The Economy in Mind: A Thematic Analysis of Economic Reality as Deployed within the Discourse of the Environmental Countermovement

Abstract

This article applies thematic analysis to the discourse of the environmental countermovement, focusing primarily on the mutually referencing contributions of Julian Simon, Friedrich von Hayek, and Ronald Reagan. Utilizing a close reading of these texts, it aims to describe how the subscribers to this discourse picture the human relationship with the natural world, and how this in turn enables them to believe that the market can overcome environmental limits indefinitely. This analysis brings to the fore a belief apparently underlying their faith in unending growth: that humankind is able to progressively convert nature into economic reality, whose essence is the limitless quality of the human mind.

In 2018 the Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded jointly to William Nordhaus (“for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”) and Paul Romer (“for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis”). Taken together, they were judged to “have designed methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth.” Summarizing how their work intersected, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated: “Nature dictates the main constraints on economic growth and our knowledge determines how well we deal with these constraints.”¹ In practice, this award affirmed as economic orthodoxy the belief that growth can be indefinitely reconciled with environmental limits.

Among partisan defenders of the idea of indefinite economic growth, this award was typically championed as celebrating the “conceptual overthrow of old-fashioned limits-to-growth economics.”² In the United Kingdom a prominent illustration of this kind of commentary was given by the environmental consultant Michael Liebreich in an article titled “The Secret of Eternal Growth.” Its prominence was highlighted by the critical responses it incited, notably a high-profile rebuttal by the ecological economist Tim Jackson.³ In his article, Liebreich hailed Romer’s work as providing us with a vision of how “unlimited knowledge” will “drive endless improvements in human wellbeing and flourishing.” Ultimately, he concluded: “We should approach the task with optimism . . . because, as Ronald Reagan (displaying a more thorough understanding of thermodynamics and economics than the entire degrowth crowd) once said: ‘There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.’”⁴

The reception given to Romer’s award, and in particular this reference to the rhetoric of President Reagan, is instructive in terms of defining a problem that deserves analysis. First, it illustrates the enduring influence, going back decades, of an environmental countermovement that has campaigned against the environmentalist argument that there are physical limits to growth (hereafter referred to as the limits thesis).⁵ Second, it illustrates the character of this countermovement’s arguments as being profoundly shaped by hyperbole and fantasy—Reagan’s rhetoric, as a prominent example, being filled with references to dreams, imagination, and limitless power.

How can we make sense of this, as a cultural phenomenon? Environmental sociologists have traced much of the output of the countermovement to the material self-interest of polluting industries and wider big business.⁶ Yet, as noted by Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright—themselves two of the leading analysts of its political roots—the countermovement cannot simply be reduced to the economic interests of corporations. That is, above the financial interests of (and grants paid by) big polluters, there is a strong ideological surplus that draws in adherents at a mass scale.⁷ Furthermore, given that the limits thesis points ultimately to catastrophic scenarios of environmental breakdown in the absence of decisive action, it is hardly in the self-interest even of wealthy capital owners to wreck political attempts at environmental protection. The fantasies of various tech-bro billionaires that they might personally evade even planetary destruction are just that: fantasies.⁸

This attachment to a doctrine of endless growth must be understood, in the face of mounting evidence that supports environmentalists’ warnings of incipient breakdown, as objectively irrational.⁹ Making sense of such behavior requires a conception of social science that seeks to understand the subjective rationality of beliefs that might otherwise be viewed as contradicting their holders’ obvious material self-interest or practical explanation.¹⁰ Such interpretivist versions of social science ask: What is it about these beliefs that makes them meaningful to people?¹¹

In this article I aim to use an interpretivist form of discourse analysis in the spirit identified by Hajer: to allow “for a better understanding of controversies, not in terms of rational-analytical argumentation but in terms of the argumentative rationality that people bring to a situation.” Combining this with reflexive thematic analysis, I aim to discern an underlying worldview implied in the discourse of the countermovement.¹² I seek an answer to the question “What must one believe the world looks like in order to passionately argue that economic activity can be expanded forever?”

Thematic Discourse Analysis of Countermovement Texts

The research method I am employing in this article is a form of discourse analysis. I am drawing here on the work of John Dryzek, whose Politics of the Earth is one of the central texts in the analysis of environmental discourse.¹³ Dryzek provides me with my concept of discourse: a discourse is “a shared way of apprehending the world. Embedded in language, it enables those who subscribe to it to interpret bits of information and put them together into coherent stories or accounts.”¹⁴ In this sense it can be understood as a way of reproducing collective meanings. This implies that by examining a discourse we can hope to understand something about the way in which a particular collective perceives the world.

Importantly for my purposes, Dryzek observes that “environmental discourse is broader than environmentalism” and “even extends to those hostile to environmentalism.”¹⁵ This leads him to include the discourse of the environmental countermovement—which he labels “Prometheanism”—within his analysis of environmental debate. Dryzek’s analysis is particularly suggestive in the way it links explicit antienvironmental opinion with a mainstream of pro-growth economics that precedes and subsequently runs alongside it. For Dryzek, both “a capitalist economy geared to perpetual economic growth” and a wider confidence in material progress have deep historical roots.¹⁶ However, it was only in response to the burgeoning environmental movement at the turn of the 1970s that a discourse emerged to defend these tenets in an explicit form, stressing the ability of growth-oriented markets to overcome environmental limits. For Dryzek, then, the discourse of the environmental countermovement reveals in explicit form beliefs that are held more implicitly by a wider mainstream of orthodox, pro-growth economists.

This insight enlarges the explanatory scope of the analysis of countermovement discourse. It connects with and reinforces the critiques that ecological economists have made of mainstream economists for assuming away environmental limits, without becoming associated with the environmental countermovement themselves.¹⁷ Such critiques are emblematically represented by the widely reproduced quip attributed to the heterodox economist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an [orthodox] economist.”¹⁸ More substantially, the arguments deployed within these critiques are well represented by a high-profile set of contributions and exchanges between the orthodox economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz and their ecological economist critics, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly.¹⁹ By leading a counterattack on environmentalism, Dryzek suggests, the countermovement takes the underlying assumptions of endless growth that are central to orthodox economics and, by making them explicit, exposes their absurdity. While the focus of my analysis is firmly on the discourse of the hardcore countermovement, my claim, following Dryzek, is that this will shed light on an attachment to the idea of indefinite growth that is widely held within the political and economic mainstream of contemporary society.

Selection of Texts

Celebrated as the Doom-slayer after winning a bet with the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich (that the price of a basket of metals would decline rather than rise over ten years, supposedly demonstrating that natural resources were becoming more abundant), Julian Simon’s polemical arguments in favor of the limitless potential for growth have been profoundly influential.²⁰ An indication of his centrality within the discourse of the countermovement is given by the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award, which is handed out to prominent opponents of the limits thesis by a think tank linked to the hobbling of environmental regulation in the administrations of both George W. Bush and Donald Trump.²¹ Simon’s direct influence on the Reagan administration is well-known.²² Indirectly he was also an influence on Reagan, thanks to the intellectual lead Simon provided to other pro-growth polemicists of the 1980s—not least the economist Warren T. Brookes.²³ Simon, in turn, drew on—and influenced—a range of economists whose primary focus lay outside environmental debate. Chief among these was Friedrich von Hayek,²⁴ who took the unprecedented (for him) step of sending Simon a fan letter; Simon was evidently so proud to receive such fan mail from “as great an economist as has lived in the 20th Century” that he published it in an appendix to one of his books.²⁵

I interrogated Simon’s book The Ultimate Resource 2 using thematic analysis (TA).²⁶ Following Braun and Clarke, my approach to TA is reflexive, which they define as a nonpositivist, qualitative approach to making sense of textual material.²⁷ In practice this meant, first, paying attention to those passages where Simon was not just criticizing the limits thesis but seeking to justify his rejection of it, coding these selections as I went by paraphrasing what the author appeared to be arguing; second, reviewing my initial codings and consolidating them as I spotted similarities among them; and, finally, organizing these codings according to an emerging theoretical interpretation that described five main themes in the arguments under analysis, each building on the last. In this respect, I was seeking to exemplify “an intensive and organic coding process designed to parse out different facets of data meaning, and to help the researcher move beyond the most obvious or superficial meanings in the data.”²⁸

I then tested and expanded this theoretical framework, and sought additional textual illustrations, by using it as a guide in reading texts from a further group of countermovement speakers. Noting their mutually reinforcing influence of and by Simon, I initially expanded my selection to encompass texts by Reagan (searching his archive of presidential speeches for references to terms such as limits, environment, and growth) and Hayek (a search of secondary sources revealed that his most extensive treatment of environmental economics is in his Constitution of Liberty).²⁹ I further expanded my selection with a small number of texts representative of the environmental countermovement, selected because of their references to or work with Simon or Hayek: these were written by the economists Wilfred Beckerman (writing with Joanna Pasek) and Milton Friedman; the polemicists Matt Ridley, and Huber and Mills; and the left-wing environmental skeptic Leigh Phillips.³⁰ These I chose as a representative selection of authors on the basis of my own and others’ scholarly familiarity with this literature.³¹

Through this process I refined my five analytical categories as follows:

1. Economic consumption and production are envisaged in terms of the limitless mental qualities of desire and imagination.

2. The offspring of the marriage of desire and imagination is ingenuity, a practical force that satisfies desire by turning imagination into reality, and, though working on the physical world, is itself nonphysical, hence unbounded.

3. Viewed through the prism of entrepreneurial ingenuity, the natural world is seen as something malleable to the as-yet-undecided plans taken by future entrepreneurs—hence the physical is conceived of in terms of the mental.

4. Entrepreneurial ingenuity requires the market to connect ingenious minds together via price signals, in turn replacing physical quantities of natural resources with abstract economic values.

5. The successful application of ingenuity adds up to a law of human progress. Since this will dissolve all barriers to the realization of our desires over time, this lends any such barriers in the present the ghostly form of impermanence.

I suggest that these individual beliefs imply the overarching belief that the world is progressively becoming transformed by entrepreneurial ingenuity, such that the physical world is being colonized by human will; matter is being converted into mind; and reality itself is becoming economic reality.

Five Aspects of Economic Reality

Without Limits: The Mental Qualities of Desire and Imagination

Belief in the insatiability of human desires—at least as experienced by the inhabitants of modern society—has been a central theme of orthodox economics stretching back at least as far as the marginal revolution of the late nineteenth century.³² Among those who have accepted this characterization of human experience yet retain a moral or ontological sense that satisfying limitless desire is an impossibility, this has lent the human condition a tragic aspect—perhaps most famously, Émile Durkheim writing about “the malady of infinite aspirations.”³³ A more prevalent assumption within mainstream economics is that in revealing this innate insatiability of wants, modern society found the key to economic growth.³⁴

The countermovement regularly affirms belief in the insatiability of human desires. One typically encounters statements such as “We have boundless ambition, and a limitless list of whims to gratify”³⁵ and “We will never stop wanting more . . . because we are built to want more of these things, an unlimited more.”³⁶ For Julian Simon it is virtually a law of progress that “population growth and increase of income expand demand” and that “there is no convincing economic reason why these trends . . . should not continue indefinitely.”³⁷ Influenced by Simon, in his 1982 book The Economy in Mind, Warren T. Brookes redeploys an assertion (made decades earlier by Hayek in defense of capitalism against socialism) to defend growth against environmentalism: “Wherever the barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever-widening ranges of desires.”³⁸

Within the context of debate on the limits thesis, such statements are made as a defiant ownership by the countermovement of the critique made against them. Where environmentalists argue that a society driven by limitless wants is unsustainable, the countermovement argues that it is precisely this limitless quality of desire that will spur on the necessary efforts to realize it.³⁹ The point to be observed here is that it is the quality of limitlessness, ascribed to human desire, that is being imaginatively transferred across to a concept of growth as that which can continually provision it.

In similar terms one may observe numerous references in this discourse to dreams and imagination as being the wellspring of our collective abilities to match our insatiable desires: here, too, the limitless quality of the mental is being projected onto the physical. Ronald Reagan, in particular, specialized in such language. Reagan chose to include in his second inaugural address—underlining the extent to which this was central to his political vision, and through his rhetoric seeking to define a whole nation by it—the following remarks: “There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.”⁴⁰ On another occasion (the one referenced by Liebreich in “The Secret of Eternal Growth”) he said: “It’s not what’s inside the Earth that counts, but what’s inside your minds and hearts, because that’s the stuff that dreams are made of, and America’s future is in your dreams. Make them come true.”⁴¹ In other speeches he described “the economy of the future . . . forming right now in the minds and imaginations of entrepreneurs.” Referencing Brookes, he told an audience: “We’re rapidly moving from the economy of the Industrial Revolution—an economy feeding on and tied to the Earth’s physical resources—to, as one economist titled his book, The Economy in Mind, in which human imagination and the freedom to create are the most precious natural resources.” Indeed, “in this new economy mind replaces matter, human invention makes physical resources obsolete. . . . Rather than being imprisoned in a world of shrinking natural resources, we’re transcending them, moving to a new era of seemingly limitless horizons” (emphasis added).⁴²

Ingenuity: The Application of Imagination to Satisfy Desire

Ingenuity is a key concept within this literature, being regarded as a form of applied imagination: it is via ingenuity that the limitlessness of the mental is understood to enter and transform the physical world, in the process allowing us to create as many or more resources than we use up. Julian Simon is a crucial figure in this regard, given the widely cited nature of his arguments within the countermovement. For him, the power of ingenuity means that we need not pay mind to natural resources, for the “ultimate resource is people.”⁴³ As a result, Simon argues that, far from being concerned about overpopulation, we should understand that the more people there are, the better:

Simon’s argument that, thanks to human ingenuity, “people are not a drain on the resources of the planet”⁴⁵ has been highly influential in debates on overpopulation.⁴⁶ It has also had a large impact on arguments on the finitude of natural resources. The crucial argument here is twofold. First, it holds that ingenuity, as a mental activity, is not subject to the limits that apply to the physical world. Second, it argues from this that in its application to the physical, ingenuity serves to expand those limits. Referencing Simon, Brookes affirmed that “the real energy of the universe is mental and, therefore, infinite.”⁴⁷ Following Simon’s death in 1998, a Wall Street Journal article summed up his legacy as instilling the awareness that “supplies of natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource.”⁴⁸ The right-wing economist Tim Worstall endorses this position: “Julian Simon, I agree with his basic thesis, obviously enough. . . . Our bottom line here is that the physical world is not the defining limit upon economic growth: human ingenuity is.”⁴⁹ Nor are such approving acknowledgments of Simon’s influence restricted to conservative opinion or hardcore antienvironmentalists. Representing an ecomodernist sensibility (i.e., accepting climate science and an important role for public policy intervention, while endorsing growth-oriented private enterprise), Ramez Naam is clear that “Simon’s core insight is as profound and important now as it was during his life. Human minds are, indeed, the source of all wealth.”⁵⁰ From a socialist standpoint, meanwhile, Leigh Phillips writes: “We, uniquely in nature, have an infinite capacity for ingenuity, what Julian Simon, the libertarian economist . . . called the ultimate resource.”⁵¹ More widely, Simon’s argument has become a commonplace among those who argue against the limits thesis, such that he does not need to be namechecked.⁵² The humorist P. J. O’Rourke reflected the penetration of these ideas into general conversation in commenting that “the real source of energy is human intellect. It’s infinitely renewable. It produces no emissions except a puff of CO₂ when smart people say, ‘Aha!’”⁵³

The Indeterminate World: Seeing the Physical through the Prism of Entrepreneurial Minds

Accompanying his celebration of ingenuity, Simon tends to identify physical resources with the mental images we have of them, as we conjecture about the potential uses we might put them to; in this way the ethereal, inexhaustible qualities of mental objects leak out into a perception of the physical world. Simon writes about viewing “the resource system as being as unlimited as the number of thoughts a person might have,” simultaneously linking a concept of nature with the idea of the limitless ingenuity that would unlock its secrets, and with the weightless quality of that mental activity itself.⁵⁴

In another passage, Simon goes into a deeper meditation about this quality of mind and its relationship to the physical world, likening natural resources to “the thoughts in your head, the strength of your wish to go to Turkey, your dog’s love for you, the number of points in a one-inch line.”⁵⁵ Simon’s argument is that all of nature is as unquantifiable as such concepts and emotions. Thus “the logical conclusion: Natural resources are not finite.”⁵⁶

This argument can be seen to depend on viewing the world through the prism of entrepreneurial ingenuity. This introduces multiple sources of indeterminacy into an understanding of physical resources. For example, ingenuity is itself seen as a creative force whose results cannot be foretold in advance. Equally, entrepreneurs may choose between different plans for the same resources before using them in production, while multiple entrepreneurs may compete to realize rival plans for the same resources. Finally, the application of ingenuity will result in future discoveries of new resources, and new ways to use them more efficiently. In this way, the weightless indeterminacy of thought is projected onto the natural world, without any countervailing sense of the physical exerting any resistance to being manipulated according to our wishes.

A recent celebration of Simon’s arguments, published by the neoliberal think tank the Cato Institute, provides a revealing analogy:

Nature is hereby reconceived as being as immaterial as music.

On the left, Simon’s reasoning has also been influential among Promethean socialists. Following Simon’s lead, Phillips argues that “counter-intuitively, you can actually have infinite growth on a finite planet”—on the basis that an “imaginary ball” is “infinitely divisible.”⁵⁸ Of course, an imaginary object remains just that; when the imaginary is mistaken for the real, the physical is being treated as having the same ontological status as the idea of it.

The Market: A Collective Entrepreneurial Intelligence, Networked via the Price Mechanism

Within this conception, whereby the physical is rendered immaterial via the speculation of entrepreneurs, a vital part is played by the idea of the market.⁵⁹ Following Hayek, who had done much to promote the idea of the market as “an information processor more powerful than any human brain,” the speakers of the countermovement routinely idolize the market as the vital medium connecting entrepreneurial invention and the natural world.⁶⁰ Typically, the market is portrayed as the institution that trains the force of ingenuity, such that the more the market comes to dominate society, the more mind comes to dominate matter. As the market becomes socially dominant, ingenuity is increasingly spoken of as a kind of agent in its own right, independent of the limited, mortal individuals whose brains are its initial substrate. As Ridley puts it, “It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine, and it solves its problems by changing its ways. It does so through invention driven often by the market.”⁶¹ Writing in the slipstream of Hayek and Simon, Postrel is clear that individual minds are limited and error-prone but that collectively, thanks to the continuous trial-and-error contests of the market, humankind will enjoy “an infinite series” of progressive advances.⁶² In this way, countermovement speakers can criticize the use of state regulation to protect the environment as the necessarily limited, intentional product of individual minds.

One role outlined for the market is to encourage people to become entrepreneurs in the first place. The presence of a market facilitates the economic incentive that trains an individual’s ingenuity toward working on those problems that are most highly valued by society: “Freedom and incentives unleash the drive and entrepreneurial genius that are the core of human progress,” as Reagan put it.⁶³ Or, as Simon clarifies, “the ultimate resource” is not just people but “the human imagination in a free society.”⁶⁴

Another vital role the market is seen as playing lies in its networking of economic actors via the price mechanism: in true Hayekian terms, countermovement literature views the price mechanism as bestowing on the market a near-omniscient status. More than that, in keeping with this literature’s conception of mind overcoming material limits, the market is viewed in near-omnipotent terms, as if its knowledge of natural resources, as revealed via prices, was capable of overriding the physical reality of biomes and mineral reserves. Crucial to this thinking is the assumption that the scarcity of a given resource would provide such a strong price signal that not only would consumers switch to alternatives but the incentivized ingenuity of entrepreneurs would also inevitably be successful in finding new reserves or developing alternatives.

Milton Friedman articulates this understanding clearly when he explains, “Suppose oil became scarce: the price would go up, and people would start using other energy sources.” On this basis he is able to declare, without qualification, that “in a proper price system the market can take of the problem [of exhausting finite resources].”⁶⁵ Such remarks reflect a typical view according to which, in a market system, physical stocks of a natural resource are replaced by their immaterial price: “Non-renewable resources supplies are expanding or contracting depending upon what is happening to relative prices. If prices are falling, resources are becoming more plentiful; if prices are rising, resources are becoming less plentiful.”⁶⁶ Thus, “the amount of oil left, the food-growing capacity of the world’s farmland, even the regenerative capacity of the biosphere—these are not fixed numbers; they are dynamic variables.”⁶⁷ The market is thus conceived as though working through action at a distance to change the basis of physical reality on a moment-to-moment basis.

A Vision of Omnipotence: Ingenuity and a Law of Human Progress

Since the market is seen as the institution that enables society to harness the power of ingenuity, a society that is dominated by the market is in turn understood as being reliably shaped by ingenuity. It is this that facilitates the enormous confidence within the countermovement that we will be able to brush aside every problem raised by environmentalists. It is common to find such absolutist language as the assertions (emphases added) that warnings of impending resource shortages are “inevitably contradicted by dynamic developments [i.e., the market]”⁶⁸ or that “we will never run out of anything at all. Anything.”⁶⁹

This absolute confidence that limits to growth will always be overcome reflects a widespread belief within countermovement discourse that market-driven ingenuity translates into a historical law of progress. In effect, an observation of economic growth since the industrial revolution is first hypostasized into a law of history and thereby assumed to hold for the foreseeable future; it is then projected forward into a speculative consideration of the far future, by which time, through a simple additive process, it is assumed our technological capacities will have grown to near-infinite abilities to translate will into reality; before this impression of near-infinite power is projected backward again into the present, and onto the agency—market-driven ingenuity—held to be responsible for the historical progress witnessed to date. Reveries such as the following are commonplace:

Such speculations are readily translated into Promethean socialist terms (i.e., focusing on technological progress outside the market): “Imagine what wonders a ten-million-year-old scientific civilization will have achieved! To call for a steady-state economy, to oppose growth, is to foreclose all the rest of the spectacular deeds that would otherwise lie in humanity’s future.”⁷¹

Julian Simon provides an explicit version of such laws of progress: first is a “Grand Theory” that growth leads to resource scarcity, which leads to price increases, which leads “inventors and business-people to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages,” which finally leaves us “better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen.”⁷² This is supported by a further explanatory theory, which suggests that “humankind has evolved culturally (and perhaps also genetically) in such a manner that our patterns of behavior . . . predispose us to deal successfully with resource scarcity.”⁷³ Finally, he presents an explicit theory of historical development: “Humans on average build a bit more than they destroy, and create a bit more than they use up. This process is, as the physicists say, an ‘invariancy’ applying to all metals, all fuels, all foods, and all other measures of human welfare, in almost all countries at almost all times; it can be thought of as a theory of economic history.”⁷⁴

Having faith in this theory of history, Simon believes there is “stronger reason than ever to believe that these progressive trends will continue indefinitely.” Thus “there is no meaningful physical limit—even the commonly mentioned weight of the earth—to our capacity to keep growing forever.” Even the destruction of the earth need not impose final limits to growth: the sun “will last perhaps seven billion years. And the chances would seem excellent that during that span of time humans will be in touch with other solar systems, or will find ways to convert the matter on other planets into the energy we need to continue longer.” Given that “we’ve got seven billion years to discover solutions[,] . . . it’s reasonable to expect the supply of energy to continue becoming more available and less scarce, forever.”⁷⁵

What this theory of historical development gives rise to is an outlook that views the future as being at once utterly deterministic and radically unforeseeable. What is determined is that mind will progressively conquer physical reality. It is also this that makes the future unknowable (meaning environmentalists’ dire predictions of doom under business as usual must necessarily be false): the more that reality does not present itself to us as an objective force with its own laws and logic, and the more it is instead shaped by mental invention, the less predictable it becomes. Supposedly eternal verities—such as “What goes up must come down,” the commonsense analog to the physics of entropy—are redescribed by this mentality as contingent truths, subject, like all things in the stream of progress, to obsolescence.

Turning Economic Reality into Reality

An illuminating exchange takes place in a series of interviews with economists on the environment carried out by Carla Ravaioli. Milton Friedman begins by conceding that while oil may be limited physically, “economically there is more oil today than there was a hundred years ago.” Ravaioli objects, “Of course, the discovery of new oil wells has given the illusion of unlimited oil,” to which Friedman retorts: “Why an illusion? . . . Excuse me, it’s not limited from an economic point of view.”⁷⁶

Such language as used by Friedman may easily be overlooked as a mere figure of speech, but the preceding analysis should allow us to see how sincerely it is treated by those who defend the idea of indefinite growth. The five iterations of ideational analysis explored above together point to a coherent ontological theory, by which another dimension of reality is posited. Beyond the mental and physical, a dimension of economic reality is imagined, regarded as combining them both. It is the physical world as subject to (in the process of being transformed by) the mental, or, rather, the collective mind of the market.

These insights into the idea of economic reality come into their own in helping us to make sense of the practical philosophy of countermovement speakers, by which they advocate a defiantly reckless policy of accelerating the unsustainable consumption of resources. What we encounter repeatedly is an all-or-nothing mentality: only by fully committing society to the market will we bring on the resource crises that we need to elicit an ingenious response, in the process maintaining the dynamic promise of progress. This mentality also explains the note of jeopardy the countermovement frequently sounds, despite its optimism regarding our ability to overcome all limits. As Brookes recognizes, our success depends on “the triumph of the metaphysical over the physical, of attitudes over appearances,” while our “only impediment to this is a fearful . . . lack of faith in our ability as free individuals and institutions to generate whatever we need.”⁷⁷ Attitude is all-important; we allow environmentalists to talk down our limitless faith in the market at our peril.

Hayek provides an early and formative contribution to this mentality in his argument against conservationists’ efforts to safeguard mineral reserves or ecosystems: “The existence of a particular natural resource merely means that, while it lasts, its temporary contribution to our income will help us to create new ones which will similarly assist us in the future.” In making this argument, Hayek was remarkably candid about the extent to which this belief—that, by a kind of reverse Say’s Law, consumption always makes its own supplies of natural resources—depends on a leap of faith.⁷⁸

We might view such practical philosophy (i.e., the positive advocacy of unsustainable consumption) as being enabled by the idea of economic reality. But we may also go further: such arguments make sense only as an attempt to create this new reality, to convert the physical world to economic reality via an effort to overawe the rational objections of other men and women. The very irrationality of this course of action is precisely what calls for such extreme calls to faith.

Such a diagnosis might perhaps allow us at least to understand an element of subjective rationality at the heart of an argument that may otherwise appear willfully and bafflingly destructive. Objectively it makes no sense: it is irrational and destructive. For those who advance it, it does make sense—but only accompanied by the belief in a naive and fanciful metaphysics of idealism, in which the material world is increasingly made subject to (and any resistance to our will dissolved by) the mental: matter turned into mind. Those who like to present themselves as hard-headed economic realists, in opposition to those highfalutin environmentalist ideologues, stand revealed as fanatical in their fantasy.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their detailed and constructive engagement. I presented a version of this article to the 2022 UK Political Studies Association annual conference (Environmental Politics specialist group conference) and received valuable feedback from several participants. I am grateful to Will Davies, Ian Christie, and Alberto Toscano for their comments on an earlier draft. Finally, I am grateful to the UK Economic and Social Research Council for funding my doctoral research, as some of the research for this article was carried out during that time.

Notes

References