The Public Good

The Public Good

Capitalism works because people strive to become rich. Who knows why they do this? Perhaps people are naturally greedy and competitive, perhaps they learn to be so. But a state whose sole motivation was to enable its citizens to become wealthy would be sorry and short lived. Maintaining a citizen’s liberties (against the state), taking some concern for a citizen’s economic well being, and maintaining the health of the ecosystems without which the state and society would collapse, must be part of any successful state. As Keynes pointed out, the state should not do what individuals can do but it must do what they cannot do. Such things include running public education systems, public transportation systems, prisons, the postal service and probably hospitals and clinics (none of which can be run affordably at a profit), regulating the electrical grid, regulating the use of waterways, regulating land use. Well run public transportation systems, public education systems and systems of medical care provide social goods worth much more (morally speaking, and often economically speaking) than their cost. Most elements of a social safety net (education, unemployment insurance, pensions, medical care) lead to a more prosperous society, and its various monetary benefits (unemployment payments, pensions), as well as its support of parts of the economy through the funding of education, transportation infrastructure and medical care help the economy survive downturns by providing a continuing flow of income from the state.

From this point of view, complaints about the bonuses being handed out by banks that were recently rescued with government loans, and later overpaid, also by the government, for bad debt they had amassed, seem to me disingenuous. The spread in incomes in the United States now (the difference between the richest and the poorest) is similar to that in China or Brazil. High incomes should be taxed and the money redistributed (one way or another) to those who need it (their incomes don’t pay for food, shelter and gas). Similarly, why complain that many of the people who profited by granting and reselling subprime (bound-to-fail) mortgages, are now making money by buying up those same distressed mortgages from banks at substantial discounts, refinancing the mortgages, and selling the new (solvent?) mortgages to entities guaranteed by the government. While it is repugnant that the same people who helped create, and who profited hugely from, the debt crisis, should profit from its resolution, its resolution is a good thing. (Of course, people guilty of fraud should be prosecuted.) For much the same reasons, I find the uproar over very short term trading (trades measured in seconds), being done by those same trading banks the government rescued, also disingenuous. Very short term trades take advantage of technical anomalies in the market and have nothing to do with “value investing” or choosing companies likely to succeed. They are a way of squeezing more money out of the system. Most capital gains (50% 75% ? 90%?) from trades that last less than a second? A minute? A day? should be taken by the government. Or, less punitively, one could tax each short term transaction, as one should tax any transaction of dubious financial value, such as currency hedges, mortgage resales and credit default swaps. A small tax on each transaction, a very small percent of the transaction’s value, payable no matter what happens, makes traders think twice.

Judicious taxing, like regulation, is a way of promoting the public good. We live under a social contract. Do we want a wise government or do we only want to become rich? Redistributing income through taxation is a way of compensating for the social effects of capitalism, a system which tends to create a wide separation between rich and poor, is inherently unjust (the playing field is never level), and if allowed to go on unchecked, tends to destroy democratic government, its own environment and the rule of law. A rule of thumb in Scandinavian countries is that the rich should make no more than ten times the poor. That would never work here, where the rich now make hundreds or thousands of times the poor, but we could aim at 50-100 times. So if a poor family made $25,000, a rich one would find it hard to make more than $1-$2 million.

The point is to use the tax system to support moral values without restraining the activity of the economic society. People will constantly and successfully find ways around any system. Thus clear and simple ways of taxing are better than complex ones.


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Capitalism’s profit motive, properly directed, can be used to solve environmental problems. The cutting and draining of its tropical peat swamp forests for plantations of palm oil and paper pulp trees make Indonesia the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. (The swamps are cut, burned and drained before planting and emit enormous amounts of carbon as they continue to sink and dry out.) The agricultural system is successful. Yields from palm oil plantations compare well with yields from grain fields. The oil from the palms is used for food and for biodiesel, a one-time environmentally correct fuel. One result is that per capita emissions of carbon dioxide in Indonesia, a relatively poor country, are close to those in the developed world. An Indonesian pulp company, one of the developers of natural forests, recently offered to protect a large area of untouched swamp forest that adjoins its drained lands. The company knows how to do this; it has the manpower and expertise; it wants to be paid enough to make the effort profitable. To charge for carbon that is emitted by the practice of forestry or agriculture (a carbon tax) is one thing. To pay for carbon that is not emitted, by not cutting a forest or plowing a field, is another. But some method must be worked out for this if carbon put into the atmosphere by people is to be reduced; and if any natural forests are to be left uncut. Perhaps the carbon saved from the atmosphere by not draining this piece could be subtracted from the carbon lost from the drained lands, for which the company should be charged, so much a ton per year. Of course, there are other, better reasons, for saving tropical forests: their habitat is invaluable, and through their transpiration of moisture and their solar reflectivity they have large effects on local and global climate; but their storage of carbon (and thus their effect on climate) is a more commonly accepted value, perhaps more easily expressible in dollars.

In the United States, new extraction techniques have made the methane in the Marcellus Shale available. The Marcellus Shale underlies parts of the Appalachian range in the eastern United States from south central New York State through much of Pennsylvania to eastern Ohio and West Virginia. This hilly landscape consists of cities, small woodlots and farms, and is cut by many roads. It has been logged, farmed, burned; there are extensive areas of lightly settled logged forest, managed as forest; in parts of the anthracite region of Pennsylvania fires and logging have reduced the vegetation to heath and scrub, an industrial recreation of the heath hen habitat that was turned into forest and farm in New England (this resulted in that bird’s extinction): perhaps prairie chickens transplanted from the Middle West would thrive in the new industrial scrublands. Drilling rigs and gas wells here are not interrupting a virgin landscape, though (each the size of a football field) they will be disturbing a bucolic one. Much of the rural landscape is relatively poor. Drilling for gas represents a windfall of thousands of dollars a year, comparable to the payments dairy farmers in flat windy Saint Lawrence valley of northern New York receive for windmills, which have helped revive the region, and which, despite their effects on birds and bats, are a somewhat less objectionable source of energy. Extracting the gas involves fracturing the rock by pumping in huge volumes of water together with chemicals (a cocktail of 100 or more) like benzene. So extracting methane from the Marcellus shale has the capacity to pollute the groundwaters under the whole region essentially forever, with fracturing fluids and also methane. That the companies have agreed not to drill in the New York City watersheds should tell us something. Taxes might work here. For instance, industrial water use should be taxed. There are many complaints about bottled water plants depleting local ground waters; and the huge volumes of water needed to cool power plants destroy rivers. Toxic chemicals like benzene should be taxed, for whatever use (all questionable bioaccumulating chemicals should be taxed). Such taxes force alternatives: cooling towers that use less water (90% less in some cases, for a small increase in the cost of the plant); nontoxic chemicals to extract gas. For the time being, if the gas can’t be extracted safely, it shouldn’t be. The product of bacteria working on ancient ocean sediments, it isn’t going away. There are alternative energy supplies, such as conservation (insulating houses, more efficient lights, pipelines motors), windmills or photo-voltaic panels. The public good represented by the long term habitability of the landscape is greater than that represented by the income from the gas. Of course this is precisely what capitalist fundamentalists, with their focus on the good produced by each person acting in his immediate self interest, would deny. They say that acting in one’s self interest makes the economy stronger and a stronger economy lets us deal with that polluted groundwater, if it turns out to be a problem. Does evil wear a smiling salesman’s face?


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Forty years ago the Danish geochemist Willi Dansgaard found evidence of long climate cycles and rapid climate change in the Greenland ice. By the early 1970s anyone who knew carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and was aware of the Keeling curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere suspected we were in trouble. It took another thirty years and several more ice cores to confirm Dansgaard’s results. Along the way, a rather good idea of the climate over the last 100,000 years was drawn out of ice cores, ocean sediments, tree rings, changing isotopes of oxygen in sea shells. With the present configuration of ocean currents and ice sheets, what happens to the Greenland ice sheet seems to be closely linked to global climate. Rapid warmings or coolings in climate terms are those that occur in three years or a decade rather than centuries and involve changes in temperature of several degrees (up to 15º Fahrenheit or 8.5º Centigrade during the Younger Dryas of 12,800 to 11,500 years ago). The more extreme of those that occurred during the last 90,000 years (the last ice age) seem to have been related to the periodic breakdown of the ice lobes from the ice sheet over Labrador that filled Hudson’s Bay. The earth is very slightly heated from below by the decay of radioactive elements at its core. Hudson’s Bay is shallow. As the ice ground into the bay from the northeast it froze to the rocks and mud of its bottom. But ice is an insulator, thicker ice a better insulator. As the ice thickened over the bay it kept in more and more of the earth’s heat, the heat eventually melted the bottom of the ice, which lost its hold on the mud and rocks of the bay. The whole ice sheet then began to thin and slide. Its seaward sides at the entrance of the bay broke up and sailed as armadas of icebergs across the North Atlantic. After the ice sheet had thinned sufficiently, it froze once again to the bay’s bottom and (since the climate was still, overall, cooling) began to build up once again. The immense release of ice and the thinning of the ice sheet itself, let the climate warm. The melting icebergs chilled the sea and eventually their fresh water, diluting the salty water of the north Atlantic, began to shut down the currents bringing warm tropical water north. The shutdown caused an abrupt cooling (among them, the Oldest, Older and Younger Dryas, though these occurred during a period of general warming, as the ice sheets of the last continental glaciation were breaking up). As the fresh water on the surface of the sea froze and tropical water no longer moved north, warm westerlies stopped blowing across the British Isles and northern Europe. The climate worldwide turned cold, windy and dry. Then as the flow of icebergs stopped and the ice sheet over Labrador rebuilt (its accumulating snows taking water from the north Atlantic) the cold ocean turned saltier, the sea ice was less extensive and the ocean circulation that draws tropical water north started once again. The climate warmed. Such fluctuations are recorded every 1500 years over the last 100,000 years in ice sheets and further back in ocean cores. The basic cause of the 1500 year oscillations are unknown but probably has to do with changing patterns of sea surface temperatures in the tropics. The behavior of ice sheets, such as the flow of icebergs from the sheet over Labrador (Heinrich Events) magnify them. In the last 10,000 years, with no glacial meltwaters to amplify them, the oscillations have been much muted. (The Little Ice Age was one.) Such abrupt fluctuations in temperature and rainfall would have made agriculture a bad (perhaps impossible) adaptation compared with (more mobile) hunting and gathering. Today a large meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet is poised to cool the (warming) climate on the same massive scale.

A tax on carbon would help. Of course a sufficiently powerful economy could organize itself to reverse the warming of the globe. Some proposals are not entirely nuts. (For instance, machines that filter carbon dioxide from the air and convert it, in a more or less energetically neutral way, to inert minerals: several million of them.) This job might be easier than filtering trillions of gallons of groundwater; or removing DDT from the bottom of Lake Michigan.


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How would people live in a new world? Eugene Odum said 40% of any ecosystem should be left alone. Is this enough? Large predators (wolves, jaguars, mountain lions, great horned owls, peregrine falcons, walrus, whales, cod, tuna) have large effects on their ecosystems. Wolves reduce the number of mid-level predators (coyotes, raccoons). Their removal reduces the predation pressure on many songbirds, especially the neotropical migrants, which come north to feed on the abundant insect life of the northern summer. These birds help control the insects that defoliate shrubs and trees, they also eat seeds and the invertebrates of the forest floor. The effects of their predation radiate down through the invertebrate and vegetative world. Similarly great horned owls and goshawks kill crows, another nest predator. (One reason crows pick well lighted roadsides and city parks, and starlings downtown buildings, for roosts, is to escape night hunting owls.) The smaller bird-eating accipiters and falcons eat jays, another devourer of songbird eggs and nestlings. Wolves and mountain lions eat deer. Deer, and other herbivores, influence forest succession by their browsing habits (favoring some species, ignoring others). Seed and seedling eating mice also influence forest succession and are eaten by weasels, foxes, coyotes, hawks and owls. Abundant deer and mice increase the incidence of Lyme disease. Changes in the abundance of large predators cascade through the ecosystem.

Large predators also eat people, though very rarely if they are hunted (and therefore probably not abundant enough to influence the ecosystem, though there is a continuum of influence here). Moose, white tailed deer and dogs also kill people. Mountain lions kill people occasionally, black bears and grizzlies now and then, wolves almost never. Many more people are killed by people, cars and lightning than mountain lions but I think it unlikely large predators will be let inhabit their former ranges in the United States. But who knows? Black bears moved into Las Vegas during a drought in Nevada a few decades ago and a large population now inhabits the city, growing larger (like urban raccoons) on abundant dumpster edibles than country bears and bearing more young. The population is held down by heavy predation by cars. Eurasian wolves, more used to people than North American ones, who move out when people number more than a few per square mile, live among the vineyards and olive groves of Tuscany. Eastern coyotes, a new species, part western coyote, part eastern timber wolf, have colonized the suburban northeast (one was seen in New York’s Central Park). They are doing well among the suburbs and farms, living on rabbits, mice, grasshoppers, cats and deer (mostly fawns). A focus on deer may turn them into a larger animal.

Of course people could perform the part of a large predator by hunting deer (where this isn’t done deer become a problem) and trapping (humanely) mid level predators for their fur (at a profit to themselves)

In formerly forested landscapes (much of humid temperate and tropical earth), large areas of the new forest would be edge. The better soils that once produced tall trees and great numbers of wild animals would be occupied by farms, while forestland would occupy the swamps, steeper hills, poorer soils. Edge environments are favored by hunters. Their berries and browse make them haunts of game (rabbits, grouse, deer) but because they are also haunts of coyotes, foxes, opossum, skunks, crows, jays and raccoons many nesting songbirds reproduce poorly. Edge environments tend to be sinks rather than sources of birdlife. Wide edges are created by frequently logging (or occasionally brush hogging) the border of a forest in a band 100-300 feet wide. The effects of the edge in terms of bird nest predation and a drier microclimate go 100 yards or more into the forest (some claim ten times that) so in a fragmented landscape, even if 40% of it is forest, much of it will be effectively edge. Thus fat clumps of forest are better than skinny ones. In the new world, skinny lines of forest following watercourses connect fat ones, with farms and towns among the woods. But skinny forests can be allowed to mature. Clumps of old evergreens make nesting habitat for predatory birds (cooper’s hawks, sharpshins, merlins, great horned owls) that control the nest predators. Tall deciduous trees hold nests of goshawks. Large coyotes will hunt some of the smaller predatory mammals. The forest will be different from the natural primary forest but modern forests have been manipulated by humans for thousands of years, north temperate forests since people and trees followed the ice north several thousand years ago. The point is to maintain the processes and wildlife essential for the forest’s health; and regard timber as one result of those processes.

A new landscape would also focus on streams. Wide borders of forest (100-300 feet wide), or grassland in the prairie and savannah, would follow streams, taking up some farmland, shading and cooling the water in summer, providing fallen trees to help the current dig pools, letting fertilizing spring and winter floods spread further, absorbing the nutrients running off farmland. Mature forests would cover the steep valleys of tributary brooks. Small streams in farmland would have a buffer of unmowed grassland to catch the soil and nutrients coming off the fields. Green swales would follow the drainage centers of large sloping fields. Aquifer recharge areas would be permanently vegetated. (They could be mowed or lightly grazed.) After 1000 years of dams and streamside cultivation many European streams may be unrestorable (at least culturally) but the memory of the wilderness might let many eastern and middle western American ones can regain their populations of migratory and cold water fish (shad, river herring, alewives, sturgeon, trout). This requires the restoration of river habitat, the removal of some dams, the provision of fish ladders around others, letting rivers flood and allowing patterns of river flow that favor fish.

In regions of good farmland in the American Middle West, 40% of the land will never be left to nature. (Over 90% of Illinois is farmed.) But 15-20% of the landscape in permanent natural vegetation, some of that in lightly grazed pasture, much of it too sloping to plow without the soil eroding anyway, would protect streams, catch the soil drifting off farmland, absorb farmland nutrients and turn them into trees, birds and grass, let runoff water become groundwater and slowly seep downhill into streams. One doesn’t have to restore all the original wetlands along rivers to restore fisheries but can choose the obvious ones: those useful in reducing flooding in populated areas downstream, those needing constant pumping to remain dry enough to farm. Replacing river transport with rail corridors, and thus eliminating locks, dams and much of the levee system on large rivers, would restore native fisheries, reduce nutrients flowing downstream into estuaries, where excess nitrogen is destroying these breeding habitats for marine fish, and eliminate most of the cost of maintaining the river. Given space, rivers maintain themselves.

Human settlements would be more compact, moved back from the riverbank and the shore. This allows rivers to flood, beaches to migrate, seas to rise. A third to a half of the continental shelves would be off limits to fishing, along with much of the open ocean, places where fish congregate to breed, the currents along which sea turtles migrate. Most bottom trawling, which destroys the life of the sea floor, and long drift nets, which catch everything, and which, when lost, continue to fish for decades, filling with fish bones, would be banned. So, probably, would be long lines, which also catch everything (fish, birds, turtles). The top marine predators (seals, whales, porpoises, bluefin tuna, rays, sharks) would be let recover. So would the forage fish on the bottom of the food chain, now fished industrially for meal and oil. More fishermen, in smaller boats, using traps, small nets, hook and line, would catch fewer, more valuable fish.

On land, factories would imitate ecosystems: the waste of one becoming the resources of another in an endless loop. Process water would be recycled, which lets paper mills locate in cities, with their tremendous resources of waste paper, greater than that of tropical forests. (Each sheet of paper reusable 9 times.) Dangerous industrial chemistries such as the chemistry of chlorine and its allies and the industrial use of poisonous metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead and mercury would disappear (or be much more controlled) and with them the accumulation of chlorinated hydrocarbons and metals in human fat (and with that, the growing incidences of mental instability and cancer). Populations would slowly fall, to a quarter of those today—this would take a century or two—and in 50 years those people would use 10% of the energy per capita we do today be comfortable. (So in 200 years total energy use would be 2.5% of today.)Farmers would farm so as to keep soil and nutrients on their fields, which then remain farmable indefinitely, and would think of their farms as part of the larger biological landscape.

The development of rational western society, of which modern capitalism, modern medicine and modern war, are part, has let human populations increase tremendously in the last 200 years (especially the last 50) and made us much more prosperous. For the last century we westerners have been cradled in the strong arms of endless electricity and oil. I have enjoyed it as much as anyone. But the result is that the real biological world is disappearing. We are also poking the climate beast with a sharp stick. Modern capitalism believes in endless growth, it discounts the future for the present, and uses up natural resources as fast as the market (encouraged by advertising) can absorb them. It is totally nuts. We need a capitalism that can deal with economic contraction, a shrinking population, and a natural world that is restorable to provide a constant and limited source of material and an unlimited sense of joy. A capitalism of contraction gets more from less. It would probably require a policy of national savings (to get through the period of a declining work force), taxes on materials rather than wages, long term investments that reduce yearly maintenance costs (efficient houses, cars, machinery; rivers that maintain themselves), a more compact and efficient organization of society (New Yorkers use a fraction of the energy of suburbanites), seeing the past, present and future as connected. Are such ideas antiwestern? They constitute the public good.