More From Less

By Wayne Brown
More From Less
If you are desperate for good news, this book may be a good read for you.  It's a book that "gets you thinking".

The most eye-catching conclusion is that developed economies are using less and less total energy and material. This flies in the face of common assumptions, such as the idea that increasing the population will eventually "eat up" all of Earth's resources.

That's quite interesting in itself, but perhaps more important is McAfee's theory as to why this happens in advanced economies and why it doesn't in "developing" nations.

He talks about the four horsemen of optimism:
  • Technology
  • Capitalism
  • Public Awareness
  • Effective Government
In his telling, these factors work together to produce increasing efficiencies in society. For example, capitalism forces companies to compete over the resource "inputs" they need, driving down the cost and absolute amount of resources used.

I personally find his other two "horsemen" more interesting, especially "effective" government. Looking around the world, it's easy to see that many governments are "ineffective" for many reasons, with the result that resource usage is also inefficient. For example, many governments are so caught up in kleptocracy, corruption, and suppression of dissent that they barely pay attention to their real economy. In other cases, such as India, we see things slipping out of control due to what appears to be a general inability of the government to come to grips with the nation's problems for whatever reason. I like the way this takes the spotlight away from such canards as "democracy", which can mean almost anything. 

The "Public Awareness" category is also interesting. It seems that politicians of all stripes fight against public awareness. Even in liberal democracies like Canada, politicians obsessively avoid real issues. For example, the carbon "tax" is a big issue, not climate change. At the other end of the scale, dissidents are simply locked up or murdered. The question is, how can we expect governments to be "effective" if they are not under public pressure to solve real problems? Oddly, it seems that the government of China is relatively effective even though it ruthlessly suppresses dissent and anything like a public discourse about anything.

What I get from the book is the idea that an "effective" government deals with two things: pressure from an informed public and objective knowledge of real problems and solutions to them. For example, an "effective" government should deal with climate change even if the public doesn't care or know about the issue. In fact, this leads us to see that one role of government is to educate the public about real issues and perhaps lead them to accept sacrifices to deal with challenges. 

Overall, McAfee gets you thinking about big issues in new ways, which makes the book worth reading.

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