Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Comparing coal with grain and his doctrine of exhaustion with Malthus’s, Jevons argued that a coal crisis would be more devastating. The productivity of farmers’ fields could reach a plateau but they would nevertheless continue to yield a harvest. An exhausted mine is a different case altogether. Giving less coal but requiring more labour, it soon becomes unprofitable. At this point, the owner stops maintaining it, and the mine gets flooded or collapses; Jevons knew of such cases. In general, he predicted an imminent halt to economic growth. ‘We cannot indeed always be doubling the length of our railways, the magnitude of our ships, and bridges, and factories.’ 16

If coal runs out, what will replace it? Jevons runs through the alternatives and finds little comfort. He talks about wind power, the power of water and tides, and discusses peat; all these things have their good points, but they are unreliable, limited to specific places, and are no match for coal. He knew about oil and that it had the potential to outperform coal. All the same, for him oil was just a liquid form of coal. If coal runs out, there won’t be oil, thought Jevons. Perhaps people would learn to harvest the sun’s energy by as yet unknown means, or would obtain heat from completely new sources. But he was pessimistic on this point as welclass="underline" when the sun’s rays replaced coal, England would lose its competitive advantages.

Keynes

Unlike the French physiocrats, the British political economists – Smith, Malthus, Ricardo – were at work precisely in the era and the country of coal. But, even while using its heat and energy, they preferred to think of themselves as living in an organic, grain-focused society. It was Jevons who saved economics from its ‘artificial groove’ by addressing coal. Keynes wrote about Jevons with unusual warmth and saw him as an important predecessor. He started his memorial essay with the fact that Jevons was born in the year after Malthus’s death; Keynes delicately forbore from mentioning that he himself was born the year after Jevons’s death. 17 All three shared the feeling that the resources used by humankind are limited and close to exhaustion, and that the analysis of these resources, in relation to labour, is the very essence of economic science. In Keynes’s words, this ‘extraordinary continuity of feeling ’ was ‘profoundly in the English tradition of humane science’. 18

It was not only about feeling . A Cambridge professor whose practical experience started with the administration of Indian finances, Keynes saw that his career aligned with this ‘English tradition’. He took part in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when the victorious states met to determine the fate of Europe after the First World War. In his book about the economic consequences of the Versailles Treaty, Keynes predicted a Malthusian crisis on a European scale. At the end of the nineteenth century, continental Europe had lost its self-sufficiency in food production in the same way that England had lost it about a century earlier. The population had grown, and Europe, like England, was able to buy increasing amounts of agricultural produce in exchange for its industrial goods. Every decade, a unit of labour invested in industry increased its purchasing power in relation to foodstuffs; here Keynes was reproducing Cantillon’s old idea, which had been recently recovered by Jevons (Prebisch and Singer would in turn reproduce these ideas of Keynes). His American counterparts Richard T. Ely and Thorstein Veblen were close to Keynes in their critical approach to land, resources and progress. But the peaceful end to the nineteenth century, which Keynes called an economic Eldorado, engendered a new, post-utilitarian generation. Nothing was more foreign to Keynes than their formalised optimism. It was the Yale economist Irving Fisher who started this neo-Panglossian canon by formulating still another ‘equilibrium theory’. On 16 October 1929, Fisher wrote in the New York Times that stock prices had ‘reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.’ The stock market collapsed on 24 October – the Great Depression had arrived.