that doesn’t mean I eat the plate

Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:

Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl–to take that sweet land in!

Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfill by the ancient sea?

We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth’s paradise.

–Allen Tate, The Mediterranean

The British Art Museum at Yale has a sterling exhibit commemorating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin. Given it is an art museum, a fine Louis Kahn one at that, the exhibit dwells heavily on how Darwin’s theories affected the development of art and society in his time. The exhibit includes a page from Darwin’s notebook where he first scratches out his dendritic “tree of life” concept but tempers it with a cryptic and humble “I Think” floating above the sketch like a cloud full of rain.

What the exhibit ably conveys is the strong connection between aesthetics and science during earlier times. Men of science informed their scientific attempts at disinterested classification and documentation with a very interested form of aesthetic awareness. This generation of Americans seems to have embraced an extended deflation in the currency of aesthetics and that, as much as anything else is what we should be talking about now. Regardless of whether or not the ice will melt and Gotham sink below the waves, whatever small New England Town that might see Palm Trees or Spruce Muskeg appear on the horizon will be long buried under an ugly and degrading filth that is emblematic of the brutish louts we are fast becoming. We proudly wade knee-deep through the abattoir in search of a place to squat and defecate and still we argue about whether global warming is true or not.

If we are to reconvene upon a proper course of life, we must work harder at reinvigorating a greater degree of aesthetic intelligence. Science without beauty is simply a better guillotine.

I suggest we stage an eat-in, in which we dress up as prominent economists and economic writers and serve ourselves a meal of money. I volunteer to be Richard Florida (“The Rise of the Creative Class”)and to try eating change, but we need someone for dollars, and someone for Euros.

I’m always glad to know whom I’m replying to, so I encourage everyone to use his or her real name. The connections we make on the web are tenuous enough as it is. Thanks.

1. “Land And Natural-resource Distribution” (utility in efficient allocation of raw material & natural capital);
2. “Location ANd Demographics” (Location values, Access to markets & services, Network effects & infrastructure, Demographic gravity & energy);
3. “Limiting Assets of Natural Development” (Land and land-like phenomena, fundamental means of production that are the limiting factors of all other economic processes).

We tend to compartmentalise all of these values as seperate, but all sets of these elements overlap the ownership and use of any parcel of physical land (although no. 3 also includes money, credit & cultural capital).

Mr. Berry isn’t just talking about efficient allocation of natural resources of course, but about the social capital and demographic networks of vibrant communities; the unofficial “added value” of social infrastructure that runs with the land like a title deed.

The second one is the stupidity of asymmetry. And the only issue I can think of disagreeing with Ron Paul on: MFN for China. We demand clean, safe factories. Insurance against hurting, much less maiming or killing a worker. Not dumping toxic waste into the river in back. There are parallel things in agriculture.

But everything is politicized. If Brazil can produce ethanol more cheaply, let them, and let US farmers feed us. Instead, they burn 9 gallons of fossil fuel to produce 10 gallons of ethanol.

We can make everything for ourselves – if the federal government would let us. Instead, through corporatist agreements like NAFTA they subsidize foreign companies (mainly through regulatory arbitrage) at the expense of US citizens.

But everything depends on what happens in the future. And one can hope the Somali pirates will spread and increase the price of transoceanic shipping in the Pacific too. Or we need to charge for our “protection”, which was my first point.

And of course there’s other mischief, as when economists tell us not to worry about climate change because the only thing it will affect is agriculture, and agriculture accounts for so little of the GNP. Herman Daly has done a credible job of responding to this lunacy in “People, Patterns, and Philanthropy in Rural America” (a symposium featuring Daly, Wendell Berry, and Wes Jackson at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center). An edited pdf transcript is available online. Here’s a taste of what Daly says:

And if we do leave it to the economists, how does agriculture fare? Well, I’ll try to answer that with three quotations. The first is from the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, William Nordhaus: “Agriculture, that part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just three percent of national output. That means there is no way to get a very large effect on the US economy.” (Pause.) In case that went by too fast (laughter), what he’s saying is that climate change affects only agriculture. Agriculture is only three percent of GNP. Therefore, we don’t have to worry about climate change; it can’t hurt the economy.

Well, maybe that’s just one person on a bad day. (Laughter.) Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman, in his small 1995 book entitled Small Is Stupid: Blowing the Whistle on the Greens, also tells us that greenhouse gas-induced climate change is no worry because it affects only agriculture, and agriculture is only three percent of GNP. But he then goes on to elaborate a little bit. “Even if net output of agriculture fell by 50 percent by the end of next century, this is only a 1.5 percent cut in GNP.”

And one final question [sic] from Thomas Schelling, former president of the American Economic Association and in 2005 a Nobel laureate: “In the developed world, hardly any component of the national income is affected by climate. Agriculture is practically the only sector of the economy affected by climate, and it contributes only a small percentage – three percent in the United States – of national income. If agricultural productivity were drastically reduced by climate change, the cost of living would rise by one or two percent, and at a time when per capita income would likely have doubled.”

So there’s no need to worry, right?

Well, it is not true that agriculture is the only climate-sensitive sector of the economy; just ask the insurance companies or the folks in New Orleans. But that’s not the error that concerns me. The error that concerns me is to treat the importance of agriculture as if it were measured by its percentage of GNP. Surely these distinguished economists all know about the law of diminishing marginal utility, consumer surplus, the fact that exchange value reflects marginal use value and not total use value, and so on. Presumably they also know that the demand for food in the aggregate is famously inelastic. So in the light of all of those things, it seems pretty obvious that the percentage of agriculture in GNP is not a constant of nature, and that in the event of a collapse of agriculture, it could increase enormously.