Class News
Gus Speth '64 on "The Problem With Capitalism"
Gus Speth, our classmate and dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, wrote the following essay published in the Yale Alumni Magazine of March/April 2008. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (Yale University Press).
The problem with capitalism
The
principal approaches to date for controlling the economy's impacts on
the natural world can be thought of as today's environmentalism. This
arena is where I have worked throughout my professional career. Now,
near the end of my career, I find it impossible to be happy with the
results. Important gains have been made, of course, including progress
on local environmental problems like air and water pollution. But, all
in all, today's environmentalism has not been succeeding. We have been
winning battles, including some critical ones, but losing the planet.
The escalating processes of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment,
and toxification that continue despite decades of warnings and earnest
effort constitute a severe indictment, but an indictment of what
exactly? If we want to reverse today's destructive trends, to forestall
further and greater losses, and leave a bountiful world for our children
and grandchildren, we must go back to fundamentals and seek to
understand both the underlying forces driving such destructive trends
and also the economic and political system that gives these forces such
free rein. Then we can ask what can be done to change the system.
The sources of today's environmental deterioration have been clearly
identified. They range from immediate forces like the enormous growth in
human populations and the dominant technologies deployed in the economy,
to deeper ones like the values that shape our behavior and determine
what we consider important in life. Most basically, we know that
environmental deterioration is driven by the economic activity of human
beings. About half of today's world population lives in abject poverty
or close to it, with per capita incomes of less than $2 per day. The
struggle of the poor to survive creates a range of environmental impacts
where the poor themselves are often the primary victims — for example,
the deterioration of arid and semi-arid lands due to the press of
increasing numbers of people who have no other option.
But the much larger and more threatening impacts stem from the economic
activity of those of us participating in the modern, increasingly
prosperous world economy. This activity is consuming vast quantities of
resources from the environment and returning to the environment vast
quantities of waste products. The damages are already huge and are on a
path to be ruinous in the future. So, a fundamental question facing
societies today — perhaps the fundamental question — is: how can
the operating instructions for the modern world economy be changed so
that economic activity both protects and restores the natural world?
With increasingly few exceptions, modern capitalism is the operating
system of the world economy. I use "modern capitalism" here in a very
broad sense as an actual, existing system of political economy, not as
an idealized model. Capitalism as we know it today encompasses the core
economic concept of private employers hiring workers to produce products
and services that the employers own and then sell with the intention of
making a profit. But it also includes competitive markets, the price
mechanism, the modern corporation as its principal institution, the
consumer society and the materialistic values that sustain it, and the
administrative state actively promoting economic strength and growth for
a wide variety of reasons.
Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn
profits, invest them, innovate and thus grow the economy, typically at
exponential rates, with the result that the capitalist era has in fact
been characterized by a remarkable exponential expansion of the world
economy. The capitalist operating system, whatever its shortcomings, is
very good at generating growth.
These features of capitalism, as they are constituted today, work
together to produce an economic and political reality that is highly
destructive of the environment. An unquestioning society-wide commitment
to economic growth at almost any cost; enormous investment in
technologies designed with little regard for the environment; powerful
corporate interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating
profit, including profit from avoiding the environmental costs they
create; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental
costs unless corrected by government; government that is subservient to
corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism
spurred by a worshipping of novelty and by sophisticated advertising;
economic activity so large in scale that its impacts alter the
fundamental biophysical operations of the planet — all combine to
deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the ability of
the planet to sustain life.
In short, my conclusion, after much searching and considerable
reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of
systemic failures of the capitalism we have today and that long-term
solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this
contemporary capitalism.