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| Young Karamoja boys herding goats and cows. |
Recently, I visited
the Moroto District in north-east Uganda, home of the (in)famous Karamajong
pastoralist. These number half a million people and are isolated
geographically, economically and politically, and are widely despised by their
compatriots as violent and underdeveloped. There have been efforts to
settle the Karamajong in villages, get children to school and make them grow
crops. However most of them are dependent on various development programs as
well as food aid from the World Food Programme.
I visited a village
where the normal kinds of development interventions were taking place. Most of
them, typically, were not successful, e.g. only one child in this village of
hundred children went to secondary school, the vegetable growing project had
failed and most of the economy seemed to be gold mining and the brewing of
sorghum beer. One intervention seemed to be successful; the construction of
wood saving stoves. Such stoves are darlings of the development community and
can save at least half of the firewood. Clearly a good thing; and they were in
use. When I asked a woman if she now didn’t have to collect so much firewood
every morning, she said, “oh, I collect the same amount of wood as before, I
just sell the wood I don’t need”. This was ironic as the reason for the
introduction of wood-saving stoves is to save trees, not generate income.
This is one of many
examples of Jevons paradox formulated by English economist William Stanley
Jevons in his 1865 book The Coal Question. He observed that England's
consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced his coal-fired steam
engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of Thomas Newcomen's earlier
design. Watt's innovations made coal a more cost-effective power source,
leading to the increased use of the steam engine in a wide range of industries.
This in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal
required for any particular application fell. Jevons argued that improvements
in fuel efficiency tend to increase, rather than decrease, fuel use: "It
is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent
to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth....no one must
suppose that coal thus saved is spared-it is only saved from one use to be
employed in others". Which seems to describe very accurately the effect of
the wood-saving stove in Moroto.
With the advent of
petroleum, Jevons paradox fell into oblivion until the first oil price shock
and the emerging environmental discourse
in the early 1970s. When you improve efficiency, say improve fuel efficiency in
a car, it lead mainly to that people drive more as the cost goes down. Further,
it is not only the same drivers that drive more, but more people buy a car and
use it instead of going by foot, bicycle or train. On yet another level, the
money saved on buying gasoline is used on some other activity which equally is
resource demanding, e.g. building a bigger house, take a flight for holiday or
just consume more “stuff”. This is referred to as a rebound effect. There are
some that see evidence of that total resource consumption increases as a result
of improved efficiency.
Jevons himself observed
the effect also in other important factors of production, such as iron and
labor. Even if rationalization can make workers redundant, it also increases
the remaining workers’ salaries. This creates new demands and new employment
opportunities. Those that made redundant are mostly productive in some other
trade. Even if we see a lot of unemployment currently one must admit that,
globally, the enormous gains in productivity have not resulted in widespread unemployment.
To some extent, workers have reduced their work hours, but certainly not at all
in parity with the increase of labor productivity. Overall, efficiency gains
have not resulted in reduced hours of work, but in increased consumption.
If we compare
efficiency on various systems, e.g. in farming or food processing, it will in
most cases show that the bigger and more technological advanced system is more
efficient. Larger crop farms perform better financially, on average, than
smaller farms. The larger farms don’t have higher revenue or yields per acre,
but they simply have lower costs. As expressed by a report (Farm
Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming) from USDA: “larger
farms appear to be able to realize more production per unit of labor and
capital. These financial advantages have persisted over time, which suggests
that shifts of production to larger crop farms will likely continue in the
future.” Their yield per acres is mostly the same as on smaller farms but the research
shows that farms with more than 2,000 acres spend 2.7 hours of work per acre of
corn and have cost for equipment of $432, while a farmer with 100-249 acres
will spend more than four times as much labor and double the amount for
equipment per acre. In that sense the larger farms are more “efficient” or
“productive”
The same goes for a
farmer who drives his pickup to the farmer market compared to the lorries
supplying the supermarkets; she will use more fuel and more machine capital per
kg of goods. And embedded in the machine capital are many other resources,
metals, more energy and other peoples’ work. But despite all this efficiency
our society neither reduce the number of hours worked nor the resources used,
not in total and not per capita. This is not even the case for societies that
have moved towards more services, as agriculture and manufacturing declines. How
come?
There are several ways
of tackling this question. In an article
in the Journal of Cleaner Production, Blake Alcott looks critically at the
claim that there is less impact from people employed in the service sector than
in manufacturing. He says that this claim loses its validity if the full
resource use of the workers is taken into account. If we only look at the labor
it is quite evident that a hairdresser uses less resources per hour than a
car-maker. But the barber will use his money earned for buying the same kind of
stuff as the car-maker, so the resource use embedded in their work hours is
more or less the same. Well, the car maker probably earns more, so in that
sense she will use more resources. But, on the other hand, if the service job
is in real estate or finances the service worker will earn more, and thus, on
average use up more resources. With this perspective it is the total resource
use for a human being that is of relevance and not how many barrels of oil he
or she use in the work place.
Other see that it is
mainly the inherent forces of capitalism, i.e. profit and capital accumulation,
which inevitably leads to that efficiencies will be exchanged for expansion.
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York writes in the Monthly Review
that: “An economic system devoted to
profits, accumulation, and economic expansion without end will tend to
use any efficiency gains or cost reductions to expand the overall scale of production.... Conservation in the aggregate
is impossible for capitalism, however much the out put /input ratio may be
increased in the engineering of a given product. This is because all savings
tend to spur further capital formation....”
As yet another perspective,
try this:
If we compare the
resource use of big, highly mechanized farmer with a small scale farmer, we
have ascertained that per kg harvested yield, the labor efficiency of
the bigger farm is higher. This is also the case for use of most other resources
for area unit. But what happens if we look at resource use per labor-hour?
Then it is clear that the big farmer in his 400 hp tractor use an awful lot
more resources than the farmer with a small tractor, or oxen, not to speak
about the half a billion farmers still working with their own labor as the main
resource. The same goes for the driver of the delivery truck to Walmart, he
uses a lot more resources per hour than the farmer loading her pickup to
drive to the market.
Now, you could say
that nature doesn’t care about this discussion, if we are efficient per hour,
per kg or per acre; nature only cares about the absolute use of resources or
the total emissions. That is correct. But almost all people have a job of some
kind, and in each job the same logic applies, i.e. that the more efficient each
person is, he or she uses less resources per produced unit but more resources
per hour of labor.
The total resource use in society is thus bound to increase despite of, or
perhaps because of, increased labor efficiency. This is just another way of
looking at the same things as Alcott does. He looks into the embedded
consumption which follows a person regardless of occupation, while here I look
more into embedded resource use per hour of work. After all, as long as we all
continue to work so much, our total resource use is determined by how much
resources we use at work and how much we use as consumers together.
The underlying driving
force can still be the accumulation of capital as identified by Foster and
colleagues, even if I see a more direct link to another aspect of the
capitalist market economy; competition as a driver for reduction in labor costs
per unit. Another driver is that people chose to continue working forty hours
per week and thus exchange increase in labor productivity with increased
consumption.
Jevons had a problem to find a reasonable
conclusion from his paradox. He said that “We have to make the momentous choice
between brief but true greatness and longer continued mediocrity” in relation
to the use of coal. His recommendation was more
or less to continue with business as usual. I think what Jevons referred to
as mediocrity is what is today called sustainability.
There are no free lunches. Or rather the
problem is that we have got so many free lunches in the shape of “natural
capital” that we have used “for free”, that we believe that we “have the right”
to use so many resources, and that the lunch will be free also in the future.
But it will not.
