Chapter Twelve

The Cost Principle
Introduction
The cost principle, as originally stated by individualist anarchists, was "cost the limit
of price."
The individualists largely neglected the corollary form of this principle: "cost the
basis of price."1 This neglect was more understandable in the nineteenth century,
although even then subsidies played an essential role in the development of capitalism.
The much greater significance of government subsidies in today's economy, relative to the
total operating costs of big business, makes the corollary impossible to ignore. The
corollary form of the cost principle will be our primary focus in this chapter: all costs
should be internalized in market price, so that the consumers of goods and services bear
the full cost of supplying them.
The cost principle, as stated by Proudhon, Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews,
was originally understood to require some special administrative mechanism or set of
bylaws to enforce, like labor-notes and other forms of voluntary currency, or Warren's
time store. Warren set the value principle (setting price by what the market would bear)
in opposition to the cost principle. Stephen Pearl Andrews, in his explication of Warren's
thought, actually considered market competition to be a form of war by which the strong
subjugated the weak, and the rich were made richer and the poor poorer; worse yet, he
argued that competition "prevent[ed] the possibility of a scientific Adjustment of Supply to
Demand," rather than being the means by which this was done.2
It was the insight of Hodgskin in England, and of Greene and Tucker in America, that
no such artificial mechanism was necessary. Rather, the natural tendency of the
competitive market was for the price of reproducible goods to move toward the cost of
production. It was (as we saw in the last chapter) consistent deviation from the cost
principle that required an artificial mechanism: namely artificial scarcity and unequal
exchange resulting from the state's suppression of competition. Despite Warren and
Andrews, the problem was not "value" as such, but rather impediments to the natural
process by which competition moves value toward cost.

1

Stephen Pearl Andrews came very close to stating the corollary principle in The Science of Society: "The
truest condition of society... is that in which each individual is enabled and constrained to assume, to the
greatest extent possible, the Cost or disagreeable consequences of his own acts." II:3. And elsewhere: "It
is Equity that every individual should sustain just as much of the common burden of life as has to be
sustained BY ANY BODY on his account." II:60.
2
Science of Society, II:147-150; Ibid. II:153.

Indeed, as Marx had recognized long before, the deviation of price from cost was the
mechanism by which the market constantly adjusted supply to demand, and the market
gravitated toward an equilibrium point at which the quantities supplied and demanded at
a market-clearing price based on cost of production. A price above or below the cost of
production was what signaled an imbalance of supply and demand, and caused factors of
production to be moved from one use to another until the imbalance was corrected. As
Thomas Hodgskin described it:
The governments of some countries, distinguished for wisdom, noticing the evils
resulting from variations in the seasons, have established public granaries to prevent them,
and to equalize the operations of nature; but the merchant buying when and where
commodities are cheap, and only selling when and where they are dear, does, in fact,
perform, but infinitely better than governments can, all the functions of public granaries.3

The forms of exploitation entailed in the older, misnamed "laissez-faire," variant of
capitalism Tucker remarked on in the nineteenth century, resulted from violation of the
original, negative version of the cost principle: cost exceeded price as a result of unequal
exchange, with tenants, workers, and consumers paying assorted forms of scarcity rent on
land, capital, and goods subject to "intellectual property." And as we saw in Chapter
Eleven, such forms of unequal exchange continue to operate in corporate capitalism up to
the present day. So-called "intellectual property," in particular, results in product prices
which reflect mainly rents on artificial property rights rather than actual material and
labor costs.
But many more of the ills specific to corporate capitalism, on the other hand, result
from violations of the positive version of the principle: the supply of transportation,
energy, education, and other production inputs to privileged enterprises below their
market costs. Murray Rothbard described the effects of such subsidies:
“Free” services are particularly characteristic of government. Police and military
protection, fire-fighting, education, parks, some water supply come to mind as examples. The
first point to note, of course, is that these services are not and cannot be truly free. A free
good, as we saw early in this book, would not be a good and hence not an object of human
action; it would simply exist in superabundance for all. If a good does not exist aplenty for
all, then the resource is scarce, and sup-plying it costs society other goods forgone. Hence it
cannot be free. The resources needed to supply the free governmental serv-ice are extracted
from the rest of production. Payment is made, however, not by users on the basis of their
voluntary purchases, but by a coerced levy on the taxpayers. A basic split is thus effected
between payment and receipt of service. This split is inherent in all government operations.
Many grave consequences follow from the split and from the “free” service as well.
As in all cases where price is below the free-market price, an enormous and excessive
demand is stimulated for the good, far beyond the supply of service available. Consequently,

3

Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics'
Institution (London: Printed for Charles and William Tait, Edinburgh, 1827), p. 175.

there will always be “shortages” of the free good, constant complaints of insufficiency,
overcrowding, etc. An illustration is the perpetual complaints about police insufficiency,
particularly in crime-ridden districts, about teacher and school shortages in the public school
system, about traffic jams on government-owned streets and highways, etc. In no area of the
free market are there such chronic complaints about shortages, insufficiencies, and low
quality service. In all areas of private enterprise, firms try to coax and persuade consumers to
buy more of their product. Where government owns and operates, on the other hand, there
are invariably calls on consumers for patience and sacrifice, and problems of shortages and
deficiencies continually abound. It is doubtful if any private enterprise would ever do what
the New York City and other governments have done: exhort consumers to use less water. It
is also characteristic of government operation that when a water shortage develops, it is the
consumers and not the government “enterprisers” who are blamed for the shortage. The
pressure is on consumers to sacrifice, and to use less, while in private industry the (welcome)
pressure is on entrepreneurs to supply more....
Free supply not only subsidizes the users at the expense of non-using taxpayers; it also
misallocates resources by failing to supply the service where it is most needed. The same is
true, to a lesser extent, wherever the price is under the free-market price. On the free market,
consumers can dictate the pricing and thereby assure the best allocation of productive
resources to supply their wants. In a government enterprise, this cannot be done. Let us take
again the case of the free service. Since there is no pricing, and therefore no exclusion of
submarginal uses, there is no way that the government, even if it wanted to, could allocate its
services to their most important uses and to the most eager buyers. All buyers, all uses, are
artificially kept on the same plane. As a result, the most important uses will be slighted. The
government is faced with insuperable allocation problems, which it cannot solve even to its
own satisfaction. Thus, the government will be confronted with the problem: Should we
build a road in place A or place B? There is no rational way whatever by which it can make
this decision. It cannot aid the private consumers of the road in the best way. It can decide
only according to the whim of the ruling government official, i.e., only if the government
officials do the “consuming,” and not the public. If the government wishes to do what is best
for the public, it is faced with an impossible task.4

The irrationality and misallocation that result from this divorce of payment from
benefit, or of cost from decision-making authority, has been a central theme of this book.
Indeed, Oppenheimer's "political means" might be defined as the divorce of payment from
benefit. The fundamental purpose of power is to receive benefits at others' expense,
through the exercise of unaccountable power over them. And this inevitably follows
from the authority relationship and from hierarchy, wherever it is found. Authority
breeds conflict of interest wherever it is found, whether in the government sector or the
nominal private sector. For example, as Lloyd Dumas described it,
The assumption that control is exercised by the cost bearers is nontrivial, and in some
cases unrealistic. For instance, taxpayers bear the cost of the salaries of government
employees. Yet, though rational, taxpayers are not necessarily in control of government

4

Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig
von Mises Institute, 1962, 1970, 1993), pp. 819-820.

personnel decisions. Hence it is quite possible that individuals will be hired whose salaries
exceed the value of their work output in the eyes of the taxpayers. In the opinion of the
government administrators doing the hiring, the value of the salaries may far exceed the
opportunity cost of that use of budgeted funds. But the administrators are not paying the
salaries--the taxpayers are. This situation is not peculiar to government. Managers of private
corporations, for example, may engage in bureaucratic empire-building and hire people
whose work output is less valuable than its cost, in the eyes of the stockholders and/or
consumers who share the salary costs. It is thus the judgment of the decision makers that
holds sway when the decision makers and the cost bearers are different individuals.5

A major part of the economy consists of things which are paid for but produce no
value, the moral equivalent of digging holes and filling them in again. This leads to the
obvious question, Dumas writes,
Why would workers be paid identical salaries to provide services of... radically different
inherent economic value? In fact, why would economically valueless output be associated
with a nonzero money value?...
[One possible answer]: there may be a discrepancy between the value of an activity or
output to the decision maker who authorizes its purchase and its value to those who actually
pay the price.6

One example he gives for the expansion of unproductive consumption of inputs is
administrative activity within an organization. The cost to managers
of expanding the bureaucratic control apparatus is low, while the value to them of such
expansion may well be substantially higher. (In standard neoclassical terminology, to the
managers the marginal cost of expansion will tend to be less than its marginal utility.) The
managers have the relevant decision-making power: they are in operational control of hiring
and purchasing decisions. Therefore, as long as the value of expansion exceeds its costs
from their perspective, they will continue to expand the bureaucracy.7

In other words, decision makers aim at maximizing net utility, not to society as a whole,
but to themselves personally. If their power enables them to shift marginal cost
downward relative to benefits, they will consume an input beyond its point of diminishing
social utility.
Economist Kenneth Boulding, our old acquaintance from Chapter Five (and the father
of what is called grants economics), wrote the introduction to Dumas' book. In it he
referred to subsidies as an example of the "implicit grants economy," a term originally of
his invention.

5

Lloyd Dumas, The Overburdened Economy: Uncovering the Causes of Chronic Unemployment,
Inflation, and National Decline. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986),
pp. 39-40.
6
Ibid., pp. 42-43.
7
Ibid., pp. 66-67.

Such subsidies result in massive amounts of waste being built into the basic structure
of the economy. For example, the centralization of the economy and concentration of
industry result, among other things, from artificially cheap transportation and energy
inputs. So do inefficiently energy-intensive forms of production. Subsidized research
and development and technical education lead, as we saw in Chapter Three, have
distorting effects on the choice of production technology: specifically, the choice of highcost, capital-intensive forms of production that create entry barriers, promote hierarchy,
and also promote capital substitution and the deskilling of labor. The centralizing effects
of transportation subsidies, likewise, were described in Chapter Three.
A. Peak Oil and the "Long Emergency"
The application of the cost principle to the corporate economy would result in radical
changes: a shift toward decentralized, small-scale production for local markets; toward
energy-efficient industry and housing; toward walkable, mixed-use communities. One of
the best summaries of the changes required comes from Herman Koenig:
Undoubtedly the first thing we will try to do as the real cost of energy increases and it
becomes less available, is make adjustments to more efficient technologies...; they are
frequently called "technological fixes." We can and will put more insulation in our homes,
opening windows a little more in the summer, turning down the thermostat in winter. Detroit
will build a more efficient automobile for you, you'll get 45 or 50 miles per gallon instead of
16 in a few years. We will transfer some of the freight from the highways to the railroads.
Such technological adjustments have been estimated to have the potential of saving thirty to
forty percent of our present energy budget. Such adjustments will not affect our life style
very much, but the "slack" will run out after a few years.
The next large class of adjustments relate to our mobility. Fifty-four percent of our
petroleum is used for transportation. As petroleum becomes less available, and the price
rises significantly, our mobility will go down. How will this affect the landscape? We will
undoubtedly find that what we need to re-invent are medium-sized communities built around
a small electrical generating facility that heats our homes and commercial buildings with the
residual heat. It is called district heating. These communities would also serve as transit
transit terminal connections to other communities, and they will have a diversified commerce
and some decentralized, light industry. Such communities are much more energy-efficient,
since most of the elements of everyday living are near at hand.
A third class of adjustments is to be found in the area of product durability. Just as small
is beautiful, age will be beautiful. we have the technology to significantly increase the
durability of most of our products. We can build a refrigerator that will outlive its human
owner. Detroit is beginning to realize that it should develop cars that will last perhaps twice
as long as present cars. If we increase product durability, as we must, there will be a
tremendous opportunity not only for reducing energy requirements, but also the impact on

our environment.8

Whether or not the state ceases to subsidize resource consumption and otherwise
distort the market in favor of large-scale organization and centralization, input crises like
Peak Oil are likely to make the cost principle felt sufficiently to result in such changes.
A common theme in the popular media today is that "human ingenuity" will find
some magic formula which will allow the current American form of social organization
(economic centralization, large-scale production for large market areas, suburban sprawl
and the commuter society, the soccer mom SUV lifestyle, thousands of passenger jets in
the air 24/7, etc.) to continue unchanged--but at lesser cost, and with reduced greenhouse
emissions and dependence on foreign oil. But this is a fairy tale. State capitalism is
headed for a crisis of inputs, as we saw in Chapter Four, the inevitable outcome of the
internal contradictions that result from its having been built around subsidized inputs in
the first place. The very act of subsidizing inputs leads to escalating demand faster than
the state can subsidize them, until things reach a breaking point.
The Western industrial economies have become dependent on extensive inputs of
long-distance shipping, to the point of insanity. Hedrick Smith, attempting to illustrate
the irrationality of the Soviet economy, used the example of a trainload of concrete beams
traveling from Leningrad to Moscow, passing a trainload of identical beams traveling
from Moscow to Leningrad. E.F. Schumacher, in Good Work, wrote:
When you travel up the big motor road from London you find yourself surrounded by a
huge fleet of lorries carrying biscuits from London to Glasgow. And when you look across
to the other motorway, you find an equally huge fleet of lorries carrying biscuits from
Glasgow to London. Any impartial observer from another planet would come to the
inescapable conclusion that biscuits have to be transported at least six hundred miles before
they reach their proper quality.9

James Kunstler explains why the American car culture and "warehouses on wheels"
industrial culture are finished:
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college
lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for
"solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the
nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy
Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no

8

Herman Koenig, "Appropriate Technology and Resources," in Richard C. Dorf and Yvonne Hunter, eds.,
Appropriate Visions: Technology the Environment and the Individual (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser
Publishing Company, 1978). p. 259. [247-259]
9
E. F. Schumacher, Good Work (New York, Hagerstown, San Fransisco, London: Harper & Row, 1979),
p. 19.

combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used Frenchfry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story.
It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex
systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These
systems can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more....
....The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle
is absurd....
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically
reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to
home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return
to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very
networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of
wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and
small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be
ones that encourage local farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake
right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact
that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how
confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel
costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension
obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy
protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again,
Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.10

I should note, in passing, that--even if giant metroplexes don't "make it"--there's no

10

James Kunstler, "Wake Up America. We're Driving Toward Disaster," Washington Post, May 25, 2008
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/23/AR2008052302456_pf.html>.

necessity for their collapse to be sudden or catastrophic. If their economies are
sufficiently restructured, their present sites can probably support at least a majority of
their current population. That would require, among other things, dedicating lawns and
other forms of greenspace to raised-bed horticulture and edible landscaping, and heroic
efforts at conserving rainwater. It would require the growth of networked economies, the
growth of commercial centers in existing monoculture suburbs, and local exchange
systems and division of labor based on household production and crop specialization.
One step toward a local manufacturing economy, based on the informal and household
sectors, is the use of the better-equipped hobbyists' workshops to custom machine
replacement parts for machinery, and the creation of neighborhood repair/recyclying/
remanufacture shops, as discussed in Chapter Fourteen.
Jeff Vail explains, in greater detail, both why there is no magic technological fix for
Peak Oil, and what a healthy economic system post-Peak Oil will entail.11 Quality of life,
he observes, is a function of energy inputs ("opportunities for work") and the efficiency
with which the energy is directed to work ("technics"). Quality of life can be increased
either by tapping new sources of concentrated energy, or by using the energy we have
more efficiently.
The problem, he says, is that the greatest sources of concentrated energy are almost
certainly reaching their peak. The only energy sources with a high "EROEI" (i.e., a
concentrated energy source that produces a great deal more energy than is required to tap
it) are fossil fuels. The only alternative energy sources with a fairly high EROEI, wind
and hydro, won't be available in quantities even remotely sufficient to replace current
energy consumption from fossil fuels. Simply put, there is no concentrated energy source
in the world with an EROEI as high as that of fossil fuel, and energy sources with an
EROEI significantly higher than one can take up only a small part of the slack.
Therefore, if quality of life is to be maintained, the only solution is "improving
technics--improving how we use the energy that we do have to create quality of life."
it seems very likely that there is ample room to improve our technics. IF we accept this latter
proposition—that we can improve our utilization of energy to create quality of life—then
doesn’t it make the most sense to focus our mitigation efforts there? I have great confidence
in the power of human ingenuity to solve our problems. However, when human ingenuity
meets the laws of physics and thermodynamics, I don’t think they will bend to our will.
Design of technics, on the other hand, seems to be an area where human ingenuity has
unending room for advancement....
My hypothesis is that our quality of life, both collectively and individually, is more
dependent on how we use our energy than on how much of it we use. This hypothesis
continues that we can better influence our quality of life through improving technics than

11

Jeff Vail, "The Design Imperative," A Theory of Power, April 8, 2007
<http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/04/design-imperative.html>.

through increasing energy consumption....
Improving technics is, of course, the flip side of the conservation coin. If our quality of
life is dependent on levels of energy consumption, then conservation must decrease quality
of life. For that reason, the conservation measures that work are those that are based on
technics—ways of using energy more efficiently to achieve the same quality of life.

As an alternative paradigm for technics, in promoting a high quality of life with
dramatically reduced energy inputs, Vail proposes three organizing principles:
"decentralized, open source, and vernacular." As an example, he contrasts the Tuscan
village with the American suburb:
How is the Tuscan village decentralized? Production is localized. Admittedly, everything
isn’t local. Not by a long shot. But compared to American suburbia, a great percentage of
food and building materials are produced and consumed in a highly local network. A high
percentage of people garden and shop at local farmer’s markets.
How is the Tuscan village open source? Tuscan culture historically taps into a shared
community pool of technics in recognition that a sustainable society is a non-zero-sum game.
Most farming communities are this way—advice, knowledge, and innovation is shared, not
guarded. Beyond a certain threshold of size and centralization, the motivation to protect and
exploit intellectual property seems to take over (another argument for decentralization).
There is no reason why we cannot share innovation in technics globally, while acting
locally—in fact, the internet now truly makes this possible, leveraging our opportunity to use
technics to improve quality of life.
How is the Tuscan village vernacular? You don’t see many “Colonial-Style” houses in
Tuscany. Yet strangely, in Denver I’m surrounded by them. Why? They make no more sense
in Denver than in Tuscany. The difference is that the Tuscans recognize (mostly) that
locally-appropriate, locally-sourced architecture improves quality of life. The architecture is
suited to their climate and culture, and the materials are available locally. Same thing with
their food—they celebrate what is available locally, and what is in season. Nearly every
Tuscan with the space has a vegetable garden. And finally (though the pressures of
globalization are challenging this), their culture is vernacular. They celebrate local festivals,
local harvests, and don’t rely on manufactured, mass-marketed, and global trends for their
culture nearly as much as disassociated suburbanites—their strong sense of community gives
prominence to whatever “their” celebration is over what the global economy tells them it
should be.

Brian Kaller's model of the vernacular post-Peak Oil community is the American
equivalent of a Tuscan village: Mayberry. Or rather, a higher-tech version of the
American Main Street lifestyle before the triumph of the car culture, symbolized by
Mayberry. Kaller also takes issue with Kunstler's apocalyptic view of the Peak Oil
transition.
In fact, peak oil will probably not be a crash, a moment when everything falls apart, but a
series of small breakdowns, price hikes, and local crises....

...The Long Emergency will be an era, not an event, and the challenge will be to see the
larger trends as they unfold and to retool our habits and infrastructure, not to wait for major
developments to "hit."....
The Long Emergency could look like the Victory Garden movement during World War
II, when Americans responded to a national threat by turning backyards into gardens and
freeing food production for the troops. Within a couple of years, such gardens were
producing almost half of Americans' vegetables. Contrary to popular myth, the movement
was not a big-government initiative—the Roosevelt administration discouraged the effort at
first, unsuccessfully, until it joined in and turned the White House lawn into crops. Similarly,
Americans formed scrap and rubber drives and practiced emergency drills.
The same habits that helped us through that crisis—recycling, thrift, gardening— will
help with this one....
While peak-oil literature often considers the world to be at the end of a 200-year
industrial era, it is only in the last few decades that we have truly binged. By some estimates,
the world has used as much oil in the last 25 years as in the entire previous century.
Restoring a low energy world, for many Americans, would not mean going back two
centuries.
Take one of the more pessimistic projections of the future, from the Association for the
Study of Peak Oil, and assume that by 2030 the world will have only two-thirds as much
energy per person. Little breakdowns can feed on each other, so crudely double that estimate.
Say that, for some reason, solar power, wind turbines, nuclear plants, tidal power,
hydroelectric dams, biofuels, and new technologies never take off. Say that Americans make
only a third as much money, cut driving by two thirds. Assume that extended families have to
move in together to conserve resources and that we must cut our flying by 98 percent.
Many would consider that a fairly clear picture of collapse. But we have been there
before, and recently. Those are the statistics of the 1950s—not remembered as a big time for
cannibalism.12

The Scale of Possible Savings on Energy Inputs
Fortunately, Vail's optimism regarding the potential of technics seems to be fully
warranted. Chapter Fourteen of this book, on decentralized production technology, deals
with the feasibility of a decentralized economy organized around small-scale
manufacturing for local markets. Vail himself links to a number of interesting initiatives.
The Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP),13 developed by students in the Practical

12

Brian Kaller, "Future Perfect: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Expensive Oil," The American
Conservative, August 25, 2008, pp. 23-26.
13
Kinsale 2021: An Energy Descent Action Plan--Version.1.2005. By Students of Kinsale Further
Education College. Edited by Rob Hopkins (Kinsale, Ireland: Kinsale Further Education College, 2005)
<http://transitionculture.org/?page_id=104>.

Sustainability course at Kinsale Further Education College, is a detailed agenda for
managing the Irish town of Kinsale's transition from a high-energy consumption to a lowenergy consumption community. The study assumes that Kinsale's available fossil fuel
inputs in 2021 will be half those available in 2005, and recommends measures for
managing an orderly transition. To take one example, in the area of food, by 2021 lawns
have disappeared, and landscaping consists entirely of edible plant permaculture. As we
have already seen in this book--repeatedly--and will see again in Chapter Fourteen, the
total labor required for growing food at the point of production is less than that required
to earn the money to buy factory farmed produce. Taking into account also the savings in
labor and money for lawn maintenance, and the improved quality of food, this would
clearly be a net improvement in quality of life.
The Transition Town14 movement in the UK, beginning with Totnes and now
including some seventy towns, is another good example. Some of these towns, including
Totnes, have developed EDAPs of their own.15 Finally, Vail mentions Richard
Heinberg's Powerdown,16 which has inspired various eco-village projects in the British
Isles.
Cuba has already made--in a much briefer and rockier manner--a transition
comparable to what the West is likely to undergo with Peak Oil in the coming decades.
Until the late 1980s, Cuba's agricultural economy was a Soviet wannabe, based on heavy
mechanization and use of chemicals; the Soviet state-socialist model of agriculture, at
least ideally, was as if Cargill or ADM had turned the farms of an entire country into one
giant agribusiness plantation, and then the state had expropriated the corporation and put
it under a state ministry. But with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and of the USSR
itself in 1991, and the cutoff of their "fraternal assistance," the Cuban economy was
deprived of the inputs necessary for a Soviet-style agricultural model. There were drastic
cutbacks in electric power and transportation, in the fuel and spare parts for those big geewhizzy combines, and the oil necessary for chemical inputs. Left with an economy largely
geared toward cash crops of sugar, and deprived of the Soviet-bloc markets for that sugar
at subsidized prices, Cuba suffered something like a one-third reduction in average daily
caloric intake. But more than a decade later, Bill McKibben noticed a difference:
Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food
again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market
gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto
organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did
before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply
remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten
that meal back.

14

Transition Town Wiki <http://www.transitiontowns.org/>
Transition Town Totnes <http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/>
16
Richard Heinberg, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society Publishers,
2004).
15

In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a
semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the
world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.17

As the Freedom Democrats blog points out, Cuba's success resulted from the Cuban
government simultaneously rejecting the Washington Consensus model of focusing on
cash-crop exports, and loosening up state socialist impediments to bottom-up innovation
domestically.
At the time, Cuba imported 60 percent of its food and was highly dependent on the
Soviet Union for oil. From 1994 and 1995 onward, Cuba's economy and in particular it's
agricultural system have recovered. It has been considered a model for how other nations
may adapt to peak oil and the decline in fossil fuels....
Of course, I noticed how many of the changes occurred from the bottom up and wouldn't
have been possible if the communist government hadn't gotten out of the way. The growth in
farmers markets and urban gardens, which have enabled half of the food consumed in
Havana to come from small gardens in Havana, wouldn't have faced greater obstacles if the
Cuban government hadn't backed down and recognized the right of the individual to buy and
sell produce in a small-scale free market. Going in the opposite direction of the advice
handed out by the IMF and World Bank, Cuba actually dropped its emphasis on cash crops in
tobacco, sugar, and citrus fruit and turned their large state run plantations into smaller
cooperatives where individual farmers are rewarded based on their productivity. Overnight,
Cuban agricultural had to become organic agriculture because of the lack of oil. Animals
replaced tractors, earthworms replaced petroleum-based fertilizers.18

According to McKibben, just about every previously vacant lot in Havana is an
intensely cultivated farm, averaging 5 kg. of produce per square meter. The city gets
"nearly its entire vegetable supply, and more than a token amount of its rice and meat,"
through such urban farming.19
Intervale, a 200-acre community-supported agriculture farm in Burlington, Vermont,
supplies "7 or 8 percent of all the fresh food consumed in Burlington."20
A lot of the price premium on local, organic food stems from the fact that it is still
consumed in insufficient quantities in most localities to maximize economies in

17

Bill McKibben, "The Cuba diet: What will you be eating when the revolution comes?" Harpers, April
2005. <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/04/0080501>.
18
"Two Pathways," Freedom Democrats, February 11, 2008 <http://freedomdemocrats.org/node/2541>.
Oxfam America also did a study on Cuba's agricultural transition: Minor Sinclair and Martha Thompson,
"Cuba: Going Against the Grain" (Oxfam America: June 2001)
<http://www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications/publications/research_reports/art1164.html>.
19
Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (New York:
Times Books, 2007), pp. 74-75.
20
Ibid., p. 80.

distribution: rather than taking a full truckload to a single supermarket, a farmer often
must distribute the load among several stores in an area. Another source of high prices is
entrepreneurial profit, reflecting the fact that supply hasn't kept up with demand. When
two things occur (both of which almost certainly will)--a much larger portion of the food
consumed in each local market is local and organic, and sufficient food is grown locally
to meet the demand--the price should be far more competitive. That's true even with the
subsidies to large-scale chemical agribusiness, which simply won't begin to compensate
for the exploding costs of long-distance transportation and chemical fertilizer.
But starting even from where we are now, there is (as the authors of Natural
Capitalism argue)21 an abundance of low-hanging fruit which could reduce energy
consumption by half or three-quarters in industry after industry, and at the residential
level, with virtually no negative impact on quality of life. That Americans have not found
this low-hanging fruit even worth the bother of picking, speaks volumes about the
distorting effect of subsidized energy and transportation.
The authors of Natural Capitalism compare subsidized energy consumption in the
American "market" economy to that in the old Soviet Union, where economic planners
priced energy at a third of the actual cost of providing it.22
Major savings, for example, could be achieved through better urban design. The main
force behind urban sprawl is disregard of the cost principle. As we saw in Chapter Four,
local governments build subsidized freeway systems and ever further outlying bypasses in
order to "relieve congestion," only generating new congestion as the new roads fill up
with new traffic from the new subdivisions and strip malls that line them. As the saying
goes, trying to relieve traffic congestion by building more roads is like trying to lose
weight by letting out your belt.
Suburban developments commonly receive subsidized utility connections at the
expense of ratepayers in the old, inlying parts of town. School boards close down old
neighborhood schools to build new ones out by the new subdivisions.
In my own area of Northwest Arkansas, voters in the city of Fayetteville recently
(September 2006) approved a sales tax increase to meet cost overruns on an upgrade of
the city sewer system. The only alternative, Mayor Dan Coody said, would be an increase
of 30% or more in sewer rates. Of course, that's what happens when we allow politicians
to determine the range of "available alternatives" for us. Since the increased burden on
the old sewer system resulted almost entirely from suburban housing additions and runoff
from big box store parking lots, the just solution would have been assessing cost-based
fees for sewer hookup in new development. But Coody not only deliberately left this
choice out of the list of "available alternatives"; he simultaneously appealed to the voters'

21

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial
Revolution (Boston, New York, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999).
22
Ibid., p. 42.

greed by reminding them that the sales tax would be paid by out of town visitors as well
as residents. As the saying goes, it's always easier to con a greedy man. So the voters,
eager to get something for nothing, taxed their own groceries in order to spare Jim
Lindsey (the area real estate baron) the indignity of impact fees.
Local government, typically, is a showcase property of the real estate industry. But
what's really amusing is that Coody himself was originally the champion of the local
"progressive" community, and ran a campaign based on "smart growth" and "new
urbanist" rhetoric. Since he was elected, though, his main focus has been on promoting
yuppie aesthetic sensibilities and a gentrified downtown friendly to limosine liberals,
rather than changing the perverse market incentives that reward sprawl.
Federal home mortgage redlining, which subsidizes the suburban real estate and
housing industries and at the same time discriminates against those wanting to buy houses
in older neighborhoods.
Urban congestion is promoted by the availability of free or underpriced parking
downtown, subsidizing those who drive in from the suburbs at taxpayer expense. For
example, "[m]ost American building regulations require developers to provide as much
parking for each shop, office, or apartment as people would demand if parking were
free."23
In addition, zoning prohibits mixed-use development, and thereby inflates the need
for transportation to get from the cul de sac to where one shops and works. The
neighborhood grocery store has been zoned out of existence, along with all but the most
informal and unobtrusive of home businesses. Affordable housing in the downtown
commercial district (e.g. walkup apartments over shops), likewise, is prohibited by
zoning.24 As an illustration of how firmly entrenched standard suburban design is in local
regulations, and how (as we already saw in Chapter Four) licensing and credentialling
artificially raise costs, consider the experience of Sim Van der Ryn:
In setting up our rural centers in Farallones Institute, where we are trying to develop and
live and research an ecologically sound, right way to live, we ran into all kinds of problems.
We went to the county initially with a plan for the use of a piece of land but it wasn't fiveacre ranchettes, it did not give everybody his own compactor and kitchen, and so on, because
we had grouped some of our community facilities. They say, "Ah ha, you're an organized
camp." We said, "No, we're not organized, we're not the boy scouts, sorry." They said,
"Well, you're a school." We said, "We are a school too. But we're more than a school, but
besides we don't want to be zoned as an institution which puts all other kinds of requirements
on us." Well, it was a very interesting process and we didn't fit into any category and we still
don't. They finally decided we were a kind of school you see, and then there was a set of
health and safety laws that apply to schools.

23

Ibid., p. 42.
See, for example, James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, for the effects of imposing car culture
through zoning laws.
24

Now, for example, as part of our teaching program we grow our own food. We have our
own animals. We can our own food. Well, on the first visit from the health inspector, he
looked in the refrigerator and saw some bottles of milk. And he said, " Where did this milk
come from?" I replied, "From our cow." Well we had a certified letter the next day. "You
are in violations of the Health and Safety Code for drinking milk from an unauthorized
source." Our kitchen was technically a restaurant and we were required to have a changing
room for our waitresses.
Well, it's all amusing now; it wasn't so amusing then, because they can turn you out of
your home for doing things that make sense.25

The combined effect of all these subsidies to sprawl is that there are two separate
communities for each of us: a bedroom community where we live, and a different
community where we work and shop--each with its own complete set of utilities, and
joined by an expensive transportation infrastructure for driving back and forth between
them.
The present car-centered pattern of urban design is the result, not (as pseudolibertarian apologists for the car culture would have us believe) of the market, but of
decades of government-imposed social engineering.
In Europe, where urban densities are several times higher, nearly half of trips are by
foot or bicycle, and another 10% by public transit--compared to 87% by car in the U.S.
Even something as low-tech as allowing mixed-use development would result in huge
savings. For example, in the 1970s Portland officials estimated that reviving
neighborhood grocers, alone, would be enough to reduce gasoline consumption by 5%.26
Other forms of waste, also associated with urban sprawl, likewise result from the
distorting effects of government intervention in the market. For example, zoning
regulations restrict the efficient use of gray water, so that people are forced to use
drinking water to water lawns and hose off driveways.27 Likewise, restrictions on
composting toilets and enforced use of water-based sanitation systems mean that drinking
water is wasted to flush wasted fertilizer downstream to the ocean.28 According to
Madhu Suri Prakash, "[m]ore than 40 percent of the water available for domestic
purposes is used for transporting shit."29 Water utilities, more often than not, deal with
droughts by threatening administrative penalties for watering lawns, and the like, instead
of charging scarcity rates or increasing rates for higher levels of usage. But in those areas
where utilities resort to the latter cost-based incentives, consumers make drastic

25

Sim Van der Ryn, "Working with and through Institutions," in Dorf and Hunter, eds., pp. 272-273.
Natural Capitalism, p. 45.
27
Ibid., p. 214.
28
Ibid., p. 221.
29
Madhu Suri Prakash, "Compost Toilets and Self-Rule," Yes!, Winter 2008
<http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2102>.
26

reductions in water consumption on their own initiative, without the need for
neighborhood informers.30 Switching to biologically, rather than chemically based
sewage treatment, and decentralizing sewage systems to the neighborhood level, not only
reduces cost but closes the loop by providing safe fertilizers for local use. Costs for
purifying drinking water are also reduced.31
The same is true of building design and industrial processes. The radical effects of a
thoroughgoing application of the cost principle, in these areas, are suggested by a wealth
of material in Natural Capitalism. The sheer scale of potential savings in energy
consumption that are feasible, from a purely technical standpoint, is astonishing. The
central theme of the book, as stated by the authors, is that "90 to 95 percent reductions in
material and energy are possible in developed nations without diminishing the quantity or
quality of the services that people want."32
Some critics of environmentalism and energy conservation (e.g. George Reisman, a
regular commentator at Mises.Org) portray energy saving as tantamount to a catastrophic
reduction in the standard of living--as though the energy input per unit of consumption
were a fixed quantity, or the expenditure of energy were itself a measure of prosperity.
Amory Lovins refers to "the bizarre notion that using less energy--or more often, failing
to use much more energy--...means somehow a loss of prosperity."33
The authors of Natural Capitalism document countless innovations, many of them
laughably cheap compared to the energy savings they would produce. Some of the
biggest savings involve, not changes in particular technologies, but in overall design
philosophy. A "whole-system engineering" or "integrated design" approach, focused on
the way components are put together, can sometimes achieve large energy savings with
little or no increase in up-front cost--or even reduced up-front cost. It's true that energysaving components may, taken individually, cost more than their conventional
counterparts. But when systems are taken as a whole, efficiencies in one area may lead
to greater savings in another, with a cumulative effect.
One good example is green building design. Passive solar design can reduce heating
and cooling costs by eighty percent or more. An office building in Amsterdam uses 92%
less energy than neighboring buildings, at a construction cost per square meter no greater
than the market average.34 Similar savings can be made in water consumption--for
example, a housing development with natural drainage swales for rain water which
actually reduce building cost by $800 per home thanks to savings on expensive storm

30

Natural Capitalism, p. 224.
Ibid., pp. 228-29.
32
Ibid., p. 176.
33
Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (New York, Cambridge, Hagerstown,
Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Sydney: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977),
xiii.
34
Natural Capitalism, pp. 82-83.
31

sewers, and at the same time cut water consumption for landscape irrigation by up to
half.35 The Rocky Mountain Institute's headquarters, despite only fifty-two frost-free days
a year, cut heating costs by 99% and uses only two small woodstoves; and despite
considerable investments in energy conserving technology (like superinsulation, and
superwindows that gain net heat in winter), the overall building costs are less thanks to
the savings on furnace and ductwork.36
Passive design features, likewise, can reduce peak indoor temperature to 82 degrees
even when outside temperatures are 104 and over--actually cooler than neighboring
houses in which conventional air conditioning cannot keep up with the cooling burden.37
While passive solar heating is comparatively well known, the principles of passive solar
cooling are almost unknown. The temperature differential between the air and earth is
potentially an enormous source of energy. As Jeff Vail describes it:
... while in Phoenix it may never get below 90 at night during some points in the summer, the
temperature of the earth at 10' underground is always a nice 55-65 degrees F. A simple solar
chimney on your home (roughly, imagine a normal chimney x 50%, with a single-glazed
window on the South side and a black-painted vent pipe inside) will heat up and pull air
rapidly out of your home. Now, for air intake, lay a "radiator", a network of pipes 10'
underground that acts as a heat-exchanger with the thermal mass of the earth. As the solar
chimney draws air out, you get nice, cool air blowing in through vents in your floor. 0 energy
cost, 0 moving parts, simple technology, and it keeps your (well insulated) home at a
comfortable temperature and well ventilated, even in Phoenix in August. Similar technology
has been in use in vernacular architecture in the Middle East for thousands of years.
Here's the catch: because it's vernacular technology, and can be easily implemented in a
decentralized fashion, there isn't much money to be made off this through a
centralized/industrialized economic mode. But it works... this is the very stuff of freedom.38

The conventional housing industry's tendency to ignore low-cost vernacular
technology applies to the choice of building materials, as well. Claude Lewenz, in How
to Build a Village, describes the savings his organization achieved by using locally
available materials and "vernacular" techniques, and substituting whitewash (ordinary
garden lime with a dab of glue added, about a dollar a gallon--"so cheap there is no
margin in it to pay for salesmen, advertising, marketing and middlemen") for paint. "The
upshot was an outstanding, iconic compound of four major buildings for a shell cost more
commonly associated with kitset garages."39 Vernacular techniques are characterized by
"locally sourced materials with limited processing steps from raw material to finished..."40

35

Ibid., p. 83
Ibid., p. 102.
37
Ibid., p. 103.
38
Jeff Vail, "Passive Solar & Independence," A Theory of Power, June 28, 2005
<http://www.jeffvail.net/2005/06/passive-solar-independence.html>.
39
Claude Lewenz, How to Build a Village (Auckland, New Zealand: Village Forum Press and Jackson
House Publishing Company, 2007), pp. 47-48.
40
Ibid., p. 182.
36

Lewenz favors, in particular, use of low-cost bulk materials like ultra-lightweight
concrete.41 Another example is the use of compressed earth blocks, produced by the
open-source CEB machine developed at Factor-E Farm, which we discuss in Chapter
Fifteen.
On a more modest level, we can see the cost principle at work in the demise of the
McMansion. Starting in 2007, KB Home in Los Angeles pared its 3400 sq. ft. homes
down to 2400, and this year is selling a line of 1230 sq. ft. homes. Other builders are
moving in the same direction. This is a reversal of a two-decade trend, in which median
house size grew from under 1600 to over 2200 sq. ft.42
If solar power can be most cost-effectively adapted to heating space and water, grid
electricity, by way of comparison, is about the least efficient method imaginable for doing
so--burning fuel to generate electrical power at a large, centralized plant serving an
enormous grid, transmitting it over long distances, and then converting it to heat through
resistance at the point of consumption. And direct solar heat can be stored far more
easily, through such means as water tanks and rock beds, than electrical power--thus
reducing the storage and load-distribution problems of the electrical power grid.43 On the
other hand, electricity is ideal for providing shaft-power via motors, running electric
lights and electronic radio and computer equipment, etc.44 Simply shifting from electrical
power to passive solar where it is suitable would eliminate the portion of fossil fuels
currently consumed for residential and commercial heating and cooling. As for solar
electricity itself, the designers at Open Source Ecology's Factor-E Farm community
suggest that photovoltaics may be a comparatively inefficient means of generating
electrical power, and express some skepticism as to whether its cost will be significantly
reduced below that of fossil fuel competitors in the near future.45 They're focusing,
instead, on a solar turbine which uses the sun's heat to power a steam-driven generator.46
Immense savings in losses from long-distance power distribution can also be achieved
by using electricity only for those end-uses suited to electrical power (which constitute
some ten percent of end-use energy needs), and then sizing and locating electrical
generators in accordance with demand.47 With power generated close to the point of

41

Ibid., p. 209.
Alex Veiga (Associated Press), "Homebuilders say 'less is more' with new homes," MSNBC, October 10,
2008 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27122696/>.
43
Lovins, Soft Energy Paths, pp. 44-45.
44
Amory Lovins, E. Kyle Datta, Thomas Feiler, Karl R. Rabago, Joel N. Swisher, Andre Lehmann, and ken
Wicker, Small is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size
(Snowmass, Colorado: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2002), p. 3.
45
Benjamin Gatti, "The Bell Tolls for PV," Factor E Farm Weblog, September 5, 2008
<http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=322>.
46
"Solar Turbine--Open Source Ecology" <http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Solar_Turbine>.
47
Lovins, Soft Energy Paths Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (New York, Cambridge,
Hagerstown, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Sydney: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1977), p. xiii.
42

consumption, still greater efficiencies can be achieved by designing as many machines
and appliances as possible to run on DC current, rather than using AC inverters.48
Another example is super-efficient cars: "a lighter, more aerodynamic car and a more
efficient drive system work to launch a spiral of decreasing weight, complexity, and cost."
While the greater cost of energy-efficient components may raise the overall cost of a
moderately more efficient house or car, the whole-system effect of combining these
efficiencies may result in lower overall cost for a super-efficient house or car.49
A small electric motor company in New Zealand produces motors with 85%
efficiency, that last for years because the reduction in vibration and heat--in addition to
saving on energy loss from such inefficiency--also greatly reduces wear. Replacing
existing electric motors with the more efficient kind would reduce American electrical
power consumption by 11%.50
The simple recycling of waste heat from power generators would by itself reduce
America's total carbon emissions by 23%. Of total energy inputs into American
generating plants, only a third is transformed into electricity. The other two-thirds are
waste heat. Denmark gets around two-fifths of its electricity from such waste heat. The
use of waste heat from industrial processes, whenever economical, would likewise reduce
industrial energy consumption by 30% and total energy consumption by 11%.51 Alana
Herro, at Common Dreams, concurs:
Recycling the heat that spews from industrial smokestacks may be one of the biggest
opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, yet not many climate-savvy
entrepreneurs are aware of it. When it comes to energy conservation, “[b]y and large, the
world ignores the biggest, single most cost-effective, most profitable thing to do, which is
recycle the energy that we’re wasting,” says Thomas Casten, chairman of the Illinois-based
company Recycled Energy Development (RED).
Of the 500,000 smokestacks in the United States, the 47,500 stacks that produce waste
heat above 260 degrees Celsius (500 degrees Fahrenheit) could produce at least 50,000
megawatts of power, says Casten. That’s almost half the energy produced by the U. S.
nuclear fleet, he notes....
RED retrofits smokestacks with “waste-heat recovery boilers” that use the stack’s heat to
produce steam to spin a turbine and generate electricity. The company uses similar
technology to develop new, localized power plants that are at least two times as efficient as
the average U.S. electric utility plant. According to Sean Casten, president and CEO of RED,
the United States could conceivably continue producing the same amount of energy it does
now, with half the fossil fuel, by recycling the waste heat from its factories and electric

48

Ibid., p. 143.
Natural Capitalism, p. 114.
50
Lewenz, How to Build a Village, p. 113.
51
Ibid., pp. 246-47.

49

generating stations....
It typically takes three to four years for RED’s projects to make back their initial
investment in the heat-recycling equipment, a roughly 35 percent return.52

And decentralized, distributed electrical production with small-scale community and
neighborhood facilities is far better suited to waste heat recycling or cogeneration than are
large plants serving a centralized grid. The smaller and more decentralized the power
production, the more easily waste heat can be captured by the end-user.53
Of course, as we shall see below, part of the problem is that under standard
accounting practices the 35% return mentioned above isn't counted as a "return" in the
ordinary sense. Capital expenditures for cost-reduction are expected to pay for
themselves at what would amount to an extraordinary rate of return on ordinary capital
investment.
Sometimes great savings are a matter of simple positioning. One simple example is
the laboratory fume hood, which can be altered to require 60-80% less fan power by
repositioning a single louver.54 On a larger scale, reduced friction from using larger,
straighter pipes in a factory pumping system enabled designers to scale the pumps down
from 95 to seven horsepower.
...Schilham laid out the pipes first and then installed the equipment, in reverse order from
how pumping systems are conventionally installed. Normally, equipment is put in some
convenient and arbitrary spot, and the pipe fitter is then instructed to connect point A to point
B. The pipe often has to go through all sorts of twists and turns to hook up equipment that's
too far apart, turned the wrong way, mounted at the wrong height, and separated by other
devices installed in between.

Besides the huge savings in power consumption, there was a significant reduction in
capital outlays up-front, reduced complexity and lower maintenance costs.55 Essentially,
conventional factories were paying for pumps twelve times more powerful than necessary
because engineers didn't even consider design efficiency at the whole-systems level.
Much of the art of engineering for advanced resource efficiency involves harnessing
helpful interactions between specific measures so that, like loaves and fishes, the savings
keep on multiplying. The most basic way to do this is to "think backward," from
downstream to upstream in a system. A typical industrial pumping system, for example...,
contains so many compounding losses that about a hundred units of fossil fuel at a typical

52

Alana Herro, "Clean Energy's Best-Kept Secret: Waste-Heat Recovery," CommonDreams.org,
November 21, 2007 <http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/21/5386/>.
53
Amory Lovins, E. Kyle Datta, Thomas Feiler, Karl R. Rabago, Joel N. Swisher, Andre Lehmann, and
Ken Wicker, Small is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right
Size (Snowmass, Colorado: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2002),pp. 284-285.
54
Natural Capitalism, p. 64.
55
Ibid., pp. 115-116.

power station will deliver enough electricity to the controls and motor to deliver enough
torque to the pump to deliver only ten units of flow out of the pipe....
But turn those ten-to-one compounding losses around backward, as in the drivetrain of
the Hypercar, and they generate a one-to-ten compounded saving. That is, saving one unit of
energy furthest downstream (such as by reducing flow or friction in pipes) avoids enough
compounding losses from power plant to end use to save about ten units of fuel, cost, and
pollution back at the power plant.
....This compounding effect also enables each successive component, as you go back
upstream, to become smaller, simpler, and cheaper.56

The overall systems efficiency from reduced weight in the Hypercar is a good
example. Complex systems are often like Rube Goldberg drawings, with some
components existing only to handle excessive size and other side-effects of inefficiency.
A snowballing concatenation of increasingly costly components comes about, in the
conventional large automobile, only to compensate for the greater handling difficulties of
large size (e.g., power steering, which became necessary to control the heavy vehicles
introduced after WWII). The decision to abandon the heavy internal combustion engine
block makes possible a long series of savings in other systems down the line.
B. Path Dependency and Other Barriers to Increased Efficiency
Although engineering schools pay lip-service to elegance of systems design, actual
practice is far different.
Designing a window without the building, a light without the room, or a motor without the
machine it drives works as badly as designing a pelican without the fish. Optimizing
components in isolation tends to pessimize the whole system--and hence the bottom line.
You can actually make a system less efficient while making each of its parts more efficient,
simply by not properly linking up these components. If they're not desgned to work with one
another, they'll tend to work against one another.

The new design required "not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old
idea."57
The problem, in part, is path-dependency. "Traditionally poor designs often persist
for generations, even centuries, because they're known to work, are convenient, are easily
copied, and are seldom questioned."58 The inertia of professional culture is too great to
overcome in a short period of time, unless some catastrophic change (like a massive
increase in energy costs) provides sufficient incentive for new kinds of thinking. Even

56

Ibid., pp. 121-22.
Ibid., p. 117.
58
Ibid., p. 118.

57

though relatively low-cost (or even cheaper) design changes can reduce costs by an order
of magnitude, the corporate dinosaur can afford to use factor inputs in the old, inefficient
way because it is one of a handful of firms in a competitive market, all doing things in the
same way.
On an individual level, people fail to take advantage of low-cost alternatives as a
result of nothing more than ingrained habit. Tom Bender, for example, chided the
audience at an alternative technology seminar:
It's easy for us to sit in a room like this and debate abstractly the possibilities of
appropriate technology without making connections with our own lives and our situation
here and now. We've been discussing whether more appropriate technologies can be
developed, yet this room is full of people who already have done the things we're wondering
about and there's no structure in this conference to allow each of us to make connection with
the others and deal in practical realities instead of abstractions.
It's my feeling that institutional "technologies" like this are more at the heart of
technological problems in the United States than the problems of machinery. Along with
that, I feel we have been ignoring the potential for a better quality of life in adjusting to
resource limits we are facing. Lets look at both of these issues in our real situation here.
We've been sitting for two days in this air-conditioned, artificially lighted room, talking
about energy conservation while it is beautiful, sunny, and 74° outside. Yet no one has even
suggested we do anything differently. This auditorium is actually well designed--all we have
to do is pull back the curtains, open the doors, turn off the lights, and shut down the air
conditioner--we're in a beautifully naturally lighted space with soft, fragrant breezes instead
of stale cigarette smoke.59

Beneficial new technologies and methods are often neglected for years before
someone sees them as the solution to a problem. For example, in my own current field of
employment, health care, it has been recognized for years that restoring normal intestinal
flora through live culture yogurt or probiotic supplements is one of the fastest and most
effective treatments for clostridium difficile and other gastrointestinal infections resulting
from antibiotics. It should be a matter of course for a doctor to order one or the other
treatment, automatically, when antibiotics are used. Yet virtually every time I get a
patient with severe loose stools from c. diff., the first two questions I ask are "were you on
antibiotics?" and "is anyone giving you yogurt?" The answers, respectively, are "yes" and
"huh?" Most doctors respond to any such suggestion, at best, with a patronizing "oh,
sure, go ahead," mentally dismissing it as a bunch of "goddamn tree-hugging hippie
crap."
The American economy has hardly begun to pick the low-hanging fruit of energy
savings, because technology is still designed by graduates of an engineering culture built

59

Tom Bender, "Appropriate Technology," in Richard C. Dorf and Yvonne L. Hunter, eds., Appropriate
Visions: Technology the Environment and the Individual (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser Publishing
Company, 1978), p. 241.

on endless supplies of cheap, subsidized energy who can't be bothered to consider such
matters. The entrenched design philosophy of the era of plentiful energy has yet to
respond to the new age of energy scarcity.
The inertia of the corporate planned economy is compounded by misleading
accounting practices, which--again--reflect the fact that restrained competition and a
common corporate culture limit the consequences of being out of contact with reality.
The problem is the same "MBA Disease" discussed in Chapters Seven and Eight: the
tendency of corporate management to focus almost entirely on finance and marketing,
while viewing the production process itself as a black box, and the concurrent tendency to
strip firms of productive assets and otherwise milk them in order to inflate short-term
earnings. The average corporation treats the projected payback time for an investment in
energy-saving technology far more stringently than the rate of return on any other capital
investment. Typically, an energy-saving technology must pay for itself in less than two
years to be considered--an astronomical rate of return when considered as a capital
investment.60
The cost principle, applied consistently, is the one thing sure to result in rational
consumption behavior over the long term. One good example, recounted in Natural
Capitalism, is the period 1979-83 following the second oil shock. During that time, when
the price of petroleum reached its highest level in real dollars to date, the economy grew
by 19% while energy consumption actually shrank by 6%! The country got five times as
much energy from increased efficiency as it got from new supply. The Swedish State
Power Board estimated, in the 1980s, that fully utilizing available energy efficient
technologies would by itself cut energy consumption in half--at a cost 78% lower than
that of generating new energy.61 The general principle has been verified many times over:
conservation, as a source of newly available energy, is far cheaper per unit than new
generation of power.
The problem is that the cost differential has to reach a certain threshold, as it did in
the late '70s and early '80s, before it is noticed by corporate dinosaurs. The oil shock of
the early 1970s caused a significant cutback in the growth of energy consumption, but
only the higher prices of the second oil shock were sufficient to result in an absolute
decrease. The collapse of energy prices in the mid-80s led to a resumption of steep
increases in energy consumption; the development of energy efficiencies, which had
almost doubled 1975-85, stagnated.62 The bureaucratic corporation, competing with
equally bureaucratic corporations in a cartelized industry, takes a long time to reach the
threshold at which inefficiency costs are high enough for the consequences to be felt.
Interestingly, gasoline consumption for late 2007 is showed a modest decline for the
first time since 1991, and the trend is expected to continue. Total miles traveled started

60

Lovins et al, Natural Capitalism, pp. 266-67.
Ibid., pp. 249-50.
62
Ibid., pp. 253-54.
61

falling below their 2006 levels in October 2007, with December miles traveled dropping
3.9% from 2006 to 2007. Total miles drive are down about 5% through February of
2008. But as Kevin Drum points out, with population growth that's a 6% reduction in
miles traveled per capita, and considering the average annual growth of 1.5% in recent
years, it's down about 7.5% from the trendline.63
A number of economic analysts have seen the recent (May 2008) rise of oil prices to
$130/barrel as a threshold or tipping point for the economy.
"We may finally have crossed the line where the price of crude actually matters for most
companies," said Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at New York financial firm Miller Tabak
& Co. "The stock market has been in la-la land when it comes to oil, but they got a pretty
good dose of reality the last few days."...
Among the signs that the economy may finally be feeling the effect of rising oil prices
was Ford Motor Co.'s announcement Thursday that it was abandoning any hope of making a
profit this year or next now that sales of its gas-guzzling pickup trucks and Explorer sport
utility vehicles have plunged.
And experts said that the other two U.S. automakers, General Motors Corp. and
Chrysler, may be in even greater trouble.
Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally said the industry had "reached a tipping point" where
energy costs were fundamentally changing what kind of vehicles Americans buy.
Meantime, to cope with higher energy prices, American Airlines and United Airlines
both raised ticket prices, and American announced plans to impose a new baggage-handling
fee. But experts say the price hikes barely begin to make up for recent losses.
"The airline industry is devastated. It can't survive $130-a-barrel oil," said industry
analyst Ray Neidl at Calyon Securities in New York.
Many analysts think that unless oil prices fall back to about $100 a barrel - where they
were as recently as April - the industry will have to slash 20% of its routes, the equivalent of
knocking two major airlines out of business.64

The steep inflation in food prices, resulting from the increased fuel cost of longdistance distribution and from the conversion of land from food to ethanol production,
has also spurred a large increase in home gardening.

63

Steve Everly, "Gasoline Usage Heads Down," Kansas City Star, April 21, 2008
<http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/585815.html>. Judy Keen and Paul Overberg, "Gas prices rattle
Americans," USA Today, May 8, 2008 <http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2008-05-08gasprices_N.htm>. Kevin Drum, "Oil Prices and Driving Habits," Washington Monthly, May 9, 2008
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_05/013696.php>.
64
Peter G. Gosselin, "$130 Oil: Is That a Tipping Point?" The Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2008
<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-econ24-2008may24,0,6841046,full.story>.

At Al's Garden Center in Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have
jumped an unprecedented 43% from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and
shrubs are up 17%. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16%. It's much
the same story at Williams Nursery, Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6% even as
herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16%. And in Austin, Texas, Great Outdoors reports
sales of flowers slightly down, while sales of vegetables have risen 20% over last year....
Even before this year's food-price crunch, the vigor for veggies was already gaining
momentum. An annual survey of more than 2,000 households by the National Gardening
Association shows the average amount spent per household on flowers was flat in 2007
compared with a year earlier. But spending on vegetable plants rose 21% to $58 per
household last year, and spending on herbs gained 45% to $32....
....Burpee's sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40% this year, twice last year's
growth rate. Tomatoes, summer squash, onions, cucumbers, peas and beans continue to be
top sellers.65

Many of these developments were anticipated by Warren Johnson during the energy
crisis of the late 1970s, in a book called Muddling Toward Frugality.66 Johnson argued
that the long-term effect of rising energy prices would be to give a market advantage on
shortened supply chains, small-scale production for smaller market areas, and diversified
local economies. Although he jumped the gun by thirty years or so, his book is
remarkably prescient in describing the likely effects of Peak Oil.
The Cost Principle and the Work-Week
One likely combined effect of reduced waste resulting from the cost principle, and
from the abolition of privilege, is a drastic reduction in the work-week. As long ago as
1913, Kropotkin estimated the labor-time necessary to produce the actual food, clothing
and housing that the average workng family consumed at around 150 half-days' labor a
year. The average worker's additional labor-time went either to waste or directly harmful
production, or to supporting parasitic consumption.67
Absent the unnecessary production that amounts to fixing Bastiat's broken windows,
and other waste (including the deliberate choice of planned obsolescence over reparability
by the state's industrial cartels), and absent the portion of commodity price that reflects
embedded rents on "intellectual property" and other artificial property rights like
artificially scarce land and capital, we could probably produce something like our current

65

Anne Marie Chaker, "The Vegetable Patch Takes Root," Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2008
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121262319456246841.html?mod=pj_main_hs_coll>.
66
Warren Johnson, Muddling Toward Frugality: A Blueprint for Survival in the 1980s (San Franciso:
Sierra Club Books, 1978).
67
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 87-94.

standard of living working an average of two days a week. We're working the other three
days to dig holes and fill them back in again, or to pay protection money so useless eaters
won't use their artificial property rights to obstruct production.
Consider, first, the amount of total labor time that is devoted to waste production.
Economists' calculation of the Gross Domestic Product is a textbook illustration of the
"broken window fallacy." As the authors of Natural Capitalism point out, anything that
involves an expenditure of money adds to the GDP.68 Jonathan Rowe writes:
The GDP is simply a gross measure of market activity, of money changing hands. It makes
no distinction whatsoever between the desirable and the undesirable, or costs and gain. On
top of that, it looks only at the portion of reality that economists choose to acknowledge--the
part involved in monetary transactions. The crucial economic functions performed in the
household and volunteer sectors go entirely unreckoned. As a result the GDP not only masks
the breakdown of the social structure and the natural habitats upon which the economy--and
life itself--ultimately depend; worse, it portrays such breakdown as economic gain.69

Or as Scott Burns puts it, "The value of a friend's services on his own car is excluded
from GNP. But the cost of his accident, ambulance ride, and hospital stay is not."70
Everything that entails the expenditure of money adds to the GDP, even if most of the
cost is waste that adds nothing to the actual production of use-value. A pileup on the
expressway that totals out a dozen cars and results in several funerals or several people
spending weeks on life support means millions of dollars added to the GDP. When you
pay three times as much to buy food grown in another country with subsidized irrigation
water and trucked to you on subsidized highways, as it would cost to buy food of
identical quality grown by a local farmer and distributed in bulk without a brand-name
markup, it adds three times as much to the GDP--even though you're just having to work
three times as long to obtain identical (or inferior) use-values.
There is a small but significant body of literature on the percentage of the national
economy made up of waste. For example, Edward Wolff sees the economic surplus
being absorbed, in addition to capital accumulation, by surplus consumption and
unproductive activity. The former is "the consumption of use values by the surplus
class," and the second "the absorption of part of the product in activities that produce no
use values themselves but instead serve to maintain an existing set of entitlements to the
total product." Unproductive activities "use labor power but produce no directly usable
output (use value)."
Instead, they serve to maintain and reproduce an existing set of entitlements to the social

68

Natural Capitalism, pp. 59-60.
T. Halstead, Jonathan Rowe, and C. Cobb, "If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?," The Atlantic
Monthly 276(4):59-78, Oct. 1995, in Natural Capitalism, p. 60.
70
Scott Burns, The Household Economy: Its Shape, Origins, & Future (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1975),
pp. 61-62.
69

product.71

Wolff's work is almost completely unusable because of his extremely arbitrary
schema for classifying "productive" and "unproductive" activity. For example, he assigns
the whole economy to those respective categories, piece by piece, almost entirely by
broad sectors or industries. In so doing he neglects, almost completely, what is arguably
the single most quantitatively significant form of waste in the modern corporate economy:
the suboptimal allocation of resources or mixture of inputs within an industry. Many
production inputs are necessary, in some quantity, for production; but they are used
inefficiently because their consumption is subsidized by the state. In Wolff's schema, if a
manufacturing industry produces use value, the entire industry is categorized as
"productive," no matter how wasteful of inputs. Questions of planned obsolescence, and
the like, slip completely between the cracks of Wolff's sector-by-sector evaluation.
Much more useful, in my opinion, is Lloyd Dumas' study, already cited earlier in this
chapter, The Overburdened Economy. We already saw Dumas' claim that much of GDP
consists of the moral equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in again, products
and activities which have no actual use value, but are assigned a monetary value.
Ordinarily, the existence of a money price at which a good or service is actually
purchased is by itself taken as proof that the good or service has economic value. Yet, if we
define economic value functionally, it is clear that this is not true. The mere fact of a money
price in no way establishes the existence, let alone the magnitude, of economic value....
Empirical constructs like gross national product are subject to this confusion of money value
with economic value, and therefore require caution in their use--caution that has often been
neglected.72

As I have argued, much of the GDP consists of the cost of replacing Bastiat's "broken
windows." If these broken window costs, these unproductive uses of labor, were
eliminated from the economy, the actual use-value consumed by the average worker
could probably be produced in substantially fewer hours than he currently works. Such
proposals frequently meet with the objection that something called "the economy" would
be hurt, or that there wouldn't be enough "jobs." The argument, as stated by Dumas: "A
society that does not generate waste in the form of planned obsolescence, or neutral or
distractive activities, cannot, it is commonly argued, generate sufficient paid work
opportunities to keep the labor force fully employed."73 Or as stated by George Meany,
who complained that labor-saving technologies were "rapidly becoming a curse to this
society... in a mad rush to produce more and more with less and less labor, and without
feeling [as to] what it may mean to the economy as a whole."74

71

Edward N. Wolff, Growth, Accumulation, and Unproductive Activity (Cambridge, London, New York,
New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 3-4.
72
Dumas, pp. 43-44.
73
Ibid, p. 75.
74
Jeremy Rifkin, The Future of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the PostMarket Era (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), pp. 84-85.

Of course this is nonsense. Labor-saving technology is not a curse when the
subsistence farmer manages to feed himself with less work. It becomes a curse only
when the link between work and consumption is broken, when either work or its product
becomes maldistributed. Dumas showed why Meany's complaint was nonsense.75
The key here lies in the word "sufficient." To be sufficient the paid work opportunities need
only supply enough income to satisfy the material needs and wants of the population, given
the availability of goods and services for which no income is necessary. In the hypothetical
purely wasteless economy, that means the workers must earn only enough income to supply
them with the nondurable goods and services for which they must pay, plus any required or
desired increase in their stock of durable goods. But once they have obtained access to a
durable good, whether by purchase, gift, or inheritance, they need only enough income to
cover the costs of its operation and maintenance.... So although there is less paid work
available because durable goods are not built to become artificially obsolete or to fall apart,
for exactly the same reason there is also less paid work needed by workers in order to
achieve a given material standard of living. Accordingly, the permanence of durable goods
may reduce the volume of paid activity, but it does not reduce the material well-being of the
work force.76

The only point of a job is consumption, and what matters is the ratio of effort to
consumption. The problem is that the average worker must perform the equivalent of
twenty hours digging holes and filling them in, in addition to twenty hours of productive
labor, to pay for the actual twenty hours' worth of use-value he consumes. And the price
of that twenty hours' worth of use value has embedded in it the cost of another twenty
hours of unproductive labor. These things result, as we saw in Chapter Eleven, from the
divorce of effort from consumption, and the maldistribution of claims on his laborproduct.
Dumas' test for what he calls a "contributive" activity (i.e., contributive to use value)
is twofold:
(1) Is it part of a process that results in the production of a good or service that has inherent
economic value? and (2) Does it perform a function necessary to the efficient operation of
that process? A negative answer to either question disqualifies the activity from being
considered contributive.

This second criterion is a major advance on the schema of Wolff, who (as we saw)
completely ignores the question of how efficiently resources are used within the
production process.
The second test is necessary because even if the process results in an addition to the
standard of living, redundant or unnecessary activities within that process do not contribute

75
76

Dumas, pp. 46-47, 70-76.
Ibid., pp. 75-76.

to that addition.

Activities which pass the first test but fail the second, Dumas calls "neutral." And
those which fail both tests are "distractive."77 Both are non-contributive.
Freeing resources from neutral activities is simply a matter of an efficiency adjustment
within an economically focuses process; freeing resources from a distractive process requires
terminating the process itself and rechanneling all resources involved to contributive
activities.78

"The preeminent contemporary example of neutral activity," Dumas writes, "is... the
untoward expansion of administration relative to production." Although it is widely
justified in terms of the alleged increase of productive efficiency which results from
intensive use of management, the increased allocation of resources to administration has
in fact not resulted in increased production.79
Another form of waste, one that Dumas pays little attention to, is the forced
consumption resulting from Ivan Illich's "radical monopolies," which we discussed in
Chapter Four. This consists of expenditures that are not actually necessary for a given
standard of living, but which have been rendered artificially necessary by the effect of
state policies which promote the crowding out of less expensive by more expensive ways
of doing things. For example, someone who lives in a walkable city like Florence, within
convenient distance of where he shops and works, and has access to convenient public
transport for visiting other parts of the city, is likely to view a car as a luxury. The typical
American suburbanite, on the other hand, has been deprived of all alternatives to car
ownership by subsidies to sprawl and the car culture. Having no choice, he must treat the
car as a necessity. The GDP is inflated by whatever amount he must spend on
periodically buying a car, keeping it insured and in working order, and putting gas in the
tank. That portion of the GDP is, essentially, the cost of a window broken by the state.
And it's a huge part of GDP. According to Bill McKibben, in compact, mixed-use
communities that emphasize walkability, bike-friendliness and public transit,
transportation costs amount to only 4 or 5% of local economic output. In American
freeway-centered communities, it's more like 17%.80
The cumulative waste described by another writer, Douglas Dowd, that falls
essentially into Dumas' neutral or distractive activities, is immense.81 It includes, of
course, the entire military sector of the economy. But the waste in the military sector is
probably dwarfed by the waste in the peacetime economy. This is especially true of the

77

Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., p. 54.
79
Ibid., p. 57.
80
McKibben, Deep Economy, p. 154.
81
He estimates the U.S. GDP would have been 49% higher in 1980 without the enumerated forms of waste.
Douglas Dowd, The Waste of Nations: Dysfunction in the World Economy (Boulder and London:
Westview Press, 1989), p. 65.
78

wastes associated with push distribution: planned obsolescence, excessive marketing
costs, brand-name markups, etc.82 Coupled with the unnecessary inflation of
administrative expenses, described earlier by Dumas, it probably outweighs the material
production cost of most of what we buy.
Dowd refers to toothpaste, ninety percent of whose price results from marketing costs.
A still weightier example, based on General Motors' figures from 1939, indicates that
some $150 of a chevy's $950 market price was actual production cost.
The rest was for advertising, distribution, and profits (and the production costs of course
included the trivial appearance changes that, it has been estimated, amounted to at least onethird of production costs over time). To this it may be added that between 1928 and 1939,
years encompassing the worst depression in history, profits for GM averaged a 35 percent
return to net worth. It should be noted that in 1939 the sales effort industry was only just
beginning to master the art of waste.

This is true, he says, for almost all consumer goods.83 Incidentally, Dowd was forced to
go back to a 1940 FTC study on the automobile industry for the most recent available
data, because the auto industry has been so secretive about its actual production costs.
Shoddy product design is another major source of waste. The central villain is what
engineers call the "gold-plated turd": a product that, rather than being simply and
elegantly designed to perform its primary task as efficiently and reliably as possible, is
laden with extra features and options that reduce ease of use and lead to frequent
breakdowns and require ongoing expenses to maintain. Victor Papanek, an industrial
designer who has made a career of denouncing gold plated turds, gives the example of a
cheese grater which works only right-handed and, after several months use, wears out to
the point that its own plastic coating is grated into the food. By way of comparison, a
cheaper, simpler and more efficient model works both right- and left-handed, and will last
virtually forever.84
Output restriction should also count as a form of waste. The resources devoted to
excess industrial capacity, thanks to state-subsidized overaccumulation, inflate
commodity prices. The standard practice, among oligopoly industries, of running at 7580% of capacity and passing the cost of idle capacity on to the consumer, adds greatly to
the price.85 In farming, holding land out of use for price support or "conservation"
subsidies is a lucrative real estate investment, which simultaneously adds to the social
cost (albeit concealed in taxes) of corporate farm produce, and makes land artificially
scarce and expensive for the small producer.

82

Ibid., pp. 64-65.
Ibid., pp. 65-66.
84
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 77.
85
Dowd, pp. 67-68.

83

Planned obsolescence, as we shall see in Chapter Fourteen, often severely shortens
product lifetime with no appreciable reduction in product cost. Consider, for example,
product designs that are deliberately designed to thwart repair and encourage
replacement, often relying on "intellectual property" to restrict access to replacement
parts. Specifically, consider the example in Chapter Fourteen of the iPhone, which is
deliberately designed to impede an operation as simple as unscrewing the back panel to
free up a stuck button, so that the owner has to pay for a replacement phone instead.
Dowd also refers to the lower productivity of labor and higher unit costs resulting
from low morale and other incentive problems in the standard capitalist enterprise,86
which we discussed heavily in Part Three (in contrast, see the material on increased
productivity of labor in Chapter Fifteen). For example, the worker-owned plywood coops in the Pacific Northwest typically have a quarter the supervisory personnel of a
capitalist-owned plywood factory, because of the completely different structure of
incentives in a worker-owned and -managed firm. Dowd compares the 10.8% of the U.S.
labor force in managerial and clerical positions in 1980, compared to 3% in Germany and
4.4% in Japan (that ten percent in 1980 was comparatively modest compared to the
inflated level it has swollen to since then, as we saw from David M. Gordon's figures
quoted in Chapter Eight).
Unfortunately, Dowd telescopes internal waste in the production process together
with other forms of waste, in a way that obscures a proper comparison. For example, he
fails to separate the necessary costs of actually transporting a finished good from the point
of production to the point of consumption from the rest of the general category of
marketing and distribution. (Transportation can also be a form of waste, obviously, as
with the subsidized replacement of economical passenger freight railroads by trucking
and airline industries87--but it's still a separate issue from inflated marketing costs.) He
also includes the GM's astronomical oligopoly profit rate of 35%, which Wolff would call
unproductive consumption, along with the wasted material inputs in the actual production
process.
Of course, the category of unproductive consumption by holders of artificial property
right is important in its own right: whether it be GM's 35% profit, the 20-25% oligopoly
price markup that the Nader Group described in American industry, or the majority of
product value that Peters celebrated as resulting from "intellect" (i.e., rents on so-called
"intellectual property").
One point in Wolff's favor is his attention to such unproductive consumption by
privileged classes. Although this obviously falls within Boulding's category of implicit
transfer ("a redistribution of income or command of the product from those who produce

86
87

Ibid., p. 70.
He deals with this in pp. 78-80.

it to those who do not"), Dumas pays little attention to it. Boulding himself mentions the
question of whether interest and rent, beyond a certain point, fall into Dumas' "neutral"
category, and then dismisses it as a subject for further research. The amount of
commodity price which reflects embedded rents on so-called "intellectual property"
doesn't warrant even this much of a mention.
This is, in my opinion, a grave shortcoming on Dumas' part. Consider the amount of
the average worker's total labor that is expended not only to pay for the above-mentioned
embedded costs of intellectual property and for the oligopoly markup, but to pay artificial
scarcity rents to owners of land and capital. The cumulative effect of eliminating all such
forms of privilege would likely equal that of eliminating subsidized waste in the
production process. If, as seems plausible as a rough approximation, waste production
and rents on intangible property each result in what amounts to a 100% markup, then
their cumulative effect is to quadruple the number of work hours actually necessary to
produce our current levels of consumption. Three quarters of our labor goes either to
waste or to tribute.
These things have a lot to do with the fact, observed by Ivan Illich, that countries with
(say) a quarter of American per capita GDP usually seem to have a far better quality of
life than that statistic would imply. The quality of life in Europe, for example, hardly
seems to be two thirds or less that in the U.S., as per capita GDP would seem to imply.
...European workers are every bit as productive as ours; both German and French

workers, for instance, produce more per hour than American workers. So why do Americans
make 29 percent more money than Europeans? Because we work longer hours. Much longer
hours--Americans average 25.1 working hours per person per week, but the Germans average
18.6; the average American works 46 weeks a year, while the French average is 40.
Europeans work to live, not the reverse; they spend more time with their families, which may
have something to do with why their divorce rates are much lower....
For Americans caught up in the orthodoxy of getting and spending, that may not seem
like such a bargain. A writer based in Oslo, for instance, recently wrote a piece for the New
York Times with the lovely title "We're Rich, You're Not. End of Story." He pointed out that
while Americans had $32,900 per person to devote to "private consumption," the European
averages ranged between $13,850 and $23,500. That is indeed a big difference; the
Europeans were definitely "poorer" than we, and the writer delighted in listing the ways.
"They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out," for instance. And
this: "One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class my teacher
illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke--'packed lunch'--by reaching into her backpack
and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for
all to see. Yes, teachers are underpaid everywhere. But in Norway the matpaake is
ubiquitous, from classroom to boardroom. In New York, an office worker might pop out att
lunchtime to a deli.... In Norway she will sit at her desk with a sandwich from home."88

88

Bill McKibben, Deep Economy, pp. 223-224. The obnoxious writer he cites is Bruce Bawer, "We're
Rich, You're Not, End of Story," New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2005.

Well, considering that the teacher could easily duplicate the quality of a deli sandwich
at home without a 400% markup, and could relax in peace and quiet rather than having to
rush out and back and probably deal with a large, unpleasant lunchtime crowd while she
was out, the difference might just be that she wasn't stupid. I never spend money on
brand name markups when generic goods are equal in quality, because I never spend
money on anything without comparing the enjoyment I expect to receive to the
unpleasantness of working an extra number of hours to pay for it. I see plenty of
coworkers who work twenty hours of overtime a week, just so they can afford never to
have a car more than two years old. I see people who live in dread of not "getting their
hours in," because they've got to work every possible hour to make the interest-only
payments on a house twice the size of the average house a generation ago. I see people
who never have time to enjoy a peaceful moment, shopping online for new consumer
electronic toys so they can throw out the perfectly functional appliances Bruce Bawer
remarked on. And it's hard not to draw the conclusion that they're stupid: they've been
trained to be stupid, since childhood, by the relentless propaganda of a push-distribution
society. "Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches." And as we
saw in Chapter One, this mass consumer propaganda was first engineered in the 1920s to
overcome the average person's natural tendency to work only until he had enough, and
then to choose leisure over more consumption. We've adjusted our lifestyles to make
money for other people, which is the definition of stupidity.
An uncharitable person might remark that working sixty hour weeks in order to be
able to throw out perfectly functional appliances, or to avoid the ignominy of bringing a
sack lunch to work, or to buy expensive consumer electronics that one has no time to use,
or to spend every spare waking moment "multitasking" on a cell phone or blackberry
rather than being able to think, reflects an incredibly stupid sense of priorities. Likewise
the choice to live in a McMansion, on interest-only terms, that will never be paid for, and
always a couple of paychecks away from homelessness, rather than to buy a house half
the size that can be paid off in ten or fifteen years, displays a monumental lack of
judgment. And the portion of per capita GDP produced by working an extra ten hours a
week to earn the portion of per capita GDP that goes to car payments, and gasoline, and
insurance, rather than being able to walk or bike to work and shopping in a relaxed
manner, seems like a remarkably poor deal. Working sixty hour weeks and being in
hock up to one's eyeballs, in order to be able afford fancy toys one doesn't even enjoy and
support a lifestyle aimed mainly at impressing equally clueless idiots, sounds an awful lot
like the kind of "steep time preference" and "short planning horizons" that right-wing
moral scolds attribute to the underclass. The American lifestyle Bawer celebrates is
almost a parody of a drunken sailor's habits.
C. The Cost Principle and Local Autonomy
Another positive effect of the cost principle, and the radical decentralization that
would likely result from it, is a healthier relationship between industry and the local

community. H. Thomas Johnson writes:
If no firm had a financial incentive to grow beyond the limits of its bioregion, then any firm
could focus its activities on a specific place where it knows its customers, employees, and
suppliers face to face and it draws on sources of energy and materials found literally in its
own backyard. By drawing the decisions of customers and owners of capital closer to the
consequences for workers and their communities, those conditions would increase the
visibility of, and increase pressure to eliminate, the externalities that plague today’s widelydispersed, global economy. A company that inhabits the region where it operates is more
likely than one of today’s global giants to see externalities (what Toyota might call an
abnormality) when and where they occur, and have an incentive to mitigate the consequences
as quickly as possible.
Having more companies operate at smaller scale and in local regions has other beneficial
consequences for achieving true sustainability in the human economy. One likely
consequence of greater localization of economic activity is diminished inequality in the
distribution of rewards and externalities. Extreme inequality of wealth and income such as
the American economy has experienced in recent decades gives those individuals at the top
of the heap increased power to act in ways that are contrary to the interest of sustainability
for all. Another likely consequence of increased localization and smaller scale operations is
less need for large amounts, or any amounts, of funds raised by sale of equities as opposed to
funds generated internally from current earnings. With less emphasis on equity capital there
presumably would be less interest in financial markets and stock trading. It is not impossible
to imagine a locally oriented economic system where no publicly traded corporations exist to
flaunt the cause of sustainability in the interest of maximizing shareholder wealth and top
executive compensation packages.
Finally, with closer proximity of actions and consequences in a locally oriented economy
there would hopefully be less need for accounting data to define and assess results and
responsibilities. Just as the presence of those conditions in Toyota’s operations virtually
eliminated the use of production and financial controls to direct and assess operations, so
might the business community and the larger public recognize the waste of complex and
extensive accounting controls in a locally-oriented, “small is beautiful” economy. Increased
proximity of actions and consequences might even reduce the need for taxes, subsidies, and
regulations enforced from afar to encourage sustainable behavior. Results would now be
visible real time in the local arena as part of local processes. As in Toyota, all the
information needed would be contained in the work and the work would be the primary
source of information about results and consequences.89

Starting from where we are, a trend toward economic decentralization and
cooperative ownership would make communities more resilient and less vulnerable to
corporate economic blackmail. One of the perceived weak points of decentralism, as
stated by skeptics, is the ability of national corporations to play communities against each
other, when they all have separate and uncoordinated policies. Angelica Oung, for

H. Thomas Johnson, "Sustainability and Lean Operations," Cost Management, March/April 2006, pp.
44-45.
89

example:
..[W]hat’s good for towns on an individual level can be harmful if everybody started
doing it. For instance, if my town gives Walmart a bunch of tax breaks and get them to build
a supercenter in my town, dollars starts pouring into my locality from all over. The “corrupt”
town can indeed outcompete a non-corrupt town.
My area starts doing really well. However, the next town over now offers all those
superstores even better deals. Now I’m sweating. What other sweetheart deals can I offer to
get that business?
Eventually, every town is a loser.
Same with... public parking lots.... I’m sure they make sense for the local municipality
thinking from a purely local point of view. Bethesda, alone, cannot change car culture in
America if it does not build that public lot. But it will lose out on $$$ that would be spent at
that Barnes and Noble to a town that has adequate parking if it does not.90

If the typical manufacturing firm were a factory of a few dozen workers (or fewer)
serving a local market, rather than a large oligopoly firm serving a national market and
pushing a product marketed around national brand identification, it would be a lot less
feasible to pick up and move to a different part of the U.S. (let alone overseas).
And that would be even more true, if local economies were diversified on the EmiliaRomagna model, with much higher levels of self-employment and cooperative
ownership. If there were many small and medium-sized employers in manufacturing,
instead of one big corporation colonizing a locality, people would be a lot more prone to
say “good riddance!”
On the other hand, an end to subsidized superhighways and airports would drastically
reduce the total volume of freight in the national economy, and increase unit shipping
costs. So the current model of economic colonization--building a large factory in a single
location and trucking the output around a large market area--would be far less feasible.
Factories would be much more likely to be built to serve the market where they were
located. So maybe the answer to the problems of decentralism is more decentralism.

90

Angelica Oung, "Local Externalities, or why decentralized isn't always better," The Art of the Possible,
April 30, 2008 <http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008/04/30/local-externalities-or-why-decentralizedisnt-always-better/>.

