Diane Coyle — Time for the next techno-enviro-social paradigm?

Diane Coyle mini-reviews Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve by Ian Morris.

On this week’s flights I read Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolveby Ian Morris. I thoroughly enjoyed Morris’s big book, Why the West Rules (For Now), a grand sweep of economic and social history in the vein of (Guns Germs and Steel, Collapse) [by] Jared Diamond... 

In a nutshell, his argument is that humanity has grown better at using the prevailing energy technology to acquire more kilocalories of energy for use, up to a ceiling. At that ceiling, a new energy basis for society evolves, importantly affecting population density and the size of human social groups, and replaces the previous social/technical paradigm. Domestication of grains and animals enabled farming to replace foraging. The extraction of fossil fuels and their harnessing as steam power led to industrial societies in place of agrarian ones. 

Each of these three paradigms involves a different kind of social relations [including economic].... 

It ends rather gloomily, pointing out that the big transitions he identfies – from foraging to farming to fossil fuels – occurred when successful societies hit the “hard ceiling of what was possible given their stage of energy capture and found themselves taking part in a natural experiment….. More often than not, people failed to revolutionize their energy capture and suffered Malthusian collapses.” 

Perhaps, he muses with unseemly cheer, that’s about to happen to us unless we can solve the climate change issues. So that’s our choice: a catastrophic collapse of civilization, or a new techno-enviro-social paradigm.

The "new techno-enviro-social paradigm" is emerging as digital. The analog era is ending and a new supercycle beginning. Will it be able to overcome existential challenges emerging along with it? Stay tuned.
The Enlightened Economist

Time for the next techno-enviro-social paradigm?
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation