The never-ending allure of ecotopianism.  What role for universities?

The philosopher Joseph Heath has a critical but thought-provoking review of Kōhei Saitō’s ecotopian book Slow Down.  My takeaway is less pessimistic than Heath’s, but there are important lessons here for all of us:

It’s discouraging to go into a classroom and find it full of students who believe, almost verbatim, every bad idea that I believed when I was their age.

. . .

All of this is to explain why the young philosopher Kōhei Saitō’s most recent book, Slow Down (a massive bestseller in Japan, recently translated into English), has pushed me to the brink of despondency. Not only is it a compendium of seemingly every bad idea that has fixated the left for the past century, it reproduces, again almost verbatim, the same ecotopian fantasy that I was raised on in the 1970s. The fact that Saitō’s book has been so well received raises extremely troubling questions about the dysfunctionality of the epistemic ecosystem of the left. Why are progressives, who are supposedly in favour of progress, incapable of making any progress when it comes to the formulation of progressive ideas? Why do we insist on recycling bad ideas, rather than embracing new, better ones?

. . .

Although I did not expect to like Saitō’s book much, I was nevertheless surprised by how bad it was, because the English-language reviews have been so deferential.

. . .

Anyone familiar with the degrowth literature will know that there is often a bit of a shell game going on in these arguments. Very few proponents of degrowth are willing to come out and say “suck it up, you’re going to have to live like a medieval peasant.” So instead they engage in wordplay.

. . .

Saitō is playing a similar game, threatening degrowth, but then turning around and promising “radical abundance” in its stead.

. . .

Saitō, to his credit, is not soft-pedaling some kind of market socialism. He actually wants to get rid of capitalism, which means that he wants to abolish both private property and market exchange. This naturally invites the objection that the modern economy is a very complex system of reciprocity, which is difficult to organize without such affordances. This is not a problem for Saitō, however, because he also wants to abolish the division of labour (194). This is certainly one way to solve the socialist calculation problem! Unfortunately, it sounds more like a recipe for radical poverty than for radical abundance. And yet Saitō talks as though life would go on pretty much as before – people will still have access to modern health care, clean energy technology, bicycles, computers, and so on. But where will all this stuff come from? Won’t it require some sort of specialization in production, some kind of exchange system? And how will all that be organized?

Again, it feels stupid to have to point this out. And yet Saitō has literally nothing to say on this question. Or more specifically, he does not see it as a problem that requires any sort of solution.

. . .

I, on the other hand, being a professional philosopher, am accustomed to the habits of my tribe, which include following the implications of one’s view to their logical conclusion, no matter how crazy. So when I read Saitō, I evaluate his view based on what he actually wrote in the book. And what he wrote in the book is that we should abandon our efforts to create a sustainable, carbon-neutral market economy, and instead plump for a hazily sketched out ecological utopia, where people just magically cooperate with one another, and we get to keep all of the good parts of the modern economy without having to endure any of the bad parts.

Okay, sure, whatever. But here’s the part that troubles me: I’ve heard all this before. Do we really have to have the same debates, about the same self-evidently unworkable ideas, again and again? Maybe I am just revealing weakness of character, but I’m having trouble summoning the requisite amor fati in the face of this latest recurrence.

Heath is right to be worried, but he should be worried about Saitō and the intellectual elites who favorably review his book, not his students.  The fact that each generation needs to learn the importance of using markets to organize economic activity is not surprising.  There is no automatic inheritance of important ideas, just like there is no inheritance of acquired characteristics.  Newborns will not spring from the womb with a sophisticated (or even rudimentary) understanding of economics.  Further, as Hayek emphasized, the beliefs that come so naturally to Saitō, and to the young people in Heath’s classes, are, in fact, . . . natural.  Each generation will need to unlearn them. 

This may make college professors like Heath feel like Sisyphus pushing rocks uphill for all eternity, but the fact is that economics needs to be taught to young people, just like mathematics, genetics, and the molecular theory of matter. 

Whether universities are doing a good or even an adequate job teaching young people economics is an important question.  The positive reception being accorded to Slow Down, a book written by someone who should obviously know better, suggests we have a problem.  I think universities are falling short and reforms are in order.  I will not try to make the case for reform here.  But the fact that many undergraduates believe nonsense about economics is inevitable, and does not bear on the question of whether universities are doing well or poorly.