The Stationary State

The space enterprise has, if anything, accentuated the smallness of the earth and the loneliness of man. This beautiful blue and white ball is clearly the only decent piece of real estate in a very long way and we are stuck with it. We have had a period of enormous expansion in the last 200 years, in which, for instance, the growth of human knowledge has almost certainly increased natural resources much faster than man has used them up. Nevertheless, there is now a brooding sense that this cannot go on forever, or indeed for very long as historical time is counted, and that within, say, 100 years, or at most 500 years, a very radical change has to be made in man's technology and in all probability in his social system, his culture, and in his image of himself as he makes the transition into the small, tight, closed, crowded, limited spaceship earth, which will almost certainly have to rely on inputs of solar energy for its power and will have to recycle virtually all materials for its goods. We are moving toward the end of the linear economy that goes from mines and wells to dumps and pollution. The circle must be made complete. All the excreta of man's activities must be transformed, and this by inputs of solar power, into goods again.

This image of the future has a grim air of physical necessity about it. We are living in just so big a house and there are only so many things that can be done with it. The psychological impact of this shift has barely begun to be felt. I think many of what look like pathological aspects of the current youth culture may be a symptom of further changes to come. Young people, after all, are more sensitive to the future than oldsters, simply because they are going to live in it longer.

Closely connected with this vision of a spaceship earth is a slowly gathering realization that perhaps the really great age of change is now over, that economic growth, or at least its technical basis, is slowing down and is likely to slow down even further. I have been teasing audiences by saying that I thought the great age of change was my grandfather's life. When I look back on my childhood in 1920, the world does not seem terribly different; there were automobiles, electricity, the beginnings of the radio, telephone, the movies, and with one or two exceptions, like television, plastics, and antibiotics, what I have seen in my lifetime is more of the same. By contrast, my grandfather, looking back in 1920 on his childhood in 1860, looked back on a wholly different world—without electricity, without automobiles, without airplanes, without movies, without telephones, without anything that we think of as constituting modern life, and his life as a boy was certainly not very much different from that of his grandfather or his grandfather or his grandfather.

In the United States since 1967 we have seen a very sharp decline in the rate of increase of gross productivity, that is, GNP in real terms divided by the total employed labor force, including the armed services. We have had periods like this in the past so that it is hard to tell whether this is a temporary phenomenon or the beginnings of a long-run trend, but it certainly suggests why we managed to have both unemployment and inflation in 1970, with the economy geared to increases in money income to take advantage of expected increases in productivity that did not materialize. Even over the last forty years economic growth in the United States has not been spectacular. It took thirty years to increase real per capita disposable income by 50 percent. This might underestimate welfare somewhat, since it does not take account of public goods, but on the most optimistic assumptions, we are certainly not much more than twice as rich as our grandfathers.

Furthermore, many of the factors that have permitted increasing incomes in the last thirty years are not repeatable. One of these is the remarkable release of manpower from the increase in productivity of agriculture, which has now brought agriculture down to 6 percent of the labor force so that even if agricultural productivity doubles in the next generation only 3 percent of the labor force would be released for other things. As productivity in particular occupations increases, the proportion of the economy in industries that are improving declines, and the proportion in productivity-stagnant industries, such as education, government, medicine, and so on, increases. It seems highly probable, therefore, that there will be a substantial decline in the rate of increase in gross productivity in the next few decades.

A sharp decline in the rate of population growth is also very much in the works for the United States and indeed for the whole temperate zone. Fertility in the United States has declined so dramatically from 1961 that a little further decline will bring Americans to a net reproductive ratio of 1. It seems, therefore, that the United States is much closer to what might be called ZPPG, that is, Zero Population and Productivity Growth, than anyone could have conceived ten or twenty years ago.

It is a fundamental principle of futurology that all projections are wrong, including mine, and certain events, of course, could postpone the coming of the spaceship earth and could lead to a longer period of productivity growth, though not perhaps of population growth. I have been able to think of only three changes, all of which seem to have rather low probability, that could drastically change the picture. These are artificial life, as a result of the developments of molecular biology; artificial intelligence, as a result of the development of computers—or even a breakthrough on the understanding of natural intelligence and human learning; and the gravity shield (a substance or process that would block the force of gravity), which would drastically change the whole power picture. None of these, however, seems at all probable in the next 50 or 100 years, with the possible exception of the first.

The image of the future outlined here is bound to have a profound effect on the evaluation function of all kinds of decision makers, an effect that will increase as we move further into the future. It implies a high value on modesty rather than grandeur. There is no room for "great societies" in the spaceship. It implies conservationism to the point of conservatism rather than expansionism. It implies a a high value on taking things easy, on conflict management. There is no place in the spaceship for men on white horses and very little room for horsing around. We cannot afford to have war, revolution, or dialectical processes. Everything must be directed towards the preservation of precarious order rather than experimentation with new forms. We have to stress equality rather than incentives, simply in order to minimize uncertainty and conflict. It is important to realize that the case for equality may not rest at all on the concepts of social justice. Equality, indeed, denies at least one principle of social justice—that distribution should be in rough proportion to desert—for under an equalitarian regime the deserving get less than they deserve and the undeserving get more, assuming at least something like a normal distribution of deservingness. Nevertheless, there may be a case for equality that rests not at all on social justice but on the sheer demand of the system for stability. A just society that provided incentives for virtue might simply prove to be too unstable.

If all this sounds rather depressing, it is intended to be. Economists have never been very cheerful about the stationary state, and a permanent, planetwide stationary state, from which there seemed to be no possible means of escape, might be a very depressing prospect indeed. What is even more depressing is that a stationary state (ZPPG) might not even be stable, simply because of the intensification of conflicts within it.

In the progressive state, conflicts can be resolved fairly easily by progress itself. The poor can get richer without the rich getting poorer. In the stationary state, if the poor are to get richer, then the rich must get poorer, and what is even more frightening, if the rich are to get richer, they can only do so by increasing their exploitation of the poor, and since the rich may be the most powerful, they may have strong incentives to do this. Thus, the banished specter of exploitation, which progress made obsolete, is reintroduced into the world. The dialectical processes to which a stationary state would be exposed would thereby become much more acute and might easily destroy the state's precarious equilibrium, in war, revolution, social upheaval, the decay of all legitimacies, and a Hobbesian nightmare of retrogression in the war of all against all. As Adam Smith said prophetically, the declining state is melancholy.

The ultimate question of whether a stationary state would be bearable, or even stable, depends a great deal on the human capacity for social invention. One might even have an optimistic image of the present period of human expansion as a kind of adolescence of the human race, in which man has to devote a large proportion of his energy and information to sheer physical growth. Hence, we could regard the stationary state as a kind of maturity in which physical growth is no longer necessary and in which, therefore, human energies can be devoted to qualitative growth—knowledge, spirit, art, and love. One might even romantically regard the twenty-first century as symbolizing the achievement of this maturity. Fortunately for us, we have to leave most of these problems to our descendants. All we can really do is to wish them well, to leave them a little elbow room, and to guide our current evaluation functions somewhere toward the minimax of being on the safe side.