The Age of Resilience E-Book

Jeremy Rifkin

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 560

Beschreibung

The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth is a wide-ranging look at the political, economic and cultural effects of the global shift from an economy based on efficiency to one based on resilience. Humans have long believed we could force the natural world to adapt to us; only now are we beginning to face the fact that it is we who will have to adapt to survive and thrive in an unpredictable natural world. A massive transformation of our economy (and with it the way we live our lives) has already begun. In The Age of Resilience, Jeremy Rifkin describes this great transformation and its profound effect on the way we think about the meaning of our existence, our economy, and how we govern ourselves as the earth rewilds around us. In The Age of Resilience, Jeremy Rifkin—a world-renowned expert and global governmental advisor on the impact of technological changes on human life and the environment—has written the defining work on the impact of climate change on the way humans organize their lives.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR THE AGE OF RESILIENCE

“ The Age of Resilience calls for the great turnaround from adapting nature to our species to adapting our species back to nature. This requires, as Jeremy Rifkin suggests, ‘a wholesale rethinking of our worldview.’ Among the most significant challenges will be our educational system that will need to be re-imagined and reinvented to proffer new pedagogical approaches to learning, if we are to make the transformation from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience. Given Rifkin’s amazing track record of envisioning the future, no one can ignore the message of this new book. The Age of Resilience is truly an awe-inspiring treatise that must be read, comprehended, and most important, acted upon.”

—Jerry Wind, Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, and Founder of the Wharton Executive MBA Program

“ The most striking feature of our multifaceted economic, social, and ecological global crisis is that none of our major problems can be understood in isolation. They are interconnected and interdependent and require corresponding systemic solutions. Jeremy Rifkin has designed effective systemic solutions to economic and technological problems at the request of governments and business organizations around the world for more than forty years. In this book he uses his rich experience to address the crisis of perception that threatens our species’ future survival on Earth. This is a challenging, thought-provoking, yet deeply hopeful book. I recommend it warmly to anyone concerned about the future of humanity.”

—Fritjof Capra, theoretical physicist and coauthor The Systems View of Life

“ Jeremy Rifkin’s The Age of Resilience takes us through the long history of illusions, culminating in the Age of Progress, by which we came to think of ourselves as both separate from nature and masters of the earth. He asks us to reconsider how our obsession with unlimited growth and hyperefficiency—by which we measure progress—has ruptured the web of life and taken us and our fellow creatures to the very brink of a mass extinction. Rifkin helps us remember that we are an intimate part of an animate nature with the hope that we will rejoin our evolutionary family on an indivisible Earth. In these times of despair and hopelessness, Rifkin points to regenerativity, flourishing, resilience, and hope for the future.”

—Dr. Vandana Shiva, feminist, ecologist, and activist in the developing world

“ At a moment when humanity’s obsession with ‘efficiency’ has led us to the doorstep of cascading biodiversity loss and a catastrophic climate crisis, Jeremy Rifkin guides us toward an alternate future sparked by a prophetic vision of the Age of Resilience. Humanity’s window of opportunity to act on climate change is rapidly narrowing. With this in mind, Rifkin calls on humanity to engage in a deep self-examination of its relationship to nature in order to strengthen our bonds with our earthly home. This is the only path toward building a resilient world prepared to take on this century’s challenges.”

—Ani Dasgupta, president & CEO, World Resources Institute

“ Jeremy Rifkin has given us a vision of the future that can inspire all those who want to be agents of change. He invites us to go beyond the idea of progress, and embrace a holistic and ecological conception of our existence on Earth. In the new era, empathy and biophilia take center stage for our re-affiliation with nature.”

—Carlo Petrini, founder and president of Slow Food International

THE AGE OF RESILIENCE

ALSO BY JEREMY RIFKIN

The Green New Deal

The Zero Marginal Cost Society

The Third Industrial Revolution

The Empathic Civilization

The Hydrogen Economy

The European Dream

The Biotech Century

The End of Work

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by St. Martin’s Press 2022

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Jeremy Rifkin 2022

The right of Jeremy Rifkin to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800751941

eISBN: 9781800751958

To Carol L. Grunewald for giving our fellow creatures a voice

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One

EFFICIENCY VS. ENTROPY:

THE DIALECTIC OF MODERNITY

1. Masks, Ventilators, and Toilet Paper: How Adaptivity Trumps Efficiency

2. Taylorism and the Laws of Thermodynamics

3. The Real World: Nature’s Capital

Part Two

PROPERTIZING THE EARTH AND PAUPERIZING THE WORKFORCE

4. The Great Disruption: The Planetary Enclosure of Time and Space

5. The Ultimate Heist: Commodifying the Earth’s Spheres, Gene Pool, and Electromagnetic Spectrum

6. The Catch-22 of Capitalism: Increased Efficiency, Fewer Workers, and More Consumer Debt

Part Three

HOW WE GOT HERE:

RETHINKING EVOLUTION ON EARTH

7. The Ecological Self: We Are Each a Dissipative Pattern

8. A New Origin Story: The Biological Clocks and Electromagnetic Fields That Help Synchronize and Shape Life

9. Beyond the Scientific Method: Complex Adaptive Social/Ecological Systems Modeling

Part Four

THE AGE OF RESILIENCE:

THE PASSING OF THE INDUSTRIAL ERA

10. The Resilient Revolution Infrastructure

11. The Ascendance of Bioregional Governance

12. Representative Democracy Makes Way for Distributed Peerocracy

13. The Rise of Biophilia Consciousness

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

THE AGE OF RESILIENCE

INTRODUCTION

The viruses keep coming. The climate keeps warming. And the earth is rewilding in real time. We long thought that we could force the natural world to adapt to our species. We now face the ignominious fate of being forced to adapt to an unpredictable natural world. Our species has no playbook for the mayhem that is unfolding around us.

We are, by all accounts, the youngest mammalian species on Earth, with only a two-hundred-thousand-year-long history. For most of that time—95 percent or more—we lived pretty much like our fellow primates and mammals as foragers and hunters living off the land and adapting to the seasons, leaving just a skim of our imprint on the body of the earth.1 What changed? How did we become the despoilers who brought nature almost to its knees but which now has come roaring back to cast us out?

Let’s step back for a moment and look at the now worn narrative regarding our species’ special destiny. During the dark days of the French Revolution in 1794, the philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet laid out a grand vision of the future while waiting to be taken to the guillotine for high treason. He wrote:

“No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties . . . the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite . . . [the] progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.”2

Condorcet’s promissory note provided the ontological foundation for what would subsequently be called the Age of Progress. Today, Condorcet’s vision of humanity’s future appears naïve, even laughable. Still, progress is just the most recent incarnation of the ancient belief that our species was cut from a different cloth from that of other creatures with whom we share the earth. While grudgingly admitting that Homo sapiens evolved from an ancestral pool dating back to the first glimmer of microbial life, we like to think that we are different.

During the modern era we tossed much of the theological world aside, but managed to keep hold of the Lord’s promise to Adam and Eve that they and their heirs would have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”3 That promise, still taken seriously, but without the religious overtones, has led to the collapse of our planetary ecosystems.

If there is a change to be reckoned with, it’s that we are beginning to realize that we never did have dominion and that the agencies of nature are far more powerful than we thought. Our species now seems much smaller and less consequential in the bigger picture of life on Earth.

People everywhere are scared. We are waking up to the hard reality that our species is to blame for the horrific carnage spreading across the earth—the floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes that are wreaking havoc and undermining economies and ecosystems around the world. We sense that planetary forces bigger than us and not easily subdued by the means we have relied on in the past are here to stay, with ominous repercussions. We are beginning to realize that our species and our fellow creatures are edging ever closer to an environmental abyss from which there is no return.

And now, the warnings that human-induced climate change is taking us into the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. Government leaders, the business and financial community, academia, and the public at large are beginning to question, whole cloth, the shibboleths by which we have lived our lives, interpreted the meaning of our existence, and understood the simple realities of staying alive and secure.

Although the Age of Progress is, for all intents and purposes, over and only awaiting a proper postmortem, what’s new and being heard from every quarter and getting louder and more determined is that we—the human race—need to rethink everything: our worldview, our understanding of the economy, our forms of governance, our concepts of time and space, our most basic human drives, and our relationship to the planet.

But the talk thus far is at best inchoate and at worst undefined. What does it really mean to rethink every aspect of our lives? We have a clue. The question being asked in so many different ways is how do we “adapt” to the havoc that is coming? We hear it around the kitchen table and in our local neighborhoods where we work and play and live out our lives.

“Resilience,” in turn, has become the new defining refrain heard in countless venues. It is how we are coming to define ourselves in a perilous future that is now at the front gates. The Age of Progress has given way to the Age of Resilience. Rethinking the essence of our species and its place on Earth marks the beginning of a new journey where nature is now the classroom.

The great transformation from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience is already triggering a vast philosophical and psychological readjustment in the way our species perceives the world around us. At the root of the transition is a wholesale shift of our temporal and spatial orientation.

The underlying temporal orientation that directed the entirety of the Age of Progress is “efficiency”—the quest to optimize the expropriation, consumption, and discarding of natural resources and, by so doing, increase the material opulence of society at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time frames, but at the expense of the depletion of nature itself. Our personal temporal orientation and the temporal beat of our society folds around the efficiency imperative. It’s what has taken us to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and now to the ruin of the natural world.

Of late, voices are being raised for the very first time from the academic community and even corporate boardrooms and government, challenging this once-sacred value of efficiency, suggesting that its ironclad hold over society’s temporal bandwidth is literally killing us. How, then, do we rethink our future?

If the Age of Progress marched in lockstep with efficiency, the temporal choreography of the Age of Resilience strides with adaptivity. The temporal crossover from efficiency to adaptivity is the reentry card that takes our species from separation and exploitation of the natural world to repatriation with the multitude of environmental forces that animate the earth—marking a repositioning of human agency on an increasingly unpredictable planet.

This realignment is already affecting other deep-rooted assumptions about how our economic and social life ought to be conducted, measured, and assessed. The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society including the shift from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small-and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.

The emerging third iteration of the industrial revolution that is taking the world from analog bureaucracies to digital platforms enveloping the whole of the earth is re-embedding our species back into the planet’s indigenous infrastructures—the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. This new infrastructure takes our collective humanity beyond the industrial era. In the emerging economic paradigm, it’s likely that “finance capital,” the heart of the Industrial Age, will be surpassed by a new economic order primed by “ecological capital” as we move further into the Age of Resilience in the second half of the 21st century and beyond.

Not surprisingly, the new temporality rides alongside a fundamental spatial reorientation. In the Age of Progress, space became synonymous with passive natural resources and governance with managing nature as property. In the Age of Resilience, space is made up of the planetary spheres that interact to establish the processes, patterns, and flows of an evolving Earth.

We are also just beginning to understand that our own lives, and those of our fellow creatures, exist as processes, patterns, and flows. The idea that we are autonomous beings acting on one another and the natural world is being rethought by a new generation of physicists, chemists, and biologists on the cutting edge of scientific inquiry. They are beginning to unearth a different story about the nature of human nature and, in the process, challenging the belief in our autonomous selfhood.

All living creatures are extensions of the earth’s spheres. The elements, minerals, and nutrients of the lithosphere, the water of the hydrosphere, and the oxygen of the atmosphere are continually coursing through us in the form of atoms and molecules, taking up residence in our cells, tissues, and organs as prescribed by our DNA, only to be continuously replaced at various intervals during our life. Although it may come as a surprise, most of the tissues and organs that make up our bodies continuously turn over in our lifetime. For example, one’s near entire skeleton is replaced every ten years or so. A human liver turns over approximately every three hundred to five hundred days; the cells that line the stomach turn over in five days; and intestinal Paneth cells are replaced every twenty days.4 A mature adult, from a strictly physical point of view, may be ten years old or younger.5

And even then, our body does not belong to us alone but is shared by many other forms of life—bacteria, viruses, protists, archaea, and fungi. Indeed, more than half the cells in the human body and the majority of DNA that make us up are not human but belong to the rest of the creatures that reside in every nook and cranny of our being. The point is, the earth’s species and ecosystems do not stop at the edge of our bodies but, rather, continuously flow in and out of our bodies. Each of us is a semipermeable membrane. We are of the planet literally and figuratively—which ought to shatter the cherished notion that our species is somehow separate from nature.

Our inseparability from nature’s flows is even more nuanced and intimate. Like every other species, we are made up of a multitude of biological clocks that continually adapt our internal bodily rhythms to the circadian day and the lunar, seasonal, and circannual rhythms that mark the daily rotation of the earth and its annual passage around the sun. Of late, we are also learning that endogenous and exogenous electromagnetic fields that crisscross every cell, tissue, and organ and permeate the planet also play a critical role in establishing the patterns by which our genes and cells line up and take form and assist in maintaining bodily functions.

We are of the earth, to the very sinew of our being. Like the rethinking of our temporality, our emerging understanding of our extended spatiality as a species is also forcing a reevaluation of our relationship to our fellow creatures, and our place on the earth.

With this comes fresh thinking about the nature of governance and how we see ourselves as a social organism. In the Age of Resilience, governance transitions from sovereignty over natural resources to stewardship of regional ecosystems. Bioregional governance, for its part, becomes far more distributed, with local communities taking on the responsibility of adapting to and stewarding their nineteen kilometers of the earth’s biosphere that encompass the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere—the region of Earth where life unfolds.

In this very different world where we break down the walls between civilization and naturalization, representative democracy, long held in high regard as the fairest and most inclusive governing model, is perceived as increasingly removed from the hands-on engagement with nature required of every member of our species. Already, “representative democracy” is beginning to make way, in bits and pieces, for “distributed peerocracy,” as a younger generation becomes active players in the governance of their bioregions.

In the emerging era, the industrious and efficient citizen bystanders to governance—whose only responsibility is to vote for a small coterie of elected officials to represent their interests—gives over, in part, to active peer-led citizen assemblies dedicated to stewarding their bioregions. There is already precedent for this as nation-states have traditionally established citizen juries who are called upon to assess the guilt or innocence of their peers in criminal and civil court cases.

These are just a smattering of developments that are only now rearing their head as our species makes a historic pivot from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience. Other developments will emerge as we rethink our sense of agency in a highly animated planet that is evolving in unfathomable ways to which we will need to adapt if we are to survive and flourish.

The pages that follow are a walk-through of where we’ve come since our first Adam and Eve stood upright and ventured out from the Rift Valley of Africa onto the open savannas and from there trekked across the continents.

Our species is the great wayfarer of the world, in search of more than our daily subsistence. Something deeper and more restless churns inside us—a feeling no other creature possesses. We are in a relentless search, whether acknowledged or not, for the meaning of our existence. It’s what moves us.

But somewhere along the journey, we lost our way. For most of our time on Earth, our species—like all others—found means to continually adapt to the larger forces of nature unfolding around us. Then, ten thousand years ago, with the ending of the last Ice Age and the beginning of a temperate climate—christened the Holocene—we steered a promethean new course, forcing nature to adapt to our species. With the rise of the hydraulic agricultural empires five thousand years ago and, more recently, the protoindustrial and industrial revolutions of the late medieval and modern age—what we have come to call civilization—our journey has been marked by increasing domination over the natural world. And now our success—if we can call it that—is measured by a startling statistic. Although Homo sapiens makes up less than one percent of the earth’s total biomass, by 2005 we were using 24 percent of the net primary production from photosynthesis, and current trends project that we might use as much as 44 percent by 2050, leaving only 56 percent of the net primary production for the rest of the life on the planet.6 This is obviously untenable. Our collective humanity has become the outlier of life and is now taking our fellow creatures along with us to a mass geological graveyard in the emerging Anthropocene.7

Ironically, our species, unlike our fellow creatures, is of a Janus face. If we are the spoiler species, we are also potentially the healers. We have been blessed with a special quality wired into our neurocircuitry—the empathic impulse—that has shown itself to be elastic and capable of infinite expansion. It’s this rare and precious attribute that has evolved, only to fall back and resurface again and again, each time reaching new plateaus before another slippage. In recent years, a younger generation has begun to extend the empathic impulse beyond our own species to include our fellow creatures, all of whom are part of our evolutionary family. This is what biologists call biophilia consciousness—a hopeful sign of a new path forward.

Anthropologists tell us we are among the most adaptive species. The question is whether we will use this defining attribute to assimilate back into nature’s fold wherever it takes us with a sense of humility, mindfulness, and critical thinking that will allow our species and our extended biological family to flourish once again. The great turnaround from adapting nature to our species to adapting our species back to nature will require abandoning the traditional Baconian approach to scientific inquiry with its emphasis on wresting nature’s secrets and seeing the earth as a resource and commodity for our species’ exclusive consumption. In its stead, we will need to take hold of a radically new scientific paradigm—what a new generation of scientists call complex adaptive social/ecological systems modeling, or CASES. This new approach to science views nature as a “life source” rather than a “resource” and perceives the earth as a complex self-organizing and self-evolving system whose trajectory is ultimately unknowable in advance, and therefore requires a science of anticipation and vigilant adaptation rather than forced preemption.

A rewilding planet will test our collective mettle. Hopefully, the journey we are now embarked on in the Age of Resilience will steer us to a new Garden of Eden, but this time not as master but as kindred spirit with our fellow creatures with whom we share our earthly home.

Part One

EFFICIENCY VS. ENTROPY

THE DIALECTIC OF MODERNITY

1

MASKS, VENTILATORS, AND TOILET PAPER

HOW ADAPTIVITY TRUMPS EFFICIENCY

There is a quote known by virtually everyone in the business community that captures the spirit of how we have come to define ourselves during the Age of Progress. Adam Smith, the first modern economist and founding father of the discipline, in his opus, The Wealth of Nations, wrote the following words—now immortalized—which capture what has been considered the essence of human nature adhered to by successive generations for the past two centuries.

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society. . . . He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.1

Smith viewed “effectually” as virtually synonymous with “efficiently,” and the very goal to which “Homo economicus” strives, and to which society bends.

On May 14, 2021, The New York Times published a guest essay with the wonkish headline “Your Car, Toaster, Even Washing Machine, Can’t Work Without Them. And There’s a Global Shortage.”2 The article was written by the economist Alex T. Williams.

The story it tells foreshadows an economic disruption and eruption at the very heart of the capitalist system of sufficient magnitude to implode and take down the economic order by which we’ve structured commercial life for the past two centuries. Buried in the article are faint hints of the kind of system that is likely to replace it.

The article starts blandly enough, pointing to “a global shortage in the supply chain of semiconductors.” These are the tiny microchips embedded in the numerous processes and manufactured products that constitute the digitalized smart world. Semiconductors are a half-trillion-dollar industry. To get a handle on how serious the problem is, let’s zero in on just one Fortune 500 company, Ford Motor Company. The company announced that the current shortage of semi conductors used in the manufacturing and workings of its vehicles has forced it to forecast a $2.5 billion drop in profits over the coming year.3 Magnify these losses across the entire global economy dependent on semiconductors—from medical equipment to electricity transmission lines—and we begin to understand the gravity of the crisis.

Behind the scenes, President Joe Biden quietly held a high-level meeting with executives from Ford Motor Company and Google to assess the economic fallout and national security risk of a shortfall of semi conductors, most of which are manufactured overseas. Executives from Verizon, Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia, among other corporate giants, have formed an industry coalition to push for urgent federal government funding of semi conductor research and development (R&D) and the underwriting of funds to establish semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the United States. The coalition wants a massive $50 billion set aside in the proposed federal government infrastructure plan—at the get-go—citing the shortages around semiconductors and the security risk that could shut down the U.S. economy.

The problem extends beyond just a short-term lapse in the global supply chain. Further along in the article, readers will find reference to two words that define the very nature of the crisis, and deeper still, foretell a fundamental contradiction in capitalism itself—that is, the unavoidable trade-off between “efficiency” and “resilience.”

The enormous expense that goes into erecting giant manufacturing facilities to produce complex semiconductors leads to lower profit margins. Only a handful of the most efficient companies have risen to the top by investing in what is called “lean logistics and supply chains” and “lean manufacturing processes” that eliminate costly buffers and other redundancies in the system that might be necessary to operationalize in case of an emergency. For example, storing surplus inventories; provisioning additional backup manufacturing facilities that can be booted up at a moment’s notice; retaining an auxiliary workforce that could be quickly deployed were there a disruption anywhere along the line; and having available alternative supply chain options that can be operationalized to avoid disruptions and a slowdown in the logistics system.

These extra expenses take away from operational efficiency and reduce the revenue stream, eating into the bottom line. For these reasons, such backups are eschewed by management and shareholders because they shrink margins and profit. What the world is left with is a handful of giant corporate heavyweights in the semiconductor market that command the industry. These market leaders have survived the competition by cutting costs across their operations with lean logistics and manufacturing processes, making them increasingly “efficient” but at the expense of being less “resilient” and vulnerable to unexpected events. Williams points out the obvious pitfall, asking, “What good is such a hyper-efficient, super-lean factory if, say, a natural disaster knocks it out of commission and there’s no backup supply of the chip it makes?” 4 The bottom line is that efficiency rules, but at the expense of resilience.

The semiconductor shortage is not the first event to cast public doubt on the resilience of the economy in the wake of escalating natural and manmade disruptions. The first inkling of fissures in the capitalist system came unexpectedly in the spring of 2020. Stunned by the fast spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus, countries were caught off guard as their medical facilities were unprepared for the pandemic and their populations found themselves exposed, unprotected, and without recourse in providing the necessities for their families.

The economic firestorm ignited unexpectedly in March 2020 with an opinion piece written by William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, who formerly served as deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton. The lead-in to his article read: “Efficiency Isn’t the Only Economic Virtue.” Galston said he had been reflecting on the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the fallout from the pandemic was worrying, it was accompanied by an especially eye-opening surprise. America was totally unprepared to meet the need. Night after night on the news, governors, medical professionals, and the public at large were asking, where were the N95 masks, personal protective equipment, ventilators, et cetera? Why are there shortages of antibacterial soap and even toilet paper and other basic necessities?

A PUBLIC REPUDIATION OF EFFICIENCY

It struck Galston that something was askew with a global economic system that could not meet the most basic needs of the American public during a once-in-a-century health crisis. He dared to ask the question that had lain hidden behind the commercial screen—the dirty little secret that underwrites modern capitalism—“What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?”5 Galston noted that the very success of globalization depends on dispersing the production of goods and services that make up daily necessities to those regions of the world best able to create efficient economies of scale by cutting labor costs and forgoing environmental protection protocols. These products are then transported by container ships and air freight to America and the far ends of the earth.

While Galston said he understood that the efficiencies brought on by globalization were a “trade-off” and “unavoidable,” the inevitable result is that “as efficiency increased, resilience declined.” He concluded by warning his business audience that “in the relentless quest for increased efficiency, which remains a key source of competitive advantage, the decisions made by individual market actors will produce, in the aggregate, a less-than-optimal supply of resiliency, a public good.” 6 It was difficult for the business community to hear such a message. After all, by drawing attention to this unassailable downside of efficiency in a global capitalist system long touted as the best of all possible worlds, Galston stepped on the Achilles’ heel of the entire system by which modern society operates.

Had the Galston piece been a single shot across the bow, it might have passed unnoticed. But just weeks later, on April 20, Senator Marco Rubio, a political conservative and a leader of the Republican party, chimed in with a second frontal attack aimed at the heart of the capitalist system, in an opinion piece published in The New York Times entitled “We Need a More Resilient American Economy.” Rubio took an even more aggressive stance, warning that “over the past several decades, our nation’s political and economic leaders, Democratic and Republican, made choices about how to structure our society—choosing to prize economic efficiency over resiliency, financial gains over Main Street investment, individual enrichment over the common good.”7

Rubio faulted the American business community for offshoring its manufacturing base to developing countries while putting its experience to building up a financial and service-based economy. He writes that it “produced one of the most efficient economic engines of all time,” but it “lacks resiliency,” which, he pointed out, “can be devastating in a crisis.” Rubio struck a deeper, more philosophical note, suggesting that the country needed to come to grips with the consequences that flow from a “hyperindividualistic ethos” by pursuing a renewal of the American spirit of resilience that made the country a beacon to the world.8

Galston and Rubio’s critique of America’s love affair with efficiency at the expense of its earlier resilient roots was already beginning to bubble up to the surface. The difference is that the toll it had been taking on the American economy and society didn’t become real to most Americans until they came up against empty shelves in supermarkets and pharmacies during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even before COVID-19, voices were being raised from deep within the capitalist establishment. In January 2019, Harvard Business Review ran a lengthy essay with the controversial title, “The High Price of Efficiency.” Its author was Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. The article was part of a series that was introduced with the following conundrum: “Beginning with Adam Smith, business thinkers have steadfastly regarded the elimination of waste as management’s holy grail. But what if the negative effects from the pursuit of efficiency eclipse the rewards?”9 Martin, like others in the rarefied world of business management, is stepping forward for the very first time in the 250-year history of the profession to challenge the ruling truisms of their discipline. Lest doubters fail to recognize the overriding importance of efficiency as a centerpiece of neoclassical and, more recently, neoliberal economics, Martin sets the record straight:

The unalloyed virtue of efficiency has never dimmed. It is embodied in multilateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization, aimed at making trade more efficient. It is ensconced in the Washington Consensus via trade and foreign direct-investment liberalization, efficient forms of taxation, deregulation, privatization, transparent capital markets, balanced budgets, and waste-fighting governments. And it is promoted in the classrooms of every business school on the planet.10

Martin takes another route in critiquing capitalism’s obsession with efficiency. He argues that at the onset of new technological breakthroughs that spur accompanying entrepreneurial opportunities, the early pacesetters quickly consolidate their control over the emerging market potential by increasing their efficiencies across all of their potential value chains and vertically integrating them into their operations to create economies of scale. But becoming a first mover and market leader comes with a negative externality not anticipated in the rush to the top.

Martin uses the example of the few companies that control virtually the entire global almond market. At the time the industry was ratcheting up, the Central Valley of California was considered “perfect for almond growing” and currently more than 80 percent of the almonds produced in the world come from that region.11

Unfortunately, centralizing almond production in one spot because of ideal weather patterns ran up against unanticipated environmental triggers. California’s almond blossoms require a very narrow seasonal window for pollination and necessitate the transporting of beehives to the region from all across America. In recent years, however, the bee population has been dying in droves. More than one-third of America’s commercial bee colonies were wiped out in just the winter of 2018–19—a record.12 There are many theories about the environmental cause of the bee die-off, but it is enough to say that the monoculture of the almond industry, while initially efficient, has proven to be more vulnerable to externalities and less resilient.

What Martin failed to mention is that almond trees are also voracious consumers of water. Every almond produced requires a gallon of water. Add it all up and almost 10 percent of all the water consumed by agriculture in California annually goes to quenching the thirst of the almond trees in the Central Valley—that’s more water than is consumed by the entire populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco in a year.13

To make matters worse, climate change has turned the once fertile Central Valley into a drought-stricken region, threatening the future viability of what was a highly efficient place to locate almond orchards. The short-term efficiencies of locating 80 percent of the almond trees that make up world trade in one region came up against the unexpected environmental threats that the industry did not consider . . . what was regarded as a highly commercial business proved not to be resilient.14 The lesson is monoculture in any commercial enterprise—putting all of one’s almonds in one basket—while efficient, lacks sufficient resilience against unknown future events.

THE UNRAVELING OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

While efficiency is a temporal value, resilience is a condition. It is true that increasing efficiency often undermines resilience, but the temporal value that serves as an antidote is not more efficiency, but rather adaptivity. We’ve come to realize over the past half century or so that the earth acts like a self-organizing system in which all forms of life are continually adapting moment to moment to the energy fluxes and flows of the planet and to the evolution of the earth’s spheres. Adaptivity bears a close resemblance to the concept of “harmonizing” in nature that is a unique characteristic of Eastern religions and philosophies.

Efficiency is about eliminating the friction, a code word for getting rid of redundancies that might slow the speed and optimization of economic activity. Resilience, however, at least in nature, is all about redundancy and diversity. For example, the monoculture of a specific crop variety might be more efficient in terms of speed of growth to maturity, but were that particular monoculture to be subject to blight, the losses can be irreparable.

The discovery in the business community and business schools that efficiency, which has long been heralded as the operating arm of capitalist theory and practice, is largely at fault in increasing the risk and accompanying vulnerability of the economy and society—all of which undermine our collective resilience—seemed to jump out of nowhere. But now, with this realization, comes a heady reassessment of how we should proceed.

If our attachment to efficiency has begun to sour, what then do we do about productivity, its twin, and the other critical agency by which our economy lives and breathes? While efficiency is a temporal value, productivity is a simple ratio of outputs produced by the inputs used, especially those associated with technology and accompanying innovative business practices. Both efficiency and productivity are strictly linear processes and limited in time to the production chain and market exchange, with little attention to or accounting of the negative side effects that may extend beyond the moment the good is exchanged and the service delivered. But of course, it’s denying these very negative externalities, created by the increased efficiencies and productivity, that allows companies to increase their profit.

Biological systems are organized around a very different operating regime. While adaptivity, rather than efficiency, is the temporal signature of biological systems, regenerativity, rather than productivity, is the measure of performance. Adaptivity and regenerativity are inseparable in all biological organisms and ecosystems. Consider, for example, the process of autophagy in biology.

Yoshinori Ohsumi is a seventy-six-year-old Japanese cell biologist who has spent a lifetime studying autophagy. The term comes from the Greek words meaning “self-eating.” Autophagy is the cell’s waste disposal system. It’s the process by which “cellular junk is captured and sealed in sack-like membranes, called autophagosomes . . . [and] transported to another structure called the lysosome.” Biologists long considered the lysosome as just a “cellular rubbish bin” and of little consequence, just as human society has come to think of garbage dumps and landfills.15 But what Ohsumi eventually discovered is that autophagy is the recycling mechanism of an organism. Scrap cell components are gathered up and the parts that are still useful are stripped to generate energy and/or build new cells. Ohsumi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2016 for his work.16

Autophagy is just one of many examples of the processes and patterns deeply embedded in living organisms that are helping reshape our own understanding of economic life. It’s become fashionable in recent years across virtually every sector of the economy to mimic the regenerative practices in biological systems by embedding the process of “circularity”—the business term for recycling—into every stage of the economic process, from extraction to production, storage, logistics, and consumption, ensuring a relatively closed loop in which little waste is lost, but rather, reused over and over again in a regenerative way, minimizing the environmental bill for current and future generations.

Is all of this talk about efficiency versus adaptivity and productivity versus regenerativity little more than a momentary acting-out in the wake of a breakdown in supply chains, logistics, and buffer stock inventories that caught the world by surprise in the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic? Or is there something of a deeper nature taking root? In the 1960s, when I was a student at the Wharton School and later, between 1995 and 2010, when I taught in the Wharton Executive Education program and particularly the Advanced Management Program, I don’t recall a single instance when the discussion ever turned to the question of the shortcomings of efficiency and progress, much less a spirited conversation around a countereconomic narrative focused on adaptivity and resilience.

What has changed is an escalating series of crises. In just the past couple of decades, we have witnessed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the meteoric rise of terrorist cells and movements around the world; the collapse of the global economy in 2008 and with it the Great Recession; the growing disparity in income with the rise of a global elite of financial and business interests and the increasing pauperization of the workforce worldwide; the rise of ultra-right, populist, and fascist political movements and parties, along with strongman rule and the loss of faith in democratic governance. But all these crises, which are threatening to destabilize human civilization, pale in comparison to the two great existential crises of increasing global pandemics in ever-shorter time intervals and the exponential warming of the planet’s climate that’s taking our species and our fellow creatures into the sixth extinction of life on Earth.

The last time our species faced a crisis even remotely comparable in magnitude and scope occurred seven centuries ago in late medieval Europe, with the spread of the bubonic plague—the Black Death—which ravaged the continent and parts of Asia, beginning in 1348 and continuing to flare up for the next several hundred years, leading to the deaths of an estimated seventy-five to two hundred million people in Eurasia.17 The social mayhem and political fallout led to a mass disenchantment with the Catholic Church’s governance and its accompanying worldview. The church’s narrative had long provided solace to the faithful and had steered the course of Western civilization for more than a millennium. The story of Christ and the church’s promise of redemption and everlasting life was a powerful narrative that was embraced across the Western world but in the end proved a weak adversary to a tiny bacteria, Yersinia pestis, which was invisible to the naked eye.

From the shambles rose a new and overarching worldview and accompanying narrative along with new forms of governance and ways of organizing economic and social life. This new ordering of civilization would take Europe, America, and eventually the rest of the world into the modern era under the loosely defined motif of the Age of Progress.

The Age of Progress has meant many things to many people, including the rise of democratic governance, greater personal freedoms, longer life spans, and the extension of human rights. But, at the core of this new narrative is the improvement of humanity’s material well-being by harnessing science and technology to a market-based capitalist economy.

At the very heart of the paradigm shift from the medieval to the modern age lies the promise of perfecting the human condition. But this time the responsibility for its realization would depend on: the wonders of science and the exactitude of mathematics; the new practical technologies to ease life; and the lure of the capitalist marketplace in advancing the economic well-being of society. These three metrics are the foundational cornerstones of the Age of Progress. The binding element is a uniquely modern method for organizing the temporal and spatial orientation of every individual, the community, and the economy and society at large. It’s a term so omnipresent that it is little talked about, rarely questioned, but, nonetheless, universally upheld as the ticket to saving time and expropriating space in hopes of creating an earthly paradise.

Efficiency is the temporal dynamic of modernity. Efficiency reorders the use of time and, by extension, space. Implicit in its use is the premise that being efficient saves, accumulates, buys, and extends time and, by so doing, gives the individual, and even society, an extended lease on time. The more efficient an individual, institution, or community becomes, the more convinced they are that they have extended their future horizon, edging ever closer to “a measure” of immortality. With the rise of modern science, ever more sophisticated technologies, and market capitalism, a powerful new trinity came to replace the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Efficiency, in turn, would come to replace God, long regarded as the universal prime mover, as the new divinity of the Age of Progress.

2

TAYLORISM AND THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS

Movie buffs are familiar with the great 20th-century comedian Charlie Chaplin’s two most iconic films, The Great Dictator and Modern Times. While film devotees are aware that in the first film Chaplin was parodying Adolf Hitler, they may not know that the second film was also a parody of a famous individual who had a momentous impact on the 20th century. In the film, Chaplin—the Little Tramp—is a factory worker on an assembly line where he screws nuts into pieces of machinery at an ever-faster rate, trying desperately to keep up with the accelerating pace set by management, only to get caught in the gears, plunging the entire factory into chaos.1 The other parodied man was Frederick W. Taylor, the founding father of the Gospel of Efficiency.

Frederick Taylor was born in 1856 into a well-off Quaker family in Philadelphia. He attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. After receiving a degree in mechanical engineering, he held several management positions in companies, the most notable being Bethlehem Steel Corporation. He later accepted a teaching position at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and in 1906 became the president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 1911, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, the book that would become the bible for embedding efficiency into the very heart of modern civilization.

Taylor devised a system of division of labor that would ensure that management controlled virtually every movement of every worker at every stage of the production process. Taylor’s system, later known as Taylorism, was based on a single overriding principle—the separation of management and planning from the execution of tasks on the factory floor and, further, dividing those tasks into ever-simpler subdivisions of the overall operation, each coordinated to work in tandem to speed the efficiency of the production process.

After narrowing each worker’s contribution to the process down to a single, simple, repeatable task with instructions described in minute detail, supervisors were trained to use stopwatches to analyze the elapsed time of every motion and movement of the worker in order to eliminate unnecessary gestures that might slow his or her response time. They then tweaked each worker’s movements to quicken their response time and accuracy. The objective was to determine the best time under the optimal conditions for completing a task and making it the standard for increased efficiency. Often, the slightest changes in gestures that might slow performance were corrected, sometimes eliminating precious seconds from the task.

The workers’ performance was standardized, eliminating any individual behavioral idiosyncrasies to secure a work environment in which workers are indistinguishable from the machines they are attending. All factors on the factory floor were viewed as components of a scientifically managed mega-machine whose performance was continually measured in improved efficiencies and whose worth would be calculated by way of cost-benefit analysis.

THE GOSPEL OF EFFICIENCY

As it turns out, the factory floor was just the foothold for advancing Taylor’s efficiency crusade across the social landscape in the early decades of the 20th century. The brilliance of Taylor’s narrative is that it was attached to science, giving it the legitimacy that would make it palpable to an educated middle class while using the term efficiency, which was originally an engineering term attached to the performance of machines, to suggest its applicability to every aspect of life. It was the Age of the Machine. New inventions were being introduced into the market at breakneck speed: the telephone, the electric dynamo, electricity, electric lighting, the automobile, airplanes, skyscrapers, radio, film, automated assembly lines, electric appliances, et cetera.

Millions of families attended great world expos and fairs in the first half of the 20th century in the United States and elsewhere, beginning with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and culminating in the New York World’s Fair in 1939, to experience a utopian world within reach, made possible by modern science and the new efficiencies of commerce. All of the exhibits were designed to draw the public into the future that they would be making and living in.

Where better to start inculcating the public into this new worldview than the home? An avalanche of articles appeared in popular magazines, imploring women to “be progressive and join the efficiency movement.” While appealing to their better nature, the articles where not shy to scold. Middle-class mothers were admonished to stop “soldiering” on the job, reminding them that the household was “part of a great factory for the production of citizens.”2 Christine Frederick, an American home economist, published an article in the popular Ladies’ Home Journal urging housewives to be more scientifically minded and efficient in operating the home economy.

She confessed, “For years I never realized that I actually made eighty wrong motions in the washing alone, not counting others in the sorting, wiping, and laying away.”3 Frederick made an appeal to American housewives to adopt a standard practice of dishwashing to “find what motions are efficient motions, and what motions are unnecessary and inefficient.” 4

“Housekeeping experiment stations” were established to surveil household activities. Time and motion studies were conducted to ascertain the optimum motion and time segments for performing each household chore, providing a database by which to train homemakers in “the principles of domestic engineering.”5 The efficiency crusade was off and running. “The home . . . was to be mechanized, systemized,” and optimized to the rhythms of efficiency.6

Although the home was the starting gate for introducing Taylorism across society, it was the school system that became the teacher, guide, arbiter, and enforcer of the efficiency agenda. The principles of scientific management were used to remake the schools in the image of factories and mold children into little Taylorites, readying them for the opportunities and challenges that awaited them in “the world of tomorrow.”

The popular media played a role in whipping up hysteria over an outmoded approach to education that was not keeping pace with the vocational requirements needed to prepare students for an emerging industrial system whose primary task was to use the principles of scientific management to upgrade efficiency, increase productivity, and create economic abundance. The Saturday Evening Post published a seething attack called “Our Medieval High Schools—Shall We Educate Children for the Twelfth or Twentieth Century?” The author ridiculed what laymen regarded as a “gentleman’s education” that “should be of no use in the world—particularly in the business world.”7 Another Taylorite scolded that “there is inefficiency in the business management of many schools such as would not be tolerated in the world of offices and shops.”8

Educators across the country took up the challenge. School superintendents began by urging a wholesale reorganization of responsibilities in public school systems along the lines of scientific management. The first priority would be disempowering teachers from establishing their own individualized approach to learning in the classroom. Taylorites argued that curriculum, classroom presentation, and testing needed to be placed in the hands of school superintendents and their boards to standardize content and provide instructions on how each teacher was to deliver the product.

In the new schema, school superintendents were akin to the management of industrial companies, and the teachers were akin to the workers on the factory floor who were spoon-fed specific assignments along with detailed instructions on how to deliver the content to students. Knowledge was to be broken up into small bits of easily digestible facts to be memorized and spit back on standardized tests.

Standardized tests and numerical grading became the norm. An older intellectual tradition pondering on the “why” of things was shunted aside to make room for an almost evangelical embrace of optimizing the “how” of things. Efficiency became the chief criterion for determining performance. Assignments were to be completed under strict deadlines. Knowledge was segmented into siloed disciplines—a division of education designed to simplify learning into discrete academic tasks. The performance of school systems was judged by the number of students achieving threshold numerical test scores on standardized state-administered exams, allowing them to pass on to the next grade—and later on judged by the students’ scores on national SAT and ACT tests.

While there have been some minor modifications to the Tayloresque approach to education over the past hundred years, they have been few and far between. Twentieth-century education has been almost exclusively dedicated to molding students to a Taylorist mindset, readying them to be efficient in the world of industry and commerce.

The U.S. federal government’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is right out of the Taylor toolbox. Its core features included high-stakes standardized testing of students and detailed instructions on how teachers were to present their classroom assignments. Curriculum that is not easily reducible to standardized grading was eased out of the classroom.

Wayne Au, a professor in the education program at the University of Washington, in an article in the Journal of Curriculum Studies titled “Teaching Under the New Taylorism: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of the 21st Century Curriculum,” describes the impact of continuing to follow a Taylorist creed in American schools today:

Knowledge learned for U.S. high-stakes tests is thus transformed into a collection of disconnected facts, operations, procedures, or data mainly needed for rote memorization in preparation for the tests . . . consequentially, students are increasingly learning knowledge associated with lower-level thinking, and they are often learning this knowledge in fragmented chunks within the context of the tests alone. In this way, high-stakes testing is effectively restricting the way knowledge itself is structured in teachers’ practices in U.S. schools.9

Nowhere was the efficiency movement more elevated in importance and more misunderstood in public debate than in the conservation of natural resources. Many leading environmentalists of the day were hoping to preserve the natural beauty of the wild for aesthetic purposes and to preserve ecosystems to allow America’s native species of plant and animal life to flourish alongside an increasingly industrialized environment.

However, professional societies and industries aligned with President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration around repositioning conservation as an efficiency agenda. While they argued that natural resources were a critical asset responsible for much of the country’s steep rise to world dominance as the premier industrial power, they also warned that the rush to own, expropriate, and exploit the nation’s treasure trove of natural resources was killing the goose that was laying the golden eggs and urged a more efficient exploitation of the country’s natural heritage to advance American industries and the economy as a whole. Since questions of resource use were of a technical nature, the oversight ought to be put in the hands of the experts who knew best how to efficiently manage the nation’s natural wealth.

Environmental historian Samuel P. Hays summed up the nub of the conservation movement this way: “The apostles of the Gospel of Efficiency subordinated the aesthetic to the utilitarian. Preservation of natural scenery and historic sites, in their scheme of things, remained subordinate to increasing industrial productivity.”10

Were anyone to think that the approach to the use of the nation’s public lands has changed in the course of the past century, consider this. Currently, ninety percent of public lands “are available to oil and gas drillers while only ten percent are for a focus on conservation and other values including recreation and wilderness.”11 Worse, 42 percent of all coal mined in the U.S. is on federal lands as well as 22 percent of all crude oil and 15 percent of natural gas, accounting for 23.7 percent of the country’s CO2 global warming emissions, according to a recent survey of federal land use by the U.S. Department of Interior.12

The efficiency narrative in the opening decades of the 20th century became a convenient tool to sidestep fundamental questions around issues of equity, gender and racial equality, political disenfranchisement, morality, and even humankind’s responsibility for the natural world. Efficiency was extolled as a neutral force. Just as Charles Darwin rewrote the book of nature arguing that the process of species selection guaranteed that the most fit would survive, neutering any question of divine purpose, the principle of scientific management came with its own rationale that efficiency rides above the din of conflicting and competing interests. To challenge efficiency is to bump up against the impenetrable laws of science and the workings of the natural world. How wrong we were.

MISREADING HOW THE WORLD WORKS:

How Revered Minds Led Our Species Astray

One-third of the world’s topsoil has been degraded during the industrial era, and scientists tell us we may have only sixty years of topsoil left to feed the human population of the planet.13 It takes upward of five hundred years to replenish one inch of topsoil.14 Our scientists are also warning us that climate change is triggering a mass extinction and that we could lose up to fifty percent of all existing species over the course of the next eighty years.15

Meanwhile, the oxygen on the planet is being snuffed out at an alarming rate, unparalleled in two billion years. Plant phytoplankton from the oceans, which account for half the oxygen production on Earth, are now threatened by the rising ocean temperature brought on by global warming emissions. New studies project that as early as 2100, phytoplankton losses could deplete ocean oxygen on a global scale.16 Equally harrowing, floods, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires are now fast increasing in intensity as the earth’s temperature rises from global warming emissions, destabilizing ecosystems, making large areas of the planet uninhabitable, and leading to 19 percent of the earth becoming “a barely livable hot zone” by 2070.17

The impact our species is having is staggering to behold. While a century ago, approximately 85 percent of the earth’s surface was still characterized as wilderness, today less than 23 percent of landmass remains unmodified by humans, with projections that over the next several decades this last remnant is likely to disappear after 3.5 billion years of life on the planet.18

How could this have happened? Why did we not see this coming? There are plenty of opinions on this subject. But, the indisputable truth is that much of the blame lies at the feet of the scientific community, the economics profession, and the business community that served up the narrative for how the global economy functions under optimal conditions to further the interests and secure the well-being of humanity.

That story begins with the French mathematician and scientist René Descartes, often regarded as the first modern philosopher. Born in La Haye en Touraine, France, in 1596, the young Frenchman excelled as a student in mathematics and physics. In his youth, Descartes marveled at all of the new mechanical inventions that were extending man’s power over nature and opined that these must be part of a much bigger picture, a mechanical universe—that is, a rational universe operating by mechanical laws. Descartes argued that these laws could be discovered and put to use to better the lot of humankind.