“Perhaps, therefore, the era of cheap food is coming to an end.” That’s what Prof Tim Benton, Director of the Environment and Society Programme at international affairs think tank Chatham House, said. You’ve already guessed as much, I suspect, watching the eye-popping way prices for your daily groceries have risen.
But it’s not happening for the reason you’re told. The pundits blame it on the war in Ukraine. They’re wrong. That has an effect, but it’s a contributor, not a fundamental cause. “While heatwaves struck in Europe, climate events have impacted global production around the world this year. In Southern China, heavy summer rains and floods disrupted rice, fruit and vegetable production. Drought impacted winter wheat yields in the US and corn and soy bean crops in Argentina. All this disruption in the first half of the year does not bode well for what is to come next.”
This isn’t really “inflation” in the classical sense of the term. See a “wage-price spiral”? Nope. Most people are struggling to make ends meet. Wages, hardly keeping pace with prices. This is better understood as “exflation.” Prices rising into oblivion, now, because extinction is making our basic systems fail, and the planet can’t supply what we’re used to taking for granted, from crops to water to livestock to energy, so easily anymore. Welcome to the age of exflation.
Our economy is changing. We are now at the end of one chapter in economic history. And entering another. One that we’re profoundly unused to. An age where supply can’t keep pace with demand anymore, because, well, a dying planet is one unable to supply the civilization that lives on it at the level it was accusomted to BE: Before Extinction.
The Age of Cheap Stuff, my friends, is coming to a swift and final end. But are we ready?
It’s not just food. It’s everything. From electronics to clothes to shoes. Prices are skyrocketing across the board. The reason for all of this is the same: extinction. The planet cannot supply basic inputs and raw materials anymore at the same level, the one we’re used to. The result is a shockfront — a huge series of shockwaves, echoing across the economy.
Think about the economy that we’re used to. In fact, think about the history of economics, period. It has four chapters. First, there was the Stone Age, where people lived on what they could hunt and forage. Then came the discovery of agriculture. For the first time, human beings had a surplus. That meant that some people — lucky ones — could begin devoting their lives to something other than simply subsistence. Art, science, literature, and democracy were all born. Civilization itself had begun.
That chapter — agricultural civilization — lasted several millennia. It culminated in the colonization of much of the world, which supplied a handful of nations valuable commodities, like spices, then worth more than gold, which is how those nations became wealthy.
And then came the industrial revolution. Suddenly, the economy underwent the greatest supply side shock in history. It was able to produce things at a level never before even really conceived of. Vast machines chugged away — first powered by water, then steam, then electricity — and manufacturing was born. Now everyone could have a broom, some clothes, a chair — and “work” shifted from agriculture to factory labour.
This is where we were. We grew up — all of us — in the twilight of the industrial revolution’s economy. Pundits called it an “information economy,” but really, information’s role was to coordinate what had by now become vast, titanic chains of supply stretching around the globe. A broom? It used to be something made in a local factory, of wood and hay. Now? It was made of plastic in China, and shipped, in huge containers, around the globe. And in China, it was made of…oil, which is where plastics come from. Information’s role? You bought it on Amazon. Coordination. But the economy? It was still that of the industrial revolution, just turbocharged by the internet, where you could now buy parts of this corncucopia with the swipe of an iPhone.
Now that economy is coming to a swift and final end. What is happening is like the industrial revolution, but in reverse. The globe is running short. Of basic materials and inputs. Cotton harvests are failing — up go the prices of clothes, and things like, for example, tampons. That’s one example, but many, many more abound. From mustard to coffee to cocoa to metals and beyond.
Why? The heat. The heat is beginning to “deindustrialize” our economies, whether we like it or now. It’s killing heat. Let’s think of a sector of the economy that represents the intersection of two great periods of economic history — agriculture and industrialization, or the industrialization of agriculture. “The cost of livestock farming also rises exponentially in the heat. Moran adds, “cattle don’t like heat so you’ve got to put them indoors to control their temperature. Then you’re forced to keep them cool with energy and, depending on where you live, energy prices are skyrocketing… Heat-induced stress can also change how animals behave, causing chickens to lay fewer eggs and dairy cows to produce less milk. “
That’s what extinction is. Heat literally alters the “yield” that we can obtain from animals — abusing them in industrialized systems of factory farming to begin with. It makes all of that less possible every day, month, year. Cows produce less milk. Chickens lay fewer eggs. Think about that for a second. Now think of your grocery prices. See the link?
This is extinction. This is the Extinction Economy now. The chapter of economic history that was about the industrial revolution is now closing. What did the industrial revolution really do, economically speaking? It created a huge, huge supply shock: a positive one. In the same way that agriculture created a surplus for the first time, so that civilization become possible, people devoting their lives to art, science, literature, democracy, instead of just subsistence hunting and gathering or even farming, so too the industrial revolution created a surplus, but on a scale that was even bigger than that. A surplus so vast people before it couldn’t have dreamt of it.
Before the industrial revolution, things used to be expensive. That is because most if not all of them had to be made by hand, and the inputs for them weren’t cheap. Simple things: chairs, clothes, shoes. Even simpler things. Food. Or “energy” itself — which was so expensive that if you wanted a “fan,” you’d have to be rich enough to afford a person to wave one around. Things were expensive. What things? Everything. That is why people stayed peasants and serfs — even after the dawn of civilization — for so very long. Societies were divided up into them, and “lords” or “nobles,” meaning people who had a right to the surplus created by the serfs. That left the serfs unable to afford much of anything, which is why even despite agriculture, living standards never rose very much, at least by modern standards.
The industrial revolution came along and changed all that. It made everything cheap. And as things became cheap, people shifted from being serfs and peasants to a new class — factory workers. Marx called them the “proletariat,” and in the West, we simply adopted the terms “working class” and “middle class” to describe them, dividing them up into manual and administrative labour, effectively. The economy chugged along like this for centuries, what Polanyi described as Great Transformation taking place — feudal societies becoming “market societies,” where everything, perhaps too much, was for sale, like even people’s dignity, politics, truth itself.
The industrial revolution in this way created modern democracy as we think of it. It freed people from the shackles of serfdom — and let them aspire to become “citizens” in the modern sense: participants in the process of democracy. No industrial revolution, no working or middle class slowly wresting the right to vote away from the landed gentry, transforming their newfound economic power into social and then political clout.
But the industrial revolution did something else, too. That we’re only now reckoning with. It made things not just cheap, but too cheap. For centuries, economies had simply ignored the “externalities” of industrialization — what economists call hidden costs. Of course, for the poor, those costs were never very hidden. They’re the ones who had to live in polluted neighborhoods, next to dirty rivers, and so forth. But by and large, economics was now a field, a domain of power, a way of scholarship unto itself — and to it, these hidden costs, of pollution, blight, wreckage, of scarring the earth and chopping down its forests and drowning its oceans in plastic…they weren’t worth paying attention to. Whatever their scale, the industrial revolution had unleashed plenty on one much, much bigger.
What’s happening now is that the hidden costs of industrialization are coming back to haunt us. And we’re discovering that far from being small, they’re as big as it gets. They’re existential. Not even for our societies, or our democracies, but even bigger than that. Industrialization relied on fossil fuels, which heated the planet, and now — centuries later, in 2022, the planet is burning. Fires stretch from Canada to Europe to China. The killing heat has arrived. It’s killing, quite literally, life on the planet. The crops we depend on. The animals we…consume.
The great externality of the industrial revolution, it turns out, was Extinction. Just the sixth one in deep history, in hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. We’ve only been here for 300,000. Will we make it out of this extinction? The one we created, with the double-edged sword of economic revolution?
And damnably, making the problem worse is the fact that our civilization even now can’t break its addiction. Emissions are at their highest ever, despite all our efforts to slow, stop, reduce them. Why is that? It’s because our civilization depends on dirty fuel at a level most people still don’t grasp at all. It’s not just the stuff we put in our cars, or that makes our power stations go, and though we’ve begun to reduce that, it’s not enough, and never will be. We can’t make any of the following things without fossil fuels. Glass and steel, meaning livestock. Fertilizer, meaning food. Cement, meaning factories to produce things like clothes and shoes and household goods, dams for water. Plastic, which is what most of our lives are made of.
Did you get all that? Food. Water. Livestock. Agriculture. Plastic.
We can’t make the basic stuff of our civilization without causing life on this planet to go extinct.
Stop. Really think about that for a second. Read that sentence until it really sinks in.
That is why the age of cheap stuff is over now. We need the stuff — we don’t know how to do without it. Good luck living without plastic, steel, glass, fertilizer, and all that comes from it, from water to food to medicine, right down to art and science and the internet itself (or did you think servers were made of mud?) But at the same time, the prices for all of these things must only rise, because it’s our very demand for them that is killing off life on this planet.
Do you see the trap we’re in now? Call it Extinction’s Razor. We can’t break the habit. We can’t do without the stuff. But our demand for it is what makes the price rise, because every time we buy it, the side effects mean that tomorrow’s supply of it goes down, because we cause extinction that way.
The Age of Cheap Stuff is over, my friend. Now we are in a new chapter of economic history. We’re not in the industrial revolution anymore. That door is closing. Now, Extinction’s Razor is slicing away the world, one degree, species, fire, flood, heatwave, crop failure at a time.
And you and I? Our real work is learning to rebuild. Transform. Change. What? Everything. The material bases of our lives, how we produce, what we consume, to what level we do, how we think about consumption itself — mindlessly, mostly — right down to the failing democracies which are imploding into fascism and theocracy as they can’t deliver the goods, literally, anymore, and people turn to hate, spite, superstition, and cruelty as a result.
This is how civilizations die. Extinction’s Razor. One small cut at a time — until, at last, the jugular is exposed. This is where we are. You don’t get to live cheap and thoughtlessly as the planet dies, my friend. You get to live — if you’re lucky — very, very carefully. Counting your harvest, planting your seeds, giving thanks, nourishing and tending life.
Our work is cut out for us. We are going to have to stop Extinction’s Razor. But so far? We’re still pretending like we’re living in the last chapter of economic history. Like it’s the industrial revolution — forever. Big mistake. Time to grow up. We become a force that tends to the planet — or we perish now, as a civilization, one slice of the blade a time.
Cheap stuff? It was never that cheap at all, it turns out. Someone had to pay the price, and the piper, eventually. That someone? It’s us.
Now you know. There’s no going back. The only question is where we go from here.
