Today, there is much evidence suggesting that man, as space, has been growing within a niche that has also been expanding over the last half million years, but that this niche has almost certainly reached the point where its expansion cannot continue indefinitely, and where its saturation appears to be near within a strictly historical span of time, measurable in centuries, perhaps even in decades.
This represents a psychological, ecological and economic crisis for humanity. In terms of his own evolution, man has probably been well adapted to expansion for about one hundred thousand years, and has done very well over the last ten thousand years. The habits and institutions, the technologies and ideologies that have had lasting value are those that have adapted well to an era of expansion.
Now that this era is coming to an end, a whole set of new ideas and institutions, which previously were not well adapted to survival, will become necessary for survival, and the entire future of humanity depends on whether it is capable of making the adjustment quickly enough.
Of course, the niche is still expandable. The expansion of the human niche through greater knowledge has been one of the most characteristic features of human development. Natural resources are mainly a function of human knowledge, and it is even likely that over the last two hundred years we have been discovering new resources more rapidly than exhausting those we already knew.
How long this process can last, however, is a question that must be raised, even if it cannot be answered. It is evident that it cannot go on forever. In any case, we cannot predict knowledge. We do not know, for example, whether nuclear fusion energy can be used effectively. We do not know the limits of better use of solar energy, and we do not know what improvements in the recycling of materials might be developed once we turn our attention to them.
What is clear is that eventually we will have to face “spaceship Earth” and the classical stationary state, when all the Earth’s geological capital that is now easily within our reach has been used, and we will have to move toward a system of recycling material from the oceans, the atmosphere and the soils, mainly through the use of solar energy.
We are still very far from this recycling technology, and we still do not know how many people the Earth can support under these conditions, or what degree of comfort even an optimal population will be able to obtain.
One thing is becoming clear: today, the poorest two thirds of the world’s population are very unlikely to reach the standard of living of the rich countries within any foreseeable period of time, simply because of the absence of materials and energy sources that are easily within our reach.
It may be that the true importance of the social experiment now being carried out in mainland China lies in the fact that it may result in a way of legitimizing, perpetuating and making fairly tolerable a low level of stagnation in economic output.
The image of the future that seems most fashionable today, and that was fashionable ten years ago, is that of a continuously growing population and gross national product per inhabitant throughout the world. This image now seems quite unrealistic in light of pollution, depletion and the other diseases of rich societies that are essentially living off their geological capital.
Under these rather depressing circumstances, the problem of the future of the grants economy is of great interest and importance. We have seen that grants are composed of two elements: one arising from the coercive system, fear, and another arising from the integrative system, love.
Therefore, we cannot accurately represent the relationship between grants and exchange by means of a simple two-variable diagram. However, the “social triangle” is one way of showing these relations.
Here, we measure 100 percent coercion at point T, 100 percent exchange at point E, and 100 percent integrative relationship, or love, at point L. Any point located within the triangle then represents a combination of these proportions.
Any point located on the line TL would be 100 percent within the grants economy. Within the triangle there will be some boundary, suggested by the dotted line, enclosing the feasible set of these three proportions. We are assuming that no society can exist without at least some proportion of all three elements, and that society is unlikely to be located at a point where the proportion of any one of the elements is excessively high.
