It's not easy being Green. But WHY insist we knit our own ties?

Worstall @ the Weekend Following on from last week's approbation of one Green Party policy, it is possibly time for me to get off my chest an issue over the policy general of said greenery luvvies that really, really, bugs me.

Specifically, it is this idea that we should rely upon markets less and do more things "for ourselves". As I'll explain, from my perch at the Adam Smith Institute, this is something that I regard as not just heterodox but falling over the line into absolute heresy. The spark for this was a little World Service programme I did last week.

Such programmes (if you're interested, it's here) are in some ways quite fun to do. I tend to get rolled out when the BBC wants someone to troll the bien pensants from the free market side and I do my best, much as the Guardian's Comment is Free used to use me to do much the same thing.

You get 50 quid plus a tank of petrol (or a taxi ride) for rocking up to the studio for an hour and as a way of earning a steak dinner it's most pleasant. However, while a 28-minute programme might seem long enough to thrash out one or another idea among four or five discussants, by the time you've added a couple of pre-recorded bits and so on there's really only three or four minutes per person. So while I noted a couple of instances of my little bugbear, it wasn't something we were able to get to.

No, no, NO... do NOT cook your own artisanal soap

And that bugbear is this idea that we should all be doing more for ourselves and rely less on that great marketplace out there to supply our desires. Here it was a rather minor case with a woman in New York proudly announcing that she makes her own toothpaste and beauty products. At one level, well, meh. But at another this is a great way to make everyone poorer.

As I've mentioned before, Deepak Lal likes to say that there are three types of economic growth. First, there's Malthusian, where any advance in technology does not lead to a sustained increase in living standards. Rather, the short term increase means that more children survive and the long term effect is that there are more people at the same old subsistence level. There's also Promethean growth, where we're replacing human and animal labour with fossil fuels (or, if you prefer, windmills, solar and or nuclear, same general effect). Lastly, there's Smithian growth.

And this is what Adam Smith was on about with that damned pin factory of his. The division of labour, the specialisation of that labour and the trade in the resultant increased production. The main quote for it is even on the back of the £20 note (no, I'm in a foreign land, don't have one: look in your own wallet).

By splitting up tasks so that different people do different parts of them, each person can become better at that specific task. We can thus get more production for the same amount of labour. And as living standards are going to depend on what we can get from human labour (as Paul Krugman has said, productivity isn't everything but in the long run it's pretty much everything) then increasing the efficiency with which we turn labour into products will raise living standards.

You'll DIY yourself out of a decent standard of living

The point here is that if we go back to doing things for ourselves, then we're abandoning that source of growth in living standards. Please do note that there's nothing about this at all that prevents toothpaste being made from whatever it is the lady makes hers from, nor her beauty products. The point being that if she makes toothpaste for two, someone else makes the same beauty products for two, the production is then shared 50/50 of each, then both people will be richer. For either, more of both can be created by the more specialised labour, or the same amount can be in less time in aggregate.

And it's that which really significantly pisses me off about "greenery" in general. And it is in general too: the New Economic Foundation (aka “Not Economics Frankly”, copyright Giles Wilkes) has been releasing reports advocating this for years. We should all do much less paid market work and instead stay home and do more things for ourselves. You know the sort of thing: instead of earning money to buy veggies we should grow them ourselves.

Well, OK, I might not share currently fashionable concerns about organic veggies and all of the rest, but agriculture, even organic agriculture, is something where there are vast economies of scale. Way back when, when everyone really was growing all of their own food, the average agricultural worker could feed, by their annual efforts, around and about two people for a year. Today we've something like one per cent of the people on the land, meaning that each worker is feeding 100 people. That really is an increase in efficiency in the use of labour time through that division and specialisation of labour. And it's something that has made us all immeasurably richer too.

We need specialists

Please note again, as with the toothpaste and so on, we can all go off and argue about the specific farming methods. Organic or not, supplying a vegan or vegetarian diet or not, using antibiotics in animals or not. Fine, argue away about that but that's not my point here. Which is, as above, that we want some people over here to specialise in growing food and others over here to specialise in other things. Because that's the way we all get richer and the mode of interaction is that market in the middle.

I can give an absurd example: so, you want some of those lovely little metal halide bulbs to use as downlighters in your kitchen. Great: so, where are you going to get the scandium to make them? Should you be trying to reach down five levels into the production chain to do that for yourself? Or is it a good idea that there's a specialist like me out there who worries about that sort of stuff? Who grows scandium, who harvests it, which vintages are best for kitchen lights and the rest? We probably would think that division and specialisation is best here. But there's no reason at all why the same thing doesn't apply to cabbages and or organic lentils.

Rather than us all trying to do everything, we really should be dividing and specialising our labour.

This doesn't mean that if you like having a veg patch you shouldn't have one: doing things that you like doing is called “being rich”. Nor does it mean that you shouldn't teach the little ones the joys of nature by doing so nor any of the other reasons why you might want to do stuff at home, yourself.

And once again, please do note that this is nothing about the methods that should be used to grow food, or recycle plastics, or make compost or whatever it is. It's also nothing at all to do with respecting Gaia or any other of the fantasy stuff that seems to go along with kitting yoghurt into yurts.

We can have large scale organic agriculture, we can have large scale yurt production, we can have large scale hippy toothpaste production. And if we do have such large scale production then we can divide and specialise labour, raise the productivity of said labour and thereby all be richer from the same effort. Which is, when you come to think of it, something of a good idea. For as economists will tell you, the true price of something is whatever you give up to get it. And if your lifestyle can be supported on 40 hours a week of labour instead of 80, because you and everyone else is specialising, then you're richer. As is everyone else of course.

So there you have it: my real and specific bugbear about greenery. I don't mind the socialist aspects, for while I disagree I can see the point. The worries over pesticides when 99 per cent of them are naturally produced as defences by the plants just makes me laugh to be honest. The concerns about climate change seem entirely rational assuming that it is actually happening. But I really cannot understand what it is that they've all got against markets, the trade in them, that makes that division and specialisation possible and thus enriches us all. ®