With the price of oil hovering around $53 a barrel, I'm posting a presentation I gave at the Take Back Your Time conference in June -- back when oil was around 20% cheaper, at $40 a barrel. My presentation touched on the analyses of Marion King Hubbert, the geophysicist most famous for his predictions of an impending peak (and subsequent decline) in world oil production. Less well known is Hubbert's analysis of the hours of work and what he saw in the 1930s as a climax in the demand for man-hours of productive work.
PROMISING ALTERNATIVES AT HOME AND ABROAD
June 2004
Tom Walker
Presumably, a promising alternatives is one that is “hopeful, full of promise, likely to turn out well.” The topic for this plenary presents a challenge to me because I am — intellectually at least – a pessimist: “Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will,” as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci put it.(il pessimismo della ragione e l’ottimismo della volontà)
But there’s another meaning of ‘promise’ that I might take advantage of – which is simply “to afford expectation of” or “seem likely.” Whether the future event I wish to address turn out to be auspicious or not depends on what we make of it – that is to say on the optimism of our will.
That “promising alternative” is not my original idea. It must be credited to Marion King Hubbert, the geophysicist who in 1956 told an audience of Shell Oil Company executives that U.S. domestic oil production would peak sometime around 1970, after which it would decline.
He was right.
As some of you may know, King Hubbert also predicted that world oil production would peak sometime around the year 2000, after which it too would decline. We don’t know yet whether this second prediction will turn out to have been right. Indications are, though, that strange rumblings are going on in the oil patch. As Fortune Magazine intimated in its May 20, 2004 issue, “This is the summer the American public is going to discover that Hubbert's Peak is not a mountain in Oregon.”
So what does running out of oil have to do with Taking Back Our Time? I’ll let King Hubbert’s words frame my answer to that question. In the 1930s, Hubbert was associated with the group called Technocracy when he wrote an article on “Man-hours and Distribution.” Here is how he began:
The period since 1929 has been one of the most unique and one of the most disturbing in the history of North America. The events that have occurred since the stock market crash of that year have provoked more competent social thinking on the part of the American people, and have demolished more fixed tenets of our American social and economic faith than those of any preceding half century.
Up until the year 1929 the American public had been brought up in the belief that any child with ambition and a willingness to work would automatically be rewarded with material gain in direct proportion to the effort and ingenuity displayed; that any office boy might become the president of his corporation in due time provided he displayed the proper virtues of industriousness, honesty, respectfulness and thrift; that every boy had an equal chance of becoming President some day; that the pathway to success was to be found in part through proper education, and that educational facilities were equally available to all; that work could be had by all who were willing; and, conversely, that unemployment and lack of material success were themselves indicative of the lack of those cardinal virtues of industriousness, thrift, honesty, and the like.
In 1929 and the years that have followed, these tenets of our American folk-lore have been rudely shattered…”
Mainstream economists looking back on Hubbert’s intuitively appealing explanation of the relationship between industrial output, the hours of work and total employment would be amused by his assertions that the continuation of “compound-interest type” of economic growth was limited by the physical resources of the earth and the capacity of the public to consume. “Contrary to all the textbooks of economics, which state that human wants are insatiable,” Hubbert asserted, “the fact is that human beings, regardless of income, can only consume a limited amount of food per day, can only wear one outfit of clothing at a time, and so with all other forms of consumption.”
Hubbert was of course writing in the days before television and credit cards. He was also writing before the uncanny resurrection of that American and folk-lore that he supposed had been so rudely shattered by the events of 1929 and after.
The central argument of his essay was that the number of hours needed to produce each unit of industrial output had historically declined to the point where it could no longer be offset by increasing production. The result was either massive unemployment—as seen in the Depression—or adoption of a policy to reduce the hours of work.
The decline in the hours of work needed for each unit of production can also be expressed as an increase in productivity. Productivity has continued to increase to this day although the annual hours of work performed by individual workers have not appreciably diminished since the 1950s. Instead, there has been in the U.S. over the past half century an enormous, unprecedented expansion of administrative and commercial functions, which has absorbed the bulk of the U.S. labour force not required by industry.
In the mid 1990s, Jeremy Rifkin and others argued that the expansion of service sector jobs was itself coming to an end. Then along came the new economy boom of the late nineties to show that “yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus” (or should that be “yes, Goldilocks, there is Greenspan”) and that was the end of the “End of Work.” Or so we were told.
But I believe that once again we are going though a myth-shattering time. The collapse of the NASDAQ dot com boom didn’t do it. The unravelling of the racketeers at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia and their ilk didn’t do it. But the “fixed tenets of American social and economic faith” are looking a little less tenable each day. It remains to be seen how widespread will be the competent social thinking provoked by shattering of the growth mythology. That’s where the “optimism of the will” part comes in. If this is the summer the American public is going to discover Hubbert's Peak, let’s also make it the summer they discover there is a “promising alternative” to $2, $3, $4 or $5 dollar a gallon gas: driving less, consuming less, spending less, working less, commuting less, warring less… and living more.
Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock put it nicely back in 1920 in an essay titled “the unsolved riddle of social justice”: “The nerves of our industrial civilization are worn thin with the rattle of its own machinery. The industrial world is restless, over-strained and quarrelsome. It seethes with furious discontent, and looks about it eagerly for a fight. It needs a rest.”
Posted by sandwichman at October 11, 2004 12:58 PM