Nothing is as emblematic of human self-congratulation than when a leader of government or of business waxes retrospective about human ingenuity and innovation in the realm of technology. We have come so far and just imagine how much further we can go with the next innovation, and the one after that. For them, the past and the future are linked in a seamless upward and outward expansion of human understanding, awareness, and habitation. We have come so far in so little time; from horse and buggy to space travel, from toiling in potato fields to instantaneous global capital transfers. Certainly, it can be easy to get caught up in the dream of our capacity to understand the workings of nature, alter it to fit our needs, and to defeat it's unpleasant and undesirable aspects.
It is interesting how so little of the credit for humanity's recent surge in production, distribution, and disposal of goods and services goes to the fuel which gave the impetus for all these wonders, all of which were designed for use with particular energy sources. The sources may vary, but a transfer of sources to a different technology is not such an easy feat. Currently, there is a rush for the next automobile that seeks to achieve two things: It must run on something other than gasoline, and be able to replace 980 million cars on the roads now at an affordable price. This is not simple to do. It raises a seemingly minor but fundamental question: Was industrialization the result of human ingenuity or was it because the energy source (coal) was so good, so condensed, that already existent human ingenuity would eventually come up with a use for it? This is not a chicken-and-egg question. The first coal-powered machine was used to get more coal.
What followed the invention of the coal-powered water pump was the greatest expansion of economic activity and wealth accrual in human history. The usable, exploitable Earth grew exponentially and the complexity of industrial societies grew right along with it. Humans would eventually gain access to energy and mineral wealth deep in the Earth, build ever larger machines to extract and transport it, and create increasingly complex systems of trade and governance to manage all the transfers. From this, some would become very wealthy and live comparatively easy lives.
During the past 200 years, as the process of industrialization got underway, probably the greatest single aspect that changed for most people was the means by which they earn a living. The occupations most prevalent in Europe and America changed dramatically as many disappeared and were replaced by many other, more specialized, occupations. In 1800 America, for example, there were farmers, tanners, and spinners. Life was mostly lived in rural areas and the average person didn't travel more than a few miles from where they kept house. People migrated back then, and it took weeks to get from one part of the country to another. Most got their food from within a hundred miles of where they lived. Most of the population was illiterate or had a low level of literacy. It was, as we've come to see it now, a very simple and very slow way to live.
In 2009 we live fast-paced, complex lives. It may seem cliche to put it that way, but it is the physical truth. It is useful to see it in terms of a system that is growing, and as it grows, it uses more and more stuff to input in order to sustain itself and feed more growth. The feedstock of this system is energy. Concentrated, low-cost energy that is plentiful and that is what we found in fossil fuels. Before, in the world of farm animals and foot paths, of hay bales and wood stoves, we obtained our energy primarily from food. Food powered the muscles to do the work and at the end of the day, we had very little energy left over to do other things. With the advent of fossil fuels and the machines that run on them, we have much more energy to do the work. This is the net energy. We have found in fossil fuels extra energy to run society on. This extra energy enables us to leave the farm, to take up jobs like like lawyer, teacher, technician, machinist, middle manager, dog counselor and event planner. It enables us to add layers to society, to create new positions that augment productive activities but don't really produce any new energy themselves.
The most visible example of this is government. All federal, state, and municipal governments in the United States employ more people now than lived in America at the time of it's founding. These are not elected officials there to better represent their constituents, either. It is a behemoth bureaucracy that has grown to administer the functions of society. It would be a mistake to think the growth in the complexity of government is anything but a symptom of increasing complexity everywhere else in society. All systems are more complex than they ever have been. Corporations, technology, universities, trade, food, medicine, money, and anything you can think of to administer these things use more energy to support the functioning of them than ever before.
The entire field of economics uses only two laws; the Law of Supply and Demand and the Law of Diminishing Returns. It is the second law that makes itself known in any discussion of complex organizations. The basic idea is this: As an organization grows it becomes more complex. As it becomes more complex it requires more energy. Each increment of complexity will see initial gains in, say, efficiency, but each increment means there is another part, another layer which is permanently a part of it's structure. Therefore, this new, more complex organization will use more energy resources in order to maintain itself. Inevitably, another problem arises which will be solved with another layer of complexity, but with each new adaptation, the benefit from that adaptation is less than the one before. This is called the marginal return on investment. The margin is the gain and each gain diminishes as the complexity increases, ergo, diminishing return. Eventually, the return requires more energy than you gain from complexity and that constitutes the beginning of the end for that organization. You can see this in the need for companies to grow each year. It isn't simply a matter of getting more money for shareholders each year, but a company must do so in order to survive. In fact, this can be generalized to the economy as a whole, especially capitalist economies, for reasons too complicated to go into here.
The reason industrial societies have managed to continue against this law of economics is that there has always been more energy to spend on that complexity. One last point to ponder in all of this is the fate of societies generally. It might be useful to think of why empires collapse. Countless theories have been proposed as to why this happens, why no empire has withstood the test of centuries and millennia and have ultimately fallen apart. It is for this reason, this problem of maintaining the grand structure of it's administration that has caused them to finally fall, whether it be from invasion by another, like Rome, or a dissipation from within, like the Maya. The capacity for an empire to withstand shocks as it's surplus energy gets used up in the maintenance of it's own structure is reduced until it can no longer support societal integrity, and then it's curtains for that empire on the stage of history.
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