Tag Archives: weightlessness

A quarter century of weightlessness

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It’s 25 years since my first book The Weightless World was published, back in 1997. We were early adopters of the online world at home, and in my job (journalism for The Independent at the time) I had been reporting on technology companies. So when approached by an agent, I knew what the subject would be. How does it stand up to the test of time?

The headline is that the central metaphor, of economic value becoming increasingly intangible, was spot on. The role of ideas and intangibles in how economies progress has become ever more apparent – watch out for the new Haskel and Westlake book on this shortly. The material intensity of economic output has declined. At the same time, I missed two big issues: energy use and climate change; and the adverse trends in concentration in digital markets & the power of big tech. The tone is more upbeat than it might be if I wrote it now, although to be fair to myself The Weightless World does flag trade-offs and the transition costs of digital adoption.

I’m most impressed with my young self in looking at the chapter headings. It was a time of higher unemployment than now so jobs are a focus, including flexibility and what we now refer to as the gig economy. As one of the jobs chapters points out, the technology offered a lot of potential for changing patterns of work but to date it had operated solely in favour of employers, not individuals. Perhaps the pandemic and WFH will finally shift that balance. Other chapters cover the impact of digital on globalisation, economic geography and clustering in cities, the need for a new social contract, the role of the third sector and reforming government. For example, I was very clear that the need for more and more exchange of ideas would enhance clustering, as has indeed happened over the past quarter century.  I even flag up the increasing scope of increasing returns.

It’s highly embarrassing reading one’s old work, so I’m not going to recommend others go back to it. This post is just to pat myself on the back for having been in on the ground floor of the digital economy. I published the book too early, probably – prescience is no use if nobody pays attention! With luck, though, digital transformation will keep me busy for the next 25 years.

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Here I am in 1996, writing The Weightless World too early

Here I am in 1996, writing The Weightless World too early

 

Weightlessness Redux

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The weeks are flying past. I’ve read recently an array of non-economics books (Owen Hatherley’s Trans-Europe Express, Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, Francis Spufford’s True Stories, a couple of the re-issued Maigrets) and also Matt Stoller’s Goliath and Andrew McAfee’s More from Less. I’ll review Goliath in my next post.

More from Less: the surprising story of how we learned to prosper using fewer resources – and what happens next (to give it the full overly wordy subtitle) is presumably aimed at the airport bookshop market. It’s written in a very accessible way and it summarises a lot of interesting research – although not McAfee’s own.

The main point is that the material resource intensity of economic growth has been declining in the rich western economies. This is set in an account of the origins of modern capitalism in the Industrial Revolution – emphasising the importance of ideas and contestability through markets – and the urgent debate about the trade-off between humans gettern better of (escaping the Malthusian trap) and the damaging environmental impact of growth. The dematerialisation of the economy is helping improve the terms of that trade-off.

A major difficulty I have in reviewing this is that, although it’s an enjoyable read, I wrote a book making the same point in 1997, The Weightless World (out of print, free pdf here). There’s no reason at all McAfee should have read it as I was a nobody, and it was a long time ago. But it does mean that (perhaps uniquely) I can’t find anything that’s new in More From Less. The research he cites concerning dematerialisation dates from 2012 (Chris Goodall) and 2015 (Jesse Ausubel, The Return of Nature) – so this is another example of a phenomenon being discovered twice; because there was similar work in the mid-1990s on material flow accounts, on which I based my book. Alan Greenspan even made a speech about it in 1996. It’s a noteworthy phenomenon so I hope McAfee does alert new readers to it. He puts far more emphasis on environmental challenges than I did back in the more innocent 1990s; my focus was more on the socio-economic consequences of a dematerializing economy.

However, the weightlessness or dematerialization phenomenon doesn’t deliver a knockout blow to the degrowth argument that it is not enough to have a reduced but still positive material intensity to growth. Tim Jackson is the most thoughtful advocate of this argument – see this recent essay in Science. It may be that we need to find a way to read more lightly on the planet in absolute terms as well as relative ones, although I’ll welcome weightless growth as better than the weighty alternative. And – as even no growth is politically divisive, never mind degrowth – the issues raised in More From Less are difficult and important ones.

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Things and Beyond

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I’ve been reading Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the 15th century to the 21st, which has taken a while as it’s 600+ pages. It has been an enjoyable read but with two flaws – more on these later.

The book does what it says in the subtitle, drawing on a major research programme, and is truly impressive in its scope and detail. It traces global (and genuinely so although with a strong tilt to the West) trends in consumption through the long sweep of history. It links these trends in behaviour to trends in thought about personal and social ethics, and the individual in the family and in society. It addresses the entire chain of production and consumption from resources to waste. It draws on a wide array of disciplinary knowledge, including philosophy, history, sociology and even some economics.

The book sets up a tension through all of this material: “The view that being and having are opposites … has a very long history. But so has an alternative trajectory that sees people as only becoming human through the use of things.” Among other forces, technology keeps this tension alive over time, as new things keep on appearing. And it’s interesting to see that certain things are particularly compelling – stockings for one. The 17th century knitting framemade better, cheaper stockings possible, and the early national accountant Gregory King estimated in 1688 that 10 million pairs a year were purchased. This reminded me of the tidal wave of nylon stockings sold by Dupont – 800,000 pairs on 15 May 1940, the first day of sale, alone.

Consumption clearly depended on rising incomes, and the book traces a switch to “the creation of value through consumption, not just production” from the 19th century – it argues that consumer society has its roots in the Industrial Revolution rather than as is often argued the post-war boom. There’s an interesting couple of sections – in the light of the way technology is currently blurring the previously sharp consumption/production divide – on the role of consumer durables. I disagree with Trentmann’s suggestion that, “The appeal of goods such as the automatic washing machine was far from self-evident.” He notes that the aggregate time spent on household work was not reduced significantly by such consumer durables – and then observes in passing and ignores the class distinctions. Middle class women were decreasingly likely to have servants and did more of their own housework. Working class women – like my mother and Hans Rosling’s – were truly given hours of time by automatic washing machines. John Kenneth Galbraith (I’m sure he never did an iota of laundry in his life) said consumer durables enslaved women; but even if – as he argued – easier washing meant more washing to have cleaner clothes, why is this not a better outcome?

Turning back to that original tension – does our relationship with things dehumanize us or the opposite? Is consumerism basically bad or good? – I’m with Hume. As Trentmann describes the Humean view: “An encounter with a new object was one way in which intelligence and feeling were inspired and strengthened.” (And isn’t this one of the big questions about AI and consciousness – can intelligences without sense perceptions become conscious?)

The modern no-growther’s disdain for consumption seems to me to be of a piece with the instinct in the past that gave us sumptuary laws. Rich folk thought poor folk should stay in their place, dressing up the restrictions on the purchases the masses were allowed to make in moralising garb. But as Adam Smith put it, it was, “[T]he highest impertinence and presumption for kings and ministers to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exceptions, the greatest spendthrifts in society.” Of course we need to pay far greater attention to resource use and to waste, but it is the affluent who are cavalier about the importance of growing real incomes and consumption – Janan Ganesh in his column today describes them as ‘too-rich-to-care bohemians’.

There is lots to enjoy in Empire of Things, therefore; I’m exactly the kind of reader who likes detail of the sort its pages are packed with.

I would have liked more economics, and more figures. There is a nice section on the mutual interaction of prices and tastes, as with the switch in British taste from coffee to tea in the later 1700s: a chart of tea and coffee prices would have been nice. But I have two bigger criticisms. One is that the book seriously needed an edit. The argument gets swamped in detail and it should have been 25% shorter. Some sections, especially those on non-western trends, fall between two stools – insufficiently detailed in themselves but enough to distract from the flow.

The biggest issue I have, however, is that the book never addresses the distinction between material and non-material consumption. It puts really a great deal of emphasis on the physical nature of consumer goods – and then skips to a discussion of some non-material aspect of consumption such as public health measures or public education, or leisure activities like the cinema. The issue of increased expenditure on services and intangibles is dismissed in just over two separate pages (out of 690), by saying that spending on housing, transport and food combined accounts for the same proportion of the household budget in 2007 as in 1958; and that in the OECD as a whole material consumption rhas continued to rise. Yet people are spending a growing proportion of their incomes on warmth, space, travel, variety, quality, entertainment as they grow richer. The immaterial is embedded in the material, and there is absolutely no reason to be complacent about the environmental footpring of the global economy; but (even knowing I may be biased about this) it is surely a significant development in the history of consumption (albeit a transition of affluence) that value is being created largely by the non-material now? (The forthcoming Capitalism without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake addresses this.)

Still, it’s probably a good sign when a huge book leaves you more inclined to ask for more rather than wishing there had been less, and the balance tips that way for me despite it being in need of a blue pencil in parts.

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Weightlessness redux

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There is a wave of interest in dematerialization – I spotted it this past weekend thanks to Justin Fox, and his article has been picked up elsewhere. I therefore can’t resist bigging up my own book, The Weightless World (pdf), published in the UK in 1996 and US in 1997.

[amazon_image id=”0262531666″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy (Obex Series)[/amazon_image]

Although it shows its age, it was (I’m pretty sure) one of the first to pick up on this physical manifestation of the structural and technological changes under way. (And I now regret that it didn’t consider energy use in the weightless economy.)

Here are the ONS charts that triggered the use of weightlessness as a prism for understanding the structural change in the economy. They show for the 1980s then the 1990s the level of real GDP and the material flows for the economy for the two decades. Around the mid or late 1980s, the link broke, and while real GDP continued to rise, the ‘weight’ of the economy stayed roughly level.

Real UK GDP and weight of economy, 1980s

Real UK GDP and weight of economy, 1980s

Real UK GDP and 'weight' of economy, 1990s

Real UK GDP and ‘weight’ of economy, 1990s

Update: Here is the latest ONS data, also based to 1990.

GDP vs 'weight' of economy up to 2011

Economics meets physics – literally

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By chance, two books about the intersection of economics and the physical world have landed recently here at Enlightenment Towers recently, [amazon_link id=”113744200X” target=”_blank” ]The Remaking of the Mining Industry[/amazon_link] by David Humphreys and [amazon_link id=”0262029146″ target=”_blank” ]Power Density: A key to understanding energy sources and uses[/amazon_link] by Vaclav Smil.

[amazon_image id=”113744200X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Remaking of the Mining Industry[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0262029146″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses[/amazon_image]

I love business histories, with all their detail about how decisions get made with no reference at all to marginal cost=marginal revenue, and David Humphreys used to be chief economist of Rio Tinto and then Norislk Nickel in Russia. He knows more than probably anyone about the economics of the mining industry, so this book promises to be full of interesting nuggets (so to speak). Paging through, one of his main themes looks to be the importance of geopolitics for the industry, and the role of government in creating a stable legal framework that will enable investment with a decades-long payoff to occur. He concludes: “The world does not have a resource problem. It cannot be ruled out, however, that it may face an investment problem.”

I also like Vaclav Smil’s previous books, [amazon_link id=”B00EI26DUM” target=”_blank” ]Made in the USA: the rise and retreat of American manufacturing[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”B00FNWQJOQ” target=”_blank” ]Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization[/amazon_link] (well of course I’d like that one!), packed full of engineering insight. This one tells me that power density is “the rate of energy flux per unit of area” – huh? – and that moving to low power density renewable fuels will require “a profound spatial restructuring of the energy system.” My guess is that it means new transmission and distribution grids, but I’ll have to read it to be sure. The final sentence, in bold italics reads: “New energy arrangements are both inevitable and desirable, but without any doubt, if they are to be based on large scale conversions of renewable energy resources, then the societies dominated by megacities and concentrated industrial production will require a profound spatial restructuring of the energy system, a process with many major environmental and socioeconomic consequences.”