Tim Congdon

Rural romanticism

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith.

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith.

The bibliography to Zac Goldsmith’s The Constant Economy includes The Trap by his father, Jimmy Goldsmith. When it was published in 1993, The Trap caused a bit of a stir because it challenged the consensus that free trade and globalisation were good for mankind. But it also contained a deeper theme, that the world had become falsely enamoured of the commercialisation of science and technology. Goldsmith père protested not just that economic orthodoxy was wrong, but that society had become too materialistic and complex, too far from nature.

Since the early 1990s these anxieties have been given a new focus. Claims have been made that economic growth has led to ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, that this has increased the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and that the extra CO2 represents a powerful ‘anthropogenic forcing’ (or man-made cause) in global warming. Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of environmentalism is apocalyptic. The doomsters say that, if governments do not intervene in the process, continued economic growth will throw up even more carbon emissions, accelerate global warming and make the earth uninhabitable. The richer we are, the closer we are to ruining ourselves. Technology reaches its zenith and the end of the world is nigh.

In his new book Goldsmith fils repositions his father’s argument to fit the altered context. The aim of the anti-materialism is now to recognise nature’s limits and to protect the environment. The Constant Economy does praise certain kinds of technology, notably the technologies that reduce the energy intensity of consumption (or the energy per unit of output). But it also wants people to restrict consumption so that, even with energy per unit of output unchanged, the world’s carbon emissions would decline.

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