Tuesday, July 17, 2012

"Sustainable" is a social, not an individual, adjective


Any economist who ever made an argument on the basis of something like a steady state and intertemporal maximization should be fairly friendly to the sustainability movement (that includes you ERE peddling Austrians). That's really the only point of it: making sure that we can do in the future what we're doing now. It's good stuff.

However, sustainability is really a social thing rather than an individual thing (although certainly individual actions can contribute to social sustainability). This recently came to mind when I was reading about the "sustainable community" (not commune as Woody Harrelson points out) that Willie Nelson, Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Kris Kristofferson, and others live in in Maui, Hawaii.

Here's the main point: why do Nelson, Wilson, Harrelson, and Kristofferson live in this community and not you, me, and your brother?

Because they're rich and it's probably expensive to live there. It's the same reason why my house doesn't run on solar power, although that would be a nice long-term goal. I'd imagine living sustainably on Hawaii is even more expensive than living on the mainland.

So how can these guys afford it? Well Willie is a musician - an old favorite of mine, in fact. The last time I saw him in concert I drove up to Baltimore to see him perform with Bob Dylan. Come to think of it, I remember lots of cars in that parking lot.

We drive to these things, and we pay for the concerts and movies these guys are making, by doing what we do everyday: which inevitably uses a lot of carbon and other resources. Getting to and from work on carbon-consuming transportation got me the money to buy Harrelson's movie Zombieland, which got him the money to buy his nice sustainable house.

We live in a market economy and a democratic society. Life is always social. We achieve what we achieve because of the actions of others, so when we think about a concept like "sustainability" we can't just think of what the total behavior of society enables a few rich guys to do. We have to instead think about what the total behavior of society enables all of society to do

This isn't to say I'm against what they're doing, just because I think in reality the life style is not as sustainable as they'd like to think. It creates a goal for people, and rich people have always pioneered the technology that then becomes affordable for the rest of us. And they're certainly raising awareness about these issues.

But when it comes to thinking about sustainability, you've gotta think globally - not locally.

5 comments:

  1. Any economist who ever made an argument on the basis of something like a steady state and intertemporal maximization should be fairly friendly to the sustainability movement (that includes you ERE peddling Austrians). That's really the only point of it: making sure that we can do in the future what we're doing now. It's good stuff.

    I realize you're just making a joke, Daniel, but the Austrians by no means "peddle" the ERE or hold it up as some sort of ideal. In fact, Mises spends a lot of time explaining that it is internally contradictory. So no, Austrians don't "peddle" it.

    A better example might be Hayek and Mises' discussions of the maintenance of the capital stock. They don't come right out and say, "It is optimal to never consume principal," but it's a lot closer than saying they peddle the ERE.

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  2. DK: So you admit that you actually BOUGHT Zombieland?

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  3. Speaking of the term "sustainable", Daniel Kuehn, did you ever take a class in environmental economics or ecological economics? What is your opinion of those divisions of economics?

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  4. Having lived in Hawai'i, I think it is pretty easy to live sustainably there. (You do want to stock up on toilet paper, though, in case of a shipping strike. ;)) You don't need a greenhouse, and solar panels, although perhaps expensive to install, provide cheap electricity. And it is very easy to grow stuff in the volcanic soil. If you don't grow your own food, you are vulnerable, though, because Hawai'i grows for export and does not produce enough food commercially for its population. You can't live on sugar cane and pineapples alone. ;)

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