Doomed by a footnote.
The world needed to be modeled, understood and explained so that it could be explored indefinitely, Robert M. Solow gave the world the best excuse.
Adam Smith inputs for his economic model were land, labor, capital, technology (add to the list: social, economic and political structures) and this model served for over a century as a cornerstone to define what an economic model should consider in order to minimally represent the economic system of a nation or geographic region.
All models before Robert Solow (Nobel in Economic Sciences 1987) considered land as a scarce resource, the classical economic model, the ones similar to Adam Smith’s, also considered the equilibrium between land use and population growth understanding that eventually these two variables would imbalance with catastrophic effects to the population and the economic growth.
Robert Solow understood that land was scarce he mentioned it in his most seminal papers, but he wanted to theorize a growth model as a linear model, with a first degree slope in which the relied upon technologies to compensate for the finite resources, like land scarcity, limited crop yields things that could be enhanced by advancements in fertilizers, better seeds and better farming techniques, to name a few. Such model could indeed be implemented, but not for long. In his paper A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth he has a key footnote that he simply decided to reduce land as something that could be “hacked out of the wilderness at essentially no cost”
What was supposed to be a theorical model, fell in the grace of bureaucrats and lobbyists that placed their bets in technologies to solve any major challenge humanity would face, suffice to say that the bet was at odds with the entire planet, given that it instilled a sense that nothing is off limits to exploration in the name of progress.
Should any problem occur, there will be a new technology to counter or fix that, besides, the world is too big to fail. The fifties where crazier than we thought. Years later Robert Solow reintroduces land into his economic model, but it was already late, this neo-Keynesian model of the world has set it’s stride and a new form a predatory exploration was born with the blessings of a theoretical model that projected a continuous growth regardless the ecological damages.
Solow’s model was confronted by a group of MIT scholars in late 60´s and was eventually published in 1972 with the title “Limits to Growth” by MIT press, with an elaborated study in which Solow’s model was proven to be misleading and almost irresponsible to follow since the rate of degradation and uneven economic growth among nations created a perfect storm for a systematic failure of ecological systems within a generation or two.
The authors were berated, and the study was heavily critiqued, Solow went on to earn a Nobel in economics and the world kept collapsing regardless of whether Mr. Solow cared or not.
Today in Brazil we experience one of most severe combination of drought (worst of the past 44 years) with a deadly combination of forest fire and criminal activities. For decades producers are hacking land out of the wilderness with fire generating megatons of CO² every season trying to enter a market that now sits in an ocean of uncertainty given that flash floods can wipe out dozens of grain fields in a single day, generating a huge demand to compensate crop loss, especially in China.
Such extreme events are directly related to degradation of forests and increase of CO² that leads to warm… well you know where I am heading to…
But as of now, this is how producers in Brazil are dealing with this surge in the commodity prices. Burning down an entire pristine ecosystem, just because.
The easiest way to confront the linear growth theory that relies on technologies to compensate for degradation is that tech is very expensive it is often proprietary and to offer tech support in such remote areas in the amazon region might be a tad complicated. Thus fire is the best tool… you see, instead of a self-sustaining growth model, Mr. Solow enabled a self-sustaining worldwide disaster, one that will surely accelerate mass extinction of wildlife while wiping out the most fragile economies in the southern hemisphere.
There aren’tt enough words to describe how preposterous is this economical model that led us here.
I leave this text for now, it’s 2am and I am sleepless and angry, won't review the text, not today.
Later this week I’ll write about local legislations and absurd.