Review: Surviving Progress

Apologies for the lack of posting recently. Aside from research stuff, most of my "internet" time has been spent working on the RECONOMICS HUB.[*] We have now officially gone live and will hopefully see a consistent level of posting from the various contributors in the weeks and months to come. Please free to stop by and let us know what you think... or follow us on Twitter!

My latest contribution to the blog is a review of the film Surviving Progress (produced by Martin Scorsese). To summarize, the film is long on intent and activism, but often fails to make a convincing argument. A snippet:

In another segment, the film jumps from Ronald Wright’s idea of a “progress trap” — something which certainly has merit in of itself — to claim that modern technology is at complete odds with our primitive physiology. (Wright: “We are running 21st century software, our knowledge, on hardware that hasn't been upgraded for 50,000 years.”) The language is undeniably provocative but is it necessarily meaningful? After all, our knowledge and innovations didn't occur in a vacuum. It is certainly hard to believe that any technological development can persist without bringing at least some form of benefit to its progenitors. The very strong conclusions that the film draws don’t necessarily follow from the premises that it provides.

Surviving Progress relies on a number of interviews and some of these work better than others. I was particularly unimpressed by a clip involving "geneticist/activist" David Suzuki, who is unilaterally scathing about the economics profession. (He calls conventional economics "a form of brain damage").

So, according to Suzuki, “externalities” is a collective term that economists use to explain away pesky things like the ozone layer, topsoil and biodiversity. Hmmm… 

There’s no other way to put this, so I’ll simply come out and say that Suzuki has completely mangled the concept of economic externalities. I cannot think of a single economist who subscribes to anything approaching the definition that he gives. (I’d even be surprised if anyone that has followed an ECO101 class would define an externality in this way.) Suzuki could open any introductory economics textbook and discover that an “externality” is simply some spillover cost or benefit incurred by a third party, which is not accounted for in the market price.

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[*] Resources. Energy. Climate. Economics