Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: The Green Age After The Collapse Page 1 of 2

We Don’t Have To Live In Hell

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On December 18, 2025

29 Comments

A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)

Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.

We don’t have to live in hell. It’s a choice.

We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.

The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”

It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)

Many, many more.

They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.

There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)

China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.

It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.

And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.

And in that is a genuine hope.

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The Promise Of Automation and Abundance

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On November 19, 2025

18 Comments

For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers believed that automation would lead to us living lives of leisure. Twenty hour work weeks, or even less, and many people wouldn’t need to work at all, but would still live good lives.

It never happened.

Economists will tell you this is because there’s always more work to be done, but economists are the priesthood of capitalism, not scientists, not even social scientists.

Most of us are well aware that many jobs are, in David Graeber’s memorable phrase, bullshit jobs. They either don’t really need to be done or are actively harmful. Everyone working in private equity. All the engineers optimizing ads. Almost everyone who works on Wall Street or in shadow banking. Most bankers, for that matter. The jobs which are actually necessary, “essential workers”, are badly paid and treated, but if they don’t show up, as we find out in a garbage, nurse, transit or teamster strike, disaster ensues.

If the janitors don’t show up, everyone’s in shit. If the CEO doesn’t show up, life continues and most people don’t care. Indeed, without CEOs most companies would run better than they do, and you’d be in a lot less danger of losing your job.

We could easily work 20 hour weeks already, if that was a priority.

But the structure of capitalism makes this impossible. We create goods which are designed to wear out quickly and be replaced. “Planned Obsolesence.” We need people to have jobs to get money to buy these shoddy goods. We buy fast food crap because we’re too busy, rather than cooking good food, and most people spend their lives doing work they’d never do if they didn’t need money to survive.

So we find more bullshit jobs, and more harmful jobs for people, and the machine churns on, destroying the environment, making people sick and unhappy and forcing us into wage slavery. Most people spend most of their waking hours doing what they’re told. Or else. Then when you’re old, you might be allowed to retire, and enjoy your declining health. Might.

We have more houses than we need, far more than the number of homeless. America throws out one-third of its food, yet people go hungry. There’s more than enough, literally more than enough food for everyone in the world to have a full and healthy diet.

KT Chong recently wrote an article about humanoid robots, in which he hopes that the Chinese will use them to allow lives of leisure, to institute a good guaranteed income. 

Perhaps they will, I hope so. To do so, however, they will have to move away from capitalism towards true communism, where everyone shares in the benefits of automation, and not just a few.

There is no reason why this isn’t possible. It could have been done any time in the last century or so, had we wished to.

Remember this: you work like a dog, obey some manager’s orders and don’t do what you really want to do because our system, and our leaders require it when it isn’t actually necessary.

Capitalism might (or might not) have been necessary for industrialization. But it is a set of leg irons weighing all of us down now, and threatening to destroy the very conditions required for life to continue on Earth.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the task of the next generation of leadership is to figure out how to run modern societies without it, without wasteful over-consumption and without destroying the environment, while making sure everyone has what they need and can live fulfilling lives: lives they choose, where most of their time is their own to do with as they would, not as some boss desires.

May it be so. The other options are far, far worse, likely catastrophically so.

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Us vs. Them / Our Government vs. the Government

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On May 30, 2025

28 Comments

I think it’s clear that democracy and capitalism don’t work together. Capitalists always wind up buying the government, and the only solution is a Great Depression-sized catastrophe to help reset capitalist wealth. But then, over time, they will capture the government again.

This isn’t to say much good may not be done at various times. Usually, after things get bad enough, a generation winds up in power who is determined to make government work “for the people” because they’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. War, revolution, poverty, depression, and so on. The second generation staggers on. They don’t really understand in their bones that government must be made to work for the people, and they compromise, but they keep it going, more or less. Then the third generation says, “Hey! If we ran the government for us and the people who can afford to pay us the most, well, we could live very, very well. Who cares about the “people?”

Often, the third generation needs to lie to themselves. They believe some intellectual charlatans: Milton, Friedman, Laffer…and later on, Fukuyama (of “We’ve won, it’s all over, it’s the end of history!” fame). The fourth generation doesn’t even pretend. It’s their government, and you peons can suck it up. (Everyone from Bush Jr. to Bush Sr. thought that neoliberalism was garbage, even as he implemented some of it. Billy Clinton appears to have been a true believer and made it work on sheer brilliance and micromanagement.)

But there’s another problem with representative government: Much like with the police, most people who want the power of government are the sort of people who shouldn’t have it.

What happens, one way or the other, is that government is run by people who run it for themselves, not for the people. It’s “the government,” not “our government.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve come down on the side of sortition. Just pick leaders based on a lottery. Then run some medical tests on the ones chosen, to make sure they aren’t chronically sick or mentally disabled. Give them ten-year terms so they are in office long enough to have some institutional knowledge and have elections every two years for one-fifth of the number.

Anyone who serves gets a full pension of three times median income for the rest of their lives, and is disallowed from any other income. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can decline office.

I’m quite positive that random people who know that they’re going back to being almost regular citizens whose income is dependent on how society performs in the future will do a better job than normal politicians.

Oh, there are plenty of details to sort out, to be sure, but this is far more likely to produce “our government” than the current regime.

The next article on this subject will be on the next important change: How we do taxation? How do people contribute to “our government” and “society?” Spoiler: Taxing money is not the right way.

 

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Don’t Call It Degrowth, Call It the “No Bullshit Society”

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On July 10, 2024

24 Comments

Or perhaps the leisure society, or the choice society.

As Mark Pontin pointed out, manufacturing is increasingly automated, with one Chinese factory reducing workers by 90%. This is the future and not just in manufacturing.

Whenever you point this out, people panic, scared of the jobs going away, but that’s ridiculous.

If we can produce more with less workers that should be a good thing, not a bad one.

The problem is our insistence on distributing the good, or at least acceptable life thru jobs, a holdover from pre-Industrial revolution times, when every worker was often needed.

That isn’t true any more, and we should be automating and reducing the work week: first to four days, then to three. Get rid of bullshit jobs and harmful jobs, which is probably half the jobs out there (almost all of Wall Street & the City are harmful jobs) and you might be able to get down to two day work weeks.

Focus AI and automation not on taking away work people love to do like artistic and intellectual jobs, and focus them on hard or degrading labour. Move heavily to true rapid transit, and get rid of cars. Make all manufactured products (or almost all) built to last, modular and designed for repair, so that we only have to make things a few times per human lifetime.

Reduce work. Let people find other, meaningful things to do with their lives. The worship of work, meaning crap you wouldn’t do if you didn’t have to, is a relatively recent thing, coming mostly out of the Protestant revolution: virtually no one before that believed that work was a good thing: it was necessary, but the good life was about art, learning, athletics, civic involvement and so on.

To create this sort of world we need to take “getting rich” off the table. You can get wealthy: say have four or five times as much as the median, but not rich. Focus competition towards status and prestige, and towards living a good life and contributing towards others.

And there will still be important things to do which require humans, not the least of which is fixing the environment. There will always be meaningful labour to do: action that matters, just not drudgery so that rich people can play “who has the most” games.

What’s so frustrating about human society is that it could be so much better, and we have almost everything we need to get their. But we’re stuck in path dependence and power games, unable to imagine or build the good world our technology makes possible.

What people want isn’t “growth” its better lives. Make a credible promise of better lives, and deliver and no one but psychopaths and greedaholics will look back.

Forget degrowth: let’s waste a ton less, build a ton less and live a ton better. It’s more than possible.

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If Bosses Want At-Will Firing This Is What Is Required (The Good Society)

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On June 12, 2024

15 Comments

One of the great complaints of bosses and corporations is that they can’t fire people whenever they want to. Employee protections were one of the great victories of the 20th century and the union movement, though far more in Europe than in America, except in the Federal civil services.

But bosses do have a point: being able to get rid of employees without fuss isn’t unreasonable: they’re hired to do a job, and if you don’t like how they’re doing it, firing them makes sense.

At first glance the problem is that often such power is abused, in too many ways to recount.

But the real problem is that without a job, people suffer: they have less, they may wind up homeless, in the US they’re essentially cut off from medical care and so on.

In a society where you would have a decent life whether employed or not, it wouldn’t matter if at employment was “at-will.”

We still live in a surplus society. If we were to get rid of planned obsolesence, massively reduce pollution, and work hard at public services like frequent and reliable public transit, free post-secondary education and plenty of third place gathering spots, we could have even more of a surplus: or rather, use much less and stop destroying the environment, so that we would stay a surplus society. Making people work when what they do isn’t actually necessary, is a “bullshit job” or actually does great harm, like almost all of the financial industry, is stupid, and doesn’t increase human welfare.

So the compromise is guaranteeing everyone in society a good life: housing, transit, health care and recreation. Again, we can do this, we have the surplus, and if we got rid of 40% of work, well, we’d have a society which would actually produce more welfare, because that work is useless of harmful.

And in a guaranteed good life society, very few people are going to want to spend their lives figuring out how to serve ads better, or other nonsense. They will want meaningful work: work which is enjoyable or which makes the world a better place. They will tend to self-select for jobs which really do benefit others, especially if, at the same time, we cap wealth at something like 10x median, and income at 3x what’s guaranteed. (Which also means those who want wealth will have to improve the baseline guaranteed wealth.)

At that point, if bosses want to fire people at will, who cares? It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s more likely that bosses who offer work that isn’t meaningful or enjoyable, or both, won’t be able to get workers.

And that, my friends, is what a good surplus society looks like.

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The Hard Problem of Leadership

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On April 1, 2024

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We have lived under representative democracy for a long time now, and while it has had its victories and there have been good leaders, it’s fair to say that most of the leadership, most of the time, has been bad or even evil, and that representative democracy has failed its biggest test—managing climate change and environmental collapse.

This is a Green Age After the Collapse Article. You can read the others (this is the fourth), here.

The other forms of leadership we’ve tried since the invention of agriculture have all, likewise, been more bad than good or have failed to scale well enough to protect themselves. Kingship, rank societies, big man societies, feudalism, imperialism, direct democracy and so on. On the economic side, when it’s not identical to the political, we’ve also tended to choose bad leaders, whether they were merchant lords, corporate CEOs and boards, guild masters or slavers. Most systems work well for a few generations, then fall apart. Seven generations when you’re lucky, more commonly three, as with neoliberalism.

Just thinking back over my life, I can’t think of a President who wasn’t doing more evil than good. This even includes Carter, who was the neoliberal leader before neoliberalism. The case for every other President is clear: Obama, for example, ramped up drone assassinations and encouraged the banks to steal people’s homes without the necessary paperwork, while massively ramping up shale oil and gas production and bragging about it.

As for corporate leadership, the idea that Musk, Bezos, Gates, and the various banking CEOs and so far are good leader is ludicrous. They are, to be sure, successful, but the society they have created is heading towards catastrophe. Even when you look at a man many worship, like Steve Jobs, you find a mixed legacy at best. Jobs opus was the smartphone. And while it’s a marvelous piece of technology, when you look at the actual literature of the effect of smart phones, it’s that the more you use one, the less real friends you have and the more unhappy you are.

And the weird thing is that Jobs didn’t even invent the underlying breakthrough, which is to say the graphical GUI, any more than Gates invented the PC (Jobs has a better shot there). And the people who make the most money out of the internet and the world wide web didn’t invent either of those things—both were invented by government supported researchers.

What Jobs and co did is bring certain ideas to scale, which is necessary if the idea should be brought to scale. But there are many different ways that an idea can be scaled and it may not require the sort of psychopathy that is common to corporations; that is, indeed, part of their DNA.

Leadership is one of the few core problems: if we can’t get it right, we can’t get anything right, because almost everything is downstream from our decisions as a species, and our leaders, whoever they are, make the most important decisions.

We have to select leaders better, or we’ll never live in good societies for any length of time, and those of us who do luck out and live in one, will indeed, just be the recipients of luck.

I’m going to write about this more, soon. The next step will be talking about Plato and the book of his everyone loves to hate, The Republic.

Because Plato’s specific solution might be repulsive to almost everyone, but he was trying to answer the right question, and we need to understand why we hate his answer, and if we’re right to do so.

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Poverty, Wealth and Money In The New Green Age (Principles of the Green Age #1.1)

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On March 18, 2024

14 Comments

This is the second article in my “Principles of the New Green Age” Series. You can read the first, here.

The first principle was

“Do as thou will, so long as you increase biodiversity and biomass, reduce pollution and heat, and replace any resources used.“

In the real olden days of civilization, in the Fertile Crescent (which really was fertile before most of it was turned into desert) there was a dual currency system: there was grain and there was silver (and what amounted to certificates of deposit on both, along with usurious loans.)

This worked well because, to oversimplify slightly, grain was produced in Mesopotamia and silver wasn’t. If you wanted to buy something else produced in Mesopotamia, you bought with grain. But if you wanted to buy something imported, you paid in silver.

Since silver could only be gotten thru trade, this meant that import and export flows were more or less in order: there could be no massive trade deficits outside the fertile crescent, at least in principle.

Though they didn’t do it, even better would have been that certain things could only be bought with internally produced grain: property, for example. That way your country’s productive ability couldn’t be bought out from under you.

In Green Age ideology there will be more than one type of money, probably three. The first is money based on renewable resources: it will be usable only to buy and sell renewable resources. The second will be based on non-renewable resources and will be strictly controlled. There may also be as pollution based based money, or rather one based on cleaning up pollution, or people may be rewarded with the other two types of money for doing so.

Though we haven’t gotten there yet, one of the Green Age principles will have something to do with taking care of everyone, and part of that will be making sure everyone has food and shelter.

Since there is a societal effort in making renewables actually renew, part of every country’s surplus will be distributed as what amounts to basic income to individuals. That amount, in most countries, certainly all countries with a renewable food surplus, meaning they produce enough food and are not degrading the land to do so, will be sufficient to feed recipients for a year.

Likewise everyone will have a home: one that works out to be pollution neutral when taken in context of the supporting infrastructure. That home will either be given, purchased or leased, with strict controls, and probably mostly long leases, similar to how Singapore works) because it is possible to build houses with materials entirely domestically sources in many countries, though we’ll have to figure out how to electrical wiring sustainably or put it into the unsustainable bucket.

Society is made up of everyone and one of the principles must be that everyone benefits from society’s successes. Even the rich and powerful (who will be kept strictly under control, with the richest have a multiple, perhaps 4x, what the lowest have), must know that for them to do better, everyone must do better and that the environment must do better. This sort of genuine alignment of interests is necessary for any society to function well, and absolutely necessary in any purpose driven society, which Green Age societies will need to be.

So if you’re a member of a green age society created along these lines: the government will make sure you have a home and food. Either you’ll get enough renewable money to get them for yourselves, or there’ll be a non-market mechanism.

In effect, based on how many renewable resources the society produces, you’ll have an income relative to how well society is actually doing. Everyone will. This will pay for things like food, housing, water and anything the country can produce and renew. Since everyone gets this money, there will be strong incentives to create as much out of renewable resources as possible, similar to, but far more healthy than, the great middle class consumer production boom of the post-War period.

If, on the other hand, what you want requires non-renewable resources, well, you’ll need the second type of money, and that will be far harder to come by.

A Green Age society cannot afford the obscenely wealthy, because such people always tend to psychopathy and acting against the common good. It also cannot afford the poor, either, for the same reason: everyone needs to be connected to the successes and failures of society and have a stake in them.

This doesn’t mean a society where there’s no individual or group income. Limited liability companies will go, because people need to be liable for polluting and for not renewing, but there will be organizations and many of them will, at least somewhat, run on money. But somewhere between one-third and a half of your income should be based on how society as a whole is doing, and that income should be enough enough to keep you decently housed and fed, with access to medical care.

Sayings like “a rising tide lifts all boats” aren’t expressions of natural law when they come to social matters: we need to make them true.

If we want to clean up the environment and live in a sustainable society, we’ll have to make it happen, and part of that involves making sure no one can avoid either the positive or negative effects of their actions on the environment.

No obscene rich, no poor.

 

Principles Of The Green Age After The Collapse: #1

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On March 7, 2024

35 Comments

Do as thou will, so long as you increase biodiversity and biomass, reduce pollution and heat, and replace any resources used.

Want to live in the howling wilderness? OK. But only if you can increase the number and amount of lifeforms, and reduce pollution by being there. If you can’t do all three, you don’t get to live in the wilderness.

Freedom today is based on money. If you have enough money, you can do what you want, if you obey the law. The more money you have, the fewer laws apply to you: either they are laws which if violated are punished with fines, which you don’t care about, or they are laws which are effectively not enforced against the rich.

The Green Age, instead of having a zero tolerance policy for minor infractions, will have no tolerance for people who damage the ecosphere or the climate.

Likewise, you will need to replace the resources you’re using if you’re using them beyond any natural replacement rate. If you’re taking water from a river or an aquifer, you’ll have an amount you can use that is equal to natural replenishment. If you use any more, you’ll need to replace it. Chop trees, plant them, and since you also need to maintain biomass and biodiversity, that won’t mean tree farms and will require you to keep doing it and, most likely, to have done it in the past. (This will make clear-cutting very rare.)

This also means that you don’t get to do what you want if you use non-renewable resources. Mining and other forms of permanent extraction will be something that society has a strict limit on. Much will be assigned by government, and much will likely be divided and given to each member of society and when they buy something which uses a non-renewable resource, that account will be debited, with no credit except in life-saving emergencies.

The principle is simple: replace what you use if it can be replaced, make the ecology and the environment better because of your existence and use limited amounts of non-renewable resources. This is how we fix the environment and make an environment is healthier and far more enjoyable to live in. (Just as almost everyone wants to live on a street with lots of trees.)

Long term, if you want to use a lot of non-renewable resources, we will have to go into space, but taking masses from Earth will be verboeten.

These rules will apply to individuals and groups, including whatever replaces corporations as our primary private economic vehicle and to households. This will lead to the end of suburbs and exurbs as we know them. Most people will either be rural (working on food production and environmental projects) or will live in dense cities. If we want the privilege of living in low population density areas, we will have to earn it by figuring out how to do so in a way that doesn’t decrease biodiversity, biomass or renewable resources, and instead of those who make more money being allowed to do more, those who will be allowed to do more will be those who increase those environmental variables the most.

This is only the first of the Green Age articles, we’ll dive into the rest of the principles and some of the details of how such a society must be run as the series continues.

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