suitable for housing development. And the building boom on New York’s west side followed the clean-up of the Hudson River.
An apartment across the street from a park will bring a higher price than the same apartment a block away. The revival of New
York’s Central Park raised the value of the already high-end real estate bordering the park. Clean air and water, healthy food and
preserved nature all benefit human health and result in far more economic benefit than economic cost.

The climate problem is not caused by economic growth, but by the absence of effective public
policy designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is nothing incompatible with capitalism
and environmental protection as long as rules are in place that control the environmental
impacts of the products and services we make and use. With those rules in place, a concern for
environmental sustainability can and will permeate everyday decision-making in the private, nonprofit
and governmental organizations we all benefit from.

I’ve written often about the evolution of the field of management over the past century or so and that a concern for sustainability is
the newest trend in the development of more sophisticated organizational management. In the 20th century, we saw the field of
management absorb the development of mass production, social psychology, accounting, information management, satellite and
cellular communications, globalization and now a concern for the physical dimensions of environmental sustainability. Sustainability
managers continue to lead an organization’s marketing, strategy, finance and work processes but they also seek to assess their use
of energy, water and other materials and work to reduce waste and environmental impacts. Just as finance staff, reinforced by the
Security and Exchange Commission rules learned to identify and reduce self-dealing, conflict of interest and fraud; sustainability
staff reinforced by EPA rules look to identify and reduce organizational practices that damage
the environment.

On the production side, organizational

managers work to increase environmental sustainability, but
on the consumption side, consumers are not only buying green but changing patterns of
consumption that also help reduce environmental damage. Going to a gym, riding a bike or eating a salad are
all activities that add to the GDP. But so does taking your private jet to your ski lodge, driving in your SUV to the ski slopes, and
eating a steak. All
consumption behaviors are not created equal and do not have the same impact on
environmental sustainability. More
sustainable lifestyles are emerging and they can be detected in
consumption patterns. For example, young Americans seem less interested in owning cars than their older siblings and
parents did. Ride-sharing, bike sharing and other transit options have become feasible due to the development of the smartphone.
But sitting in an Uber or driving your own car are both economic activities that are counted in the GDP.

These consumption trends are more influenced by changing cultural norms than by public policy, and typically should not be
subjects of policymaking. Exceptions might include consumption that has a direct negative impact on others such as driving while
intoxicated or smoking in a public space. The environmental impact of consumption can also be reduced by
new technologies. For example, streaming music and video has far less environmental impact than videos and discs that used
to be manufactured, packaged and shipped before they were used.

It is ironic that some environmentalists along with some climate deniers share the belief that we
must trade off economic growth and environmental protection. We can and must accomplish
both. A reason that we cannot abandon economic development is that most people in the
developed world like the way they live and will not give up their way of life. Asking them to do
so dooms environmental advocates to political marginalization and failure. Due to the internet,
even very poor people in the developing world see the way we live here, want it, and are demanding
that their political regimes help them achieve their dreams. The absence of economic development
leads to political instability and the potential for violence. Climate scientists often mention the impact of
climate change on political instability and the phenomenon of climate refugees is well documented. But the path to climate
mitigation is not through slower economic growth, but through economic growth that is
steered toward environmental sustainability and away from gratuitous environmental destruction.
One of the first sustainability books I ever read was Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature. McHarg developed cluster development as an
alternative to suburban sprawl. The idea was that rather than providing every home with a quarter acre of land and their own large
yard, you would build the housing in the one area of the building site that would cause the least damage to natural drainage and
eco-systems and preserve the rest of the land as a parkland for hiking and viewing. It turned out that most of the outdoor access
people used in their homes was on their patios, and that suburban yards were not simply ecological disasters, but a burdensome
waste for most homeowners. (This past June a wonderful piece summarizing McHarg’s ideas and influence appeared on the City Lab
website and it is well worth reading.) McHarg demonstrated that with care, humans could build urban developments that might
minimize rather than maximize environmental damage.

Sloppy management, the hunger for easy money and short-term profits, and ideological rigidity lead some to believe the
environment must be sacrificed for economic growth. The
belief that capitalism is evil and inevitably causes
environmental destruction leads others to believe that sustainable economic development is
not feasible. My view is that with enlightened design, sustainability management and cutting-edge
technology we can harness human ingenuity to the practical problems of environmentally
sustainable economic development. We can build and live in sustainable cities and end the
climate and ecological crises that seem so overwhelming today.
AT: Link---Protection
Protection of water is integral to resisting accumulation by dispossession under
AT: Link---State
State interventions like the plan are a necessary and positive corrective.
Movahed '16 [Masoud; 2/15/16; PhD Student in Sociology and Economics from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison; "Does capitalism have to be bad for the environment?"
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/does-capitalism-have-to-be-bad-for-the-
environment/]

Examples of success in terms of growth rates are numerous in the modern history of capitalism.
The massive industrial development of England in the 18th and 19th centuries, the United States as early capitalist developers prior
to the two devastating World Wars, the remarkable growth of rates western Europe (i.e. Germany, France, Italy,) in the post-war era
followed by Japan in the last half a century, the rise of the East Asian Tigers and, of course more recently, the Chinese leviathan are
the conspicuous examples of stunning economic development in contemporary capitalism.

So what is the problem? After all, if capitalism has been very successful in projecting itself as the engine of productivity and growth,
why should it be blamed for environmental disasters? It is herein that the very core dynamics of capitalism that generate its virtues,
also cause its maladies. Capitalism requires endless growth of production in order to remain stable , raise
the standards of living, and produce ample employment for the young and increasing world population.

Production itself is contingent on consumption . Without sufficient consumption, which creates more demands for
production, the production cycle would be paralyzed. Consumption is thus the flip side of the coin of a thriving
production cycle. But while capitalism stimulates tremendous productivity rates, it biases productivity towards more
consumption to ensure that the production process is not impeded. Therefore, mass consumption - or consumerism - is not merely a
cultural phenomenon. It is embedded in the core tenets of capitalism as an economic system. The higher consumption, the higher
production, the higher production, the higher sales, and with higher sales, higher profits are generated, which are largely re-invested
in the sustainability of the firm or the business-unit.

But if
we live in a finite planet with limited ecological and natural resources that ought to be
preserved for sustainability purposes, how than, can we resolve this contradiction? If the carrying capacity of
the world cannot sustain endless consumption and production, there is clearly a contradiction at stake here. This contradiction
naturally raises the more important question: how to reconcile the quandary of maintaining a capitalist system that meets necessary
growth rates to remain stable on the one hand, and simultaneously contain the environmental hazards that threaten our planet on
the other?

To answer these questions, there are three propositions about the very nature and dynamics of capitalism
that have to be examined. First, firms in a capitalist setting are under enormous pressure to cut
costs, because if they don’t, their competitors will. Since their competitors cut costs to be able to reinvest in the firm’s growth and
thereby, become more competitive, if one firm refrains from doing so, it will be soon pushed out of the market by others.

As the economic sociologist Erik Wright of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said, one
way of cutting cost is to
project some of that cost onto the environment. Imagine, for instance, throwing a can of soft drink from a car
window because this is a low-cost way of disposing of a can, and being totally indifferent to its negative impact on others. The same
behaviour is often adopted by large businesses.

The market dynamics in capitalism do not provide any mechanisms in themselves to prevent
this behaviour; it requires some forms of non-market intervention either by state or by organized social
forces. States have shown that they are reluctant to or deliberately ignore taking measures against this. In
democratic countries, however, social forces are given relative freedom to organize around this cause. Social activists with a whole
slew of interests - including the environment - usually take it upon themselves to draw public attention to this issue. Through
mass organization,environmentalists can pressure the state to impose certain regulations on
firms to conduct activities that are less detrimental to the environment .
Secondly, the price of non-renewable natural resources under capitalism is usually organized around relatively short-term horizons
with almost no account of the future value of these finite resources. The rate of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere has
increased sharply since the mid-1990s, driven mainly by strong economic growth in developing countries that often consume
massive natural resources such as oil, gas, and other minerals.

China and India have grown rapidly in the past two decades and the bedrock of development in their industrial settings are non-
renewable natural resources, which happen to generate one of the highest rates of carbon gas emissions. Non-renewable natural
resources are often underpriced since their future value is not accounted for in the dynamics of supply and demand. In an influential
study for the World Bank, Margaret Slade shows in great detail that the enormous negative “externality” - negative impact - that’s
inflicted onto the environment as a result of extraction, production, and the use of minerals is largely due to underpricing those
natural resources. Which is to say, the massive minerals consumption that’s responsible for a large fraction of world pollution are
not taken into account in the prices that they are offered in the market. The upshot is that buyers tend to overconsume these
resources. The fluctuating price of oil that’s produced by the Persian Gulf States is the most telling example.

What can be done?

As I alluded earlier, the architecture of market under a capitalist setting does not provide any mechanisms to counter the
environmental hazards that the large-scale production and consumption processes inflict on the environment. Hence, there
have to be non-market interventions to contain or reduce environmental damages. This non-
market intervention can be either state or social forces . Of course, one could argue that it is state’s
responsibility to regulate this inimical behaviour of the firms against the environment by
heavily taxing those firms that violate the environmental regulations that the state sets in
place.
AT: Environment---War Turns
War turns the kritik---obliterates the environment.
Mercer '5/13 [Matthew; 5/13/21; writer for Red Flag; "How militarism is killing the planet,"
https://redflag.org.au/article/how-militarism-killing-planet/]

Military production depends on the consumption of large quantities of fossil fuels and involves
countless other environmentally destructive processes. The mining, refining and production of
some of the key resources employed in military production, like aluminium, steel and nickel, are highly energy intensive,
producing massive emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases .
Over half the energy required for aluminium smelting is currently produced by burning coal, and the perfluorocarbons released
during the smelting process are between 6,500 and 9,200 times more potent as drivers of global warming than carbon dioxide.
Nickel mining emits millions of tonnes of toxic sulphur dioxide per year, and has a history of severe pollution of the land, air and
water surrounding mines—such as when a major spill from the Norilsk nickel factory in Russia turned the Daldykan river bright red in
2016.

Steel production contributes 3.3 billion tonnes annually to global carbon emissions. The iron and steel industries are estimated by
the International Energy Agency to be responsible for around 6.7 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

Then there are nuclear weapons. Even if we discount the possibility that the thousands of
nuclear warheads currently armed and ready to deploy around the world will one day lead to the
destruction of all human civilisation, we must factor in the poisonous industry that produces
them. Whatever the industry’s backers might say, the risks involved in mining uranium, producing power in nuclear reactors and
dealing with radioactive waste are all too obvious from the history of highly destructive accidents—from the Ranger uranium mine
spill in 2013, to the catastrophic meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The US military is both the world’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels and its largest
producer of carbon emissions. The five largest US chemical companies combined produce only a fifth
of the military’s emissions.
Multiple studies show a correlation between states’ increased military spending and high emissions. Armies internationally are also
responsible for two-thirds of global emissions of chlorofluorocarbons—a volatile derivative of methane that, in addition to
contributing to global warming, destroys the ozone layer that protects Earth from damaging ultraviolet light (a major cause of skin
cancer). These substances were banned under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, but the military use of them goes on.

And all this concerns only the day to day “peacetime” operations of the military. War itself, as
well as killing, maiming and destroying human lives, is catastrophic for the environment, flattening
landscapes and poisoning the air.

Environmental destruction can be a conscious tool of warfare. During the Vietnam War, the US sprayed an
estimated 20 million gallons of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange across the country in order to clear forest canopies providing
cover to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops and to cripple agriculture. The toxic effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam’s
environment, farming and human life continue to today.

Even when not purposefully destroying nature, warfare causes irreparable environmental
damage. The US bombing campaigns in Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s created extensive pollution and environmental degradation.
The use of ammunition tipped with depleted uranium contaminated possibly tens of thousands of hectares of Iraqi land and led to
elevated levels of birth defects in communities where the bombing was most intense.

And the initial destruction wrought by wars has massive roll-on effects. After the 1991 Gulf War and 2003
US invasion, cases of typhoid increased tenfold among the Iraqi population as a result of water pollution due to the destruction of
sewage systems and other basic infrastructure.

Similar damage occurred in Afghanistan. Already in 2003, just two years into a war that has now dragged on for two decades, a
United Nations Environment Programme report found that the war, combined with a lengthy drought, had “caused serious
and widespreadland and resource degradation, including lowered water tables, desiccation of
wetlands, deforestation and widespread loss of vegetative cover, erosion, and loss of wildlife
populations”.