La fin de l'abondance: L'économie dans un monde post-pétrole

by John Michael Greer

Quoi qu’en disent les adeptes du développement durable, les substituts aux énergies fossiles abondantes et bon marché n’existent pas. Aucune source d'énergie alternative ne pourra offrir un rendement aussi élevé que les énergies fossiles. Puisqu’ils refusent d’intégrer cette réalité, les modèles économiques dominants ne savent pas comment appréhender l'après-pétrole, et les habitants des sociétés industrielles sont incapables de se préparer aux profondes mutations qui les attendent.

Plongeant aux fondements de la pensée économique depuis Adam Smith, "La fin de l’abondance" montre que l’actuelle orthodoxie néoclassique fait fausse route en traitant la Terre et ses ressources comme des facteurs de production inépuisables, ce qu’elles ne sont pas.
Avec les énergies alternatives dites "diffuses", l’humain pourra par exemple réchauffer l’eau du bain, mais il ne pourra faire tourner les gigantesques turbines électrogènes qu’exige notre société de transformation industrielle, de consommation, de déplacements gigantesques et d’information électronique.

Au fond, écrit Greer, l'ère industrielle tout
entière, fondée sur les sources d’énergies concentrées et accessibles, aura peut-être représenté la plus grande bulle spéculative de l'histoire.

Traçant du monde de demain un portrait qui évoque explicitement le tiers-monde, John Michael Greer plaide en faveur des technologies intermédiaires chères à E.F. Schumacher ("Small is Beautiful"), de
changements politiques propres à adoucir la transition… et d'une bonne dose de stoïcisme.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Environment, Ecology, Sustainability, Business

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 31, 2011

About the author

John Michael Greer is an author of over thirty books and the blogger behind The Archdruid Report. He served as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His work addresses a range of subjects, including climate change, peak oil, the future of industrial society, and the occult. He also writes science fiction and fantasy. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife.

Reviews

[Guy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The weakest of Greer's books that I have read, this one seems to me as if its genesis was in an idle reflection or a bon mot around the dinner table (wordplay simultaneously on both Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and Schumacher's "Economics as if People Mattered") and it never really developed into much more than that. Or, more accurately, Greer never put the work in to develop it into much more than that.

There are of course plenty of intriguing insights and perspectives, as I've come to expect from Greer, but not much that is new if you have read his "Long Descent" and "Ecotechnic Future". This is more a rhetorical work than a closely reasoned or well researched one and there are a fair number of lazy errors as a result, in particular when he focusses on energy. I'll give a few examples:

o when discussing Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions on page 57: "Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astonomy isn't wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy; if you want to know how the movements of the planets appear when seen from Earth - for the purposes of navigating a boat by the stars, for example - the Ptolemaic approach is still a better way to go about things." Well, no. The Ptolemaic and Copernican approaches are identical for the purpose of navigation, because you navigate by the stars, not the planets, and for both approaches the stars are essentially fixed.

o pg 91: "If we allow ourselves to wait until actual energy shortages begin to cripple our capacity to produce goods and services, it will be much too late to start retooling our civilization for some other energy resource, even if one happens to turn up." I call rhetoric. For a start, we have started retooling our civilization for some other energy resource -- several in fact: sun, wind, tides, geothermal, and hydro. We might not be far along, but we have started. Second, although I suppose it depends upon how you define "cripple", even after we start to feel energy shortages, we should be able to switch to renewables on the generation side, and on the consumption side replace direct fossil-fuel use applications with electrical ones (such as electric cars). I mean, we replace 5-10% of our cars each year in the West and it isn't as if fossil fuels will disappear from one day to the next. Now, it won't be painless, and whether we will actually choose to do the right thing or instead fight over the ever-shrinking fossil fuel pie... well that's another question. But Greer pooh-poohs the possibility... and in that he is wrong.

o pg 125, talking about the advantages of concentrated energy (fossil fuels) over diffuse energy (sunlight): "This is why it takes millions of dollars and complex motorized mirror systems to focus sunlight onto a boiler and produce steam, when this could be produced with much simpler technology and at much lower cost by burning fossil fuels: the energy in the fossil fuels is more concentrated, and thus much less enegy is needed to put it to work." This is perilously close to not even being wrong. Deuterium is a far more concentrated energy source than fossil fuels... but the technology to generate energy from it (via fusion) is beyond us still today. So, it isn't concentration that counts, is it? Fossil fuels can be burned, and the heat required to start them burning is producible by a savage with a stick... that's what is important... and it has nothing to do with concentration. On another front, you don't need "millions of dollars and complicated motorized mirror systems to focus sunlight onto a boiler" to produce steam: you can do it with a magnifying glass. You have the big complex systems because you want to produce huge amounts of steam... but big volumes of fossil fuels also require big complex technology to mine and transport... so where's the difference? And more generally, what's the point? Once again, rhetoric over reality.

o pg 129-130: a couple of pages of hand-waving (i.e., no figures, just assertions) that basically boils down to saying that concentrated solar power (CSP) plants won't work because they require too much energy to build and maintain. Trouble is EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) analyses have been done for CSP... and it looks like they produce 5-20x the energy invested in them... and are trending higher as the technology matures. Of course, there was that 1986 study that said 1.6x... that must be the one Greer is relying on. Seriously, this is a key point in his whole argument for a low-tech future... one would expect some analysis here.

o pg 131-132: some more detailed analysis of CSP at last! Using technology from, wait for it, 1910! 13,000 square feet of parabolic solar reflecting troughs produced 55hp (42kw). But what about modern technology? Well, Greer deprecatingly says "Modern technology could do better, doubtless, but not much better, given the law of diminshing returns that affects all movements in the direction of efficiency...". Well, let's work it out. Photovoltaic panels are modern technology, they generate electricity these days at 20% for the mass market, and 40% in the lab -- let's be charitable and take 20%. 13,000ft2 is 1300m2, solar irradiation is 1kw/m2, so we get 1300kw*20% = 260kw... more than six times better than the technology from 1910! And we can double that again with the 40% panels in labs. And if you are wondering if 260kw (a quarter of a megawatt) is a significant amount of energy... well, electric cars use about 0.2kwh per km, so in one hour 260kw produces enough energy to move a car from New York to Chicago (and then some), or from London to Florence. Seems like quite a bit to me.

o pg 133: here we learn, without any figures to back it up, that geothermal power won't work either. I am now enlightened... or would be if it weren't for the fact that there's a geothermal plant in the next town over from me merrily producing 3.5 megawatts 7/24/365 (and that's after subtracting the energy used for pumps). Oh, and no magma in sight (that's Greer's explanation for when it could work).

o pg 135: and now we are treated to a disparaging description of technology from 1874...

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Why such egregious errors? Partly it is because Greer doesn't let little details get in the way of making a good point (e.g., Ptolemy), but more often I think the basic reason is because he has a doomer bias: he is convinced that as fossil fuels run out we will not be able to maintain a high-tech civilization and so anything that conflicts with that vision gets edited out or smothered with rhetoric. A kind of willful blindness....

Ah well, nobody's perfect. If you ignore everything Greer says about energy and technology, and just focus on his observations about economics there is still a lot that is worth reading in this book. But there's enough that is irritatingly wrong so that I can't find it in myself to give it more than two stars. Ah well, nobody's perfect.

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 5 out of 5]

Economists are not, by and large, stupid people. Many of them are extraordinarily talented: the level of mathematical skill displayed by the number-crunching "quants" in today's brokerages and investment banks routinely rivals that in leading university physics departments. Somehow, though, many of these extremely clever people have not managed to apply their intelligence to the take of learning from a sequence of glaring and highly publicized mistakes. This is troubling for any number of reasons, but the reason most relevant just now is that economists play a leading role among those who insist that industrial economies need not trouble themselves about the impact of limitless economic growth on the biosphere and the resource base that supports all our lives. If they turn out to be as wrong about that as so many economists were about the housing bubble, they will have made a fateful leap from risking billions of dollars to risking billions of lives. (15)

The differences between the tertiary economy [i.e., finance] and the primary [i.e., natural resources] and secondary [i.e., production of goods] economies run very deep, and those differences have consequences that are central to our current predicament. In the real world, the supply of tangible goods produced by natural cycles or human labor is limited by factors that may not necessarily respond to changes in demand. If there's only so much water in a river, for example, that's how much water there is; the fact that people want more, if such is the case, does not produce any more water that the hydrologic cycle is already willing to provide. Equally, if a country's labor force, capital plant and resource base are fully engaged in making a certain quantity of secondary goods, producing more requires a good deal more than a decision to do so; the country must increase its labor pool, its capital plant, its access to resources or some combination of these, in order to increase the supply of goods.

Yet the only limit on the production of tertiary goods is that demand for them. (68)

Greer goes on to argue that this difference reveals itself most clearly in the forms of feedback each economy entails. The primary and secondary economies involve negative feedback, which is the essence of Adam Smith's "invisible hand"; when demand increases, prices rise until demand diminishes, at which point prices decline, and so on. Similar homeostatic systems occur throughout the natural world, the "primary economy." Only in the tertiary economy is the opposite case true, with positive feedback in effect. For example, in the mid-2000s, housing was seen as a great investment, i.e., it became part of the tertiary economy, and so prices rose far beyond the logic dictated by supply and demand, until the bubble popped, and prices dropped like a lead balloon, with each decrease in price pushing more people to sell, driving the price down further.

It's not all that controversial to describe financial bubbles in this way, though you can safely bet that during any given bubble, a bumper crop of economists will spring up to insist that the bubble isn't a bubble and that rising prices for whatever the speculation du jour happens to be are perfectly justified by future prospects. On the other hand, it's very controversial just now to suggest that the entire tertiary economy is driven by positive feedback. Still, I suggest that this is a fair assessment of the financial economy of the industrial world, and the only reason that it's controversial is simply that we, our great-grandparents' great-grandparents, and all the generations in between have lived during the upward arc of the mother of all speculative bubbles. (72–3)

If economists took a wider view of the history of their discipline than they generally do, the might have noticed that what most of them consider a fundamental feature of all economies worth studying—the centrality of money—is actually a unique feature of an economic era defined by unprecedented amounts of cheap energy. Since the fossil fuels that made that era possible are being extracted at a pace many times the rate of which new supplies are being discovered, current assumptions about the role of money in society may be in for a series of unexpected revisions. (97)

What this means, ultimately, is that the change from today's industrial economy to the economies of the future can't be accomplished by plugging in some other energy source to replace petroleum or other fossil fuels. Nor can it be done by downscaling existing technologies to fit a sparser energy budget. It requires reconceiving our entire approach to technology, starting with the paired recognitions that the very modest supply of concentrated energy sources we can expect to have after the end of the fossil fuel age will have to be reserved for those tasks that still need to be done and can't be done with any more diffuse source, and that anything that can be done with diffuse energy needs to be done with diffuse energy if it's going to be done at all.

A society running on diffuse energy resources will thus not be able to make use of the same kinds of technology as a society running on concentrated energy resources, and attempts to run most existing technologies of diffuse renewable sources are much more likely to be distractions than useful options. In the transition from today's technology dominated by concentrated energy to tomorrow's technology dominated by diffuse heat, in turn, some of the most basic assumptions of contemporary economic thought—and of contemporary life, for that matter—are due to be thrown out the window. (143)

It should be obvious that whether or not a given technology continues to exist in a time of faltering abundance depends on three economic factors. The first is whether the things done by that technology are necessities or luxuries, and if they are necessities, just how necessary they are; the second is whether the same things, or at least the portion of them that must be done, can be done by another technology at a lower cost in scarce resources; the third is how the benefits gained by keeping the technology supplied with the scare resources it needs measure up to the benefits gained by putting those same resources to other uses. (149)

One useful way to assess the vulnerability of any current technology in the post-abundance world, in fact, is to note the difference between the direct and indirect energy inputs needed to keep it working and the inputs needed for other, potentially competing technologies that can provide some form of the same goods or services. All other factors being equal, a technology that depends on large inputs of energy will be more vulnerable and less economically viable in an age of energy scarcity than a technology that depends on smaller inputs, and the larger the disparity in energy use, the greater the economic difference. In turn, communities, businesses and nations that choose less vulnerable and more economic options will prosper at the expense of those that do not, leading to a generalization of the more economical technology. (161)

For the last few centuries, we have tried replacing [Lewis Mumford's "primal machine," i.e., "community"] with a dizzying assortment of others; instead of subordinating individual desires to collective needs, like every previous society, we have built a surrogate community of machines powered by coal and oil and natural gas to take care, however sporadically, of our collective needs. As those resources deplete, societies used to directing nonhuman energy according to scientific principles will face the challenge of learning once again how to direct human energy according to older and less familiar laws. This can be done in relatively humane ways, or in starkly inhumane ones; what remains to be seen is where along this spectrum the societies of the future will fall. (178)

The residents of any lifeboat community founded today will not only have to come up somehow with the very substantial sums needed to buy the land, build the cohousing units, wind turbines and so on, and plant all that permaculture landscaping; they will also have to earn a living during the long transitional process that leads from the world we inhabit today to the conditions that will pertain at the bottom of the curve of decline. Some awareness of these difficulties may go a long way to explain why, of the great number of lifeboat communities that have been proposed over the last decade or two, the number than have been built can be counted on the fingers of one foot. (190)

What sort of Plan B might work best depends on so many local and personal variables that specifics would be misleading. If you've got a large family with whom you're on good terms, bone up on your home economics skills; ten years from now, when four of your grandkids, their spouses and their children live in one rundown McMansion, having Grandma and Grandpa there to cook meals, tend children, and tend the garden will likely be worth much more than your keep. If you don't have a family or can't stand them, cultivate relationships with younger friends, or get ready to take up a second career that you can continue into advanced old age. No matter what you choose, it's not going to be as much fun as sitting on a lawn chair in a Sun Belt trailer park, but then the future is under no obligation to limit itself to those options we prefer. (231)

It's worth noting that while there's been plenty of talk about the monasteries of the Dark Ages among people who are aware of the impending decline and fall of our civilization, next to none of it has discussed, much less dealt with, the secret behind the success of monasticism: the deliberate acceptance of extreme material poverty. Quite the contrary: all the plans for lifeboat ecovillages I've encountered so far, at least, aim at preserving some semblance of a middle-class lifestyle into the indefinite future. That choice puts these projects in the same category as the lavish villas in which the wealthy inhabitants of Roman Britain hoped to ride out their own trajectory of decline and fall—a category mostly notable for its long history of total failure. (242–3)

[Pacific Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book’s goal is “to communicate the failure of modern economics, and potential solutions to the crises driven by that failure” (p.9). The central ideas are modeled on E.F. Schumacher’s theories from the 20th century. He was distinct from contemporary economists in several ways: first he distinguished between primary goods from Nature and secondary goods/services produced by human labor, second he stressed the central role of energy among primary goods to an economy, third he stressed the importance of the cost per worker in establishing and maintaining a workplace, and fourth he emphasized the false metaphysical assumptions made in modern economics (p.6).

The book visits familiar topics in economics, like the free market, supply and demand, rational actors, productivity, exchange values, the commons, etc. There’s even an interesting chapter on the metaphysics of money, where he describes how as a society we agree that “what exists is limited to what can be known; what can be known is limited to what can be measured; and what can be measured is treated as though it was identical to its measurements” (p.89). And so, “economists have consistently treated the one thing in their field that can easily and consistently be measured with numbers – money – as though it was the one thing that matters.”

Joe Rogan just interviewed Joel Salatin recently from Polyface Farms, and he talks about the same thing. There are things that should be valued that cannot be directly given a cost, switching from industrial farming to localized, sustainable systems would cost more in dollars, but it would lead to a cleaner environment, increased biodiversity, less disease outbreaks, healthier people… The problem is that these can’t properly be valued in the monetary system that we have in place. What is the value of breathing clean air? Of actually knowing your butcher?

Greer argues that one of the chief failure of modern economics comes from its “inability to make sense of the interactions between economic activity and the rest of the world” (p.23). All of the mathematical models developed from deductive methods fail to see the link between markets and political power, for example, or supply/demand and available resources. Only the most distorted abstractions can lead us to conclude that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet, that physical reality can impose no limits to the economy. This is our collective hubris: the idea that we can overcome any limits from Nature with progress.

The wealth of nations, however, is ultimately the wealth of Nature. Our dependence on the natural world goes unrecognized, even as there are increasing signs that the “natural systems that make human economic activity possible are cracking under the strain we’ve placed on them” (p.80). The depletion of critical resources like fossil fuels, disappearance of honeybees, scarcity of clean drinking water… As the secondary economy becomes less productive, more people pile into the tertiary (financial) economy that doesn’t see any of the increased costs associated with the physical world’s limitations. Speculative bubbles become larger, there is under-investment in all of the other physical sectors in favor of financializing the economy (p.75).

Moreover, his explanation of entropy, and how the usefulness of an energy source depends on the concentration gradient, helped me see why alternative energy technologies won’t work in the way we are hoping. Solar, wind, geothermal etc are all ways of capturing diffuse energy, and lack the concentration density of fossil fuels. They won’t be capable of running on the same kinds of inefficiencies that allow us to run cars, which lose 75% or so of the energy to heat (p.134). You can, however, use alternative energy in ways that are appropriate, for tasks that require diffuse energy – like solar ovens, solar water heating, geothermal indoor-temperature controls, even solar distilleries.

Greer also discusses Schumacher’s theories on “intermediate technologies” for third-world countries (our likely future in the US). Their goals would have been different from industrialized nations, seeking wider employment, self-sufficiency, and independence from international money lenders (p.175). Tucker Carlson when asked recently about automation in the trucking industry said that he would absolutely stop automation from happening in order to save jobs. This line of thinking, where people move away from pure profit-defined “efficiencies” in economics, is already starting to happen in the wider public. Of course, it’s not automation that will ultimately lead us to widespread poverty, but the Great Contraction underway.

Towards the end, he offers some interesting steps governments can take if they are willing to mitigate the decline, for example using different economic indicators for primary, secondary, tertiary wealth, removing taxes from the secondary economy and heavily taxing primary and tertiary economies, and putting corporations in “jail” or sentencing them to “death” for anti-social behavior (they are already treated as legal persons).

Overall, this was another great read from Greer. His critique of modern economics is very well articulated, with many examples showing the foolishness of the whole enterprise. I appreciate that he doesn’t stop there but offers potential solutions both on the individual and local/governmental level. He also briefly captures a vision of what lies ahead for us in the near future, although some of his other books go into greater detail (Ecotechnic Future, Dark Age America…).

[KMO · Rating 4 out of 5]

JMG applies an ecologist's eye to the topic of economics. I just opened my copy and looked for some highlighted passages. Here are a couple of examples of what I found valuable in the book:

From pg 47:

"Local, resilient, sustainable and cheap: these need to be our keywords for technological innovation just now. There are plenty of technological solutions that answer to that description, but again, our superstistions stand in the way."

Later, at the bottom of that page and the top of the next, he defines a superstition as "an observance that has become detached from its meaning, and one of the more drastic ways this detachment can take place is through a change in the circumstances that make that meaning relevant."

From pg 98: "The dominance of money in complex societies has a distinctive trajectory over time, and that trajectory promises to unfold in ways that will overturn many of the assumptions of conventional economics in the decades ahead."

I spoke to John Michael Greer about The Wealth of Nature in C-Realm Podcast Episode 262: Assume the Can is Open.

[A_M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Étrangement je m’attendais à un livre qui allait parler de changements climatiques mais j’ai été agréablement surprise par le fait que l’auteur parle d’une point de vue économique. C’est rafraîchissant, pertinent et percutant pour ne pas exagérer.

Je le recommande facilement même à ceux qui ne croient pas aux changements climatiques et/ou qui ne voient pas l’avantage de changer notre mode de vie actuel.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Turned out to be a pretty extreme environmentalist point of view. The world will be drastically different in the future without liquid fossil fuels.

Another book that points out some of the problems of assuming continued growth is the answer to our problems. Some other measure needed in the long term. The global eonomy cannot just keep growing forever.

Advocate of peak oil theory.

[Clifford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bald assertions, logical fallacies, false claims, and circular arguments lead this book nowhere. Which is too bad, because a more rational approach to an age of energy restraints might have produced some sensible policy proposals.

[Andrew A Ferrante · Rating 2 out of 5]

Revisited this book after buying it for a college course - Environmental Economics. This was a mistake. The author has no credibility in the field to write this, yet he still decided to go forward and publish.

There are actual environmental economists who study these problems of infinite growth in a finite world who are more equipped to explain than John M Greer. I am upset that people gravitate towards popular things without properly examining the speaker's ethos.

Pros:
- Ernst Friedrich Schumacher's thesis
- concept of "negative feedback loop" which was the takeaway for the college class
- problems of forecasting and predicting
(economists prefer to not predict the future, but when they do they understand the risks)

Cons:
- suggesting that government data is tampered with
(??????)
- suggesting that presidents casually request methodology changes
(people actually claimed that this happened during the start of the COVID recession, when it obviously wasn't true - read more here https://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...)
- claiming that when something's value goes down deflation occurs
- claiming that all countries will fail either by default or hyperinflation
- sharing that economists need to look at history to better understand their field when all data economists work with is HISTORICAL DATA
(most economists make decisions using data we've collected in the past and since data was only started being collected when the Wealth of Nations was written, under 300 years ago, which gives us SO LITTLE information to make decisions)
- using the housing crisis and the fall of LTCM as examples of why financial economics will inevitably fail
- not understanding what economics even is - "the science of economics, however, is mostly about numbers that measure...economists rely implicitly on the claim that those numbers have some meaningful relationship with what's actually going on"
(economics is a social science that studies people's decision making given scarcity exists- since they only have so much time to make decisions, they use numbers to measure these decisions)

I'm sorry if you disagree, but John M Greer doesn't even understand the fundamentals of environmental economics to write a 250 page book about the subject.

[Natasha Hurley-Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

By centering 'primary production' in Nature, instead of the exploitation of Nature, Greer adroitly reframes our entire civilisation in the light it should be cast: an unsustainable despoilment of limited resources, and a deconstruction of the fragile web of ecosystems on which it depends.

[Pat Mckay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was harder to read than The Retro Future.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good.

[Logan Streondj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent look at many things in economics and a wonderful primer for future generations. Worth archiving.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am already familiar with Greer's philosophy from his earlier book "The Long Descent". This more recent one reiterates most of the same ideas, that our industrial society that had been feeding on abundant cheap sources of fossil energy will inevitably face a decline back into a world of scarce energy resources that was the norm for most of our history. It views the issue through the discipline of economics, which he criticizes as oversimplified and more suited to our previous world of abundance than the one of limits we are facing today. He posits that there are really three economies, that of nature (natural resources and ecosystem services), manufactured goods derived from primary resources, and finally a tertiary economy consisting of intangible monetary and other financial products whose values are derived from the tangible goods economy but in reality has no physical limits to expansion. Taxing the first and third parts of the economy while leaving the second alone will help tremendously in getting our priorities right in terms of conserving what is left of our precious environment and energy resources, an idea also put forth and much elaborated by Sanderson in his book "Terra Nova".

Greer also covers thermodynamics and how renewable energy can never come close to being a replacement or substitute for our diminishing fossil fuels, while advocating that we live a simpler life as disconnected from the cash economy as possible in order to prepare for an inevitably more materially impoverished world to come. Much reference is made to E.F. Schumacher's teachings, which Greer makes his basis for this book. Joseph Tainter's classic hypothesis of societal collapse brought on by increasing social complexity is also discussed briefly.

While it is less of a revelation to those already familiar with the aforementioned authors, it is always interesting to read Greer's insightful commentary on recent global developments and how they affect his prognosis of the coming decline. The environmental movement during the 1970s proved on hindsight to be premature, although it did herald our increasing awareness of the crisis of limits looming in the distance. Today we are near the precipice, and the next forty years is highly unlikely to prove as forgiving to our transgressions.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of the decade, as far as I can tell, because it is both well-written and covers such important topics. Filled with timely, original and brilliant explanations, this book addresses what's going to happen in the near future, and why, as well as a bit of what one can do about it. I hope it's rapidly translated into many languages.

In particular, this book explains well the discernment of wealth into primary, secondary and tertiary realms. The primary wealth is that which has been so taken for granted before, the wealth that has been supplied; the wealth of sunlight, soil and water that render crops to humanity. The secondary realm is what we make; the tools and goods and improvements to land that we create with our effort and planning. The third realm is of financial wealth. Here is where the distinction between wealth and money gets most confusing, as both money and tertiary wealth have only imaginary value by custom.


I heartily recommend _The Wealth of Nature_:_Economics as if Survival Mattered_.

[Janine Prince · Rating 5 out of 5]

Setting out to re-visit the important work of the seminal economics book "Small is Beautiful", "The Wealth of Nature" provides a new and important voice re-contextualising the discussion about economy and value.

Greer brings his precise and controlled concentration to the basic elements of our economy that so often get overlooked that it is easy to forget they still exist and indeed are, in every sense, fundamental. This is, of course, to re-define the true Primary economy; the basis for all other economic, and indeed human, activity.

This important work with this recalibration sets out a framework for lay-readers to critically engage for themselves with the 'news', data and other spin pedalled (such as investment advice) in the popular media on economics.

That Economists and Environmentalists could be considered as complete opposites (and act like it most of the time) makes the middle path traced out or suggested by this book all the more valuable and welcome. We are all in this together.

If I could only recommend one non-fiction book this year, this is the one.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greer's third book in a series dealing with the coming post-peak-oil age tackles the subject of economics. It is a clear explanation of how the "science" of economics operates from some very flawed assumptions. Perhaps the biggest flaw is refusing to take into account the workings of the natural world and the limits which these place on our economic life.

The huge expansion of economic activity in the past 300 years or so is the product of our easy access to abundant energy. But we are now entering an age of scarcity which will have lasting effects on our economics. Greer shows how economics can be brought more in line with the real world and he shows what the reader can do at the individual level to prepare for an age of scarcity.

Favorite quote: "The future is under no obligation to limit itself to those options we prefer."

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give this 4 stars for the central ideas, but 3 for writing. Though at times a bit inflammatory with over simplistic examples, the basic point it is a good one that more people ought to be paying attention to. Greer believes that the last 300 years of the industrial age have more or less been an anomally. Fossil fuels are a fantastic energy source, but they are in fact limited and we've been burning them way too quickly. The age of fossil fuels is going to end and we will have to go back to less "advanced" and less "efficient" technologies and life styles. We can slow the decline, but not stop it. Quite an interesting if you can get past some of the cheap shots at other world issues and some narrowly focused examples.

[Nik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readers of Greer's blog be warned, a lot of this book is recycled from the ADR. Not that there's anything wrong with that, since the blog is where he develops his books and gives most of them away for free. However, I felt like I only got maybe 40% new material, and it wasn't as coherent or compelling as I had hoped. Ecotechnic Future and Green Wizardry are much stronger, more focused works in my opinion.

All that being said, if you're new to JMG, this might be a good starting point, and you'll probably get more out of it. I feel like the topics discussed here have broader appeal than the other books.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

As always JMG has important things to say that deserve to be heard more widely. I learnt some new things from this book, in which he looked at the problem of resource depletion through an economics lens. His trademark verbosity did get in the way, and I'm sure I read certain phrases about four times.

Recommended for JMG fans, but first time readers would be better served by The Long Descent.

[Sionna L]

Critical reading for those who want a historical perspective on economics combined with practical alternatives taken throughout history and vastly applicable to our current time. A great deal of information that I recalled being interested in from other writers, synthesized in one book. It has connected me to a part of myself that was lost in a consumer-oriented world.

[Bharat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent in parts that deal with the changes that are needed to transition us to a more sustainable way of living. But, like most peak oil experts, he overstates the peak oil case and over-dramatises the issues that will come from oil shortages.

[Patrick Andersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Distilled from many of his blog posts in 2009-2010, Mr. Greer outlines the fundamental problem with how standard economics deals with energy depletion (among other things) and ways to do things differently that could provide an easier pathway to a future with limited access to fossil fuels.

[George Haun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not nearly as well structured or argued as The Long Descent. Also, the message starts to get redundant. Having said that, Greer reliably produces brilliant insights that make the read rewarding. The high point for me was "The Metaphysics of Money". Enjoy!

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drawing heavily on E.F. Schumacher, Greer offers a provocative look at a downsized, sustainable economy of the future and the appropriate technology that it will require.

[February Four]

Had to return the book to the library before I could get around to finishing it. I'll be getting it again, because I didn't have a chance to get far enough in the book to decide either way.

[James Harken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really like this author & his blog.

[Joshua Mccroskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has made me reassess my understanding of economics.