We often think that we have a problem of scarcity of resources. It is not so: scarcity is not absolute. Whether we have enough of something or not depends on our perception of what we need. And, because we seem to think that we never have enough, we tend to use what we have faster than it can be replaced. It is the phenomenon called "overexploitation" or "overshoot". It is the main problem that we are facing and it is all because of the way the human mind works. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, overexploitation is all in the brain of the exploiter.

Nate Hagens has argued several times in "The Oil Drum" that the human mind is geared for growth (see, for instance here ). Apparently, we act on the basis of a series of neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine) that make us search for continuously renewed stimulation. This way of functioning of the human mind is what generates our tendency of "discounting the future", that is of giving a lower value to the future than to the present. This rapidly declining discount function is the key of the mechanism of overexploitation.

This view of human behavior is based on experimental evidence which, however, is mostly limited to humans living in the modern, fast growing countries of the Western world. But present day humans may be just a short lived phenomenon. Growth cannot continue forever and sooner or later we'll have to settle in a condition of zero growth; very likely after a phase of decline. Zero growth has been the normal condition of human life for the past few millennia of agricultural civilizations. Surely the world changed even in ancient times, but the perception of this change was denied to people constrained to their fields, their family, their village, and little more. It was the world of peasants.

Peasants, by now, have disappeared in the Western world, replaced by farm workers specialized in operating agricultural machinery. Yet, this is a recent development and the peasant world is still alive in poor countries and a living memory in rich ones. So, we still have a chance to have a glimpse of a zero growth world and of the mind of the people living in it. How did they see the world around them? How did they see their future? How did they plan ahead for good and bad times?

There seem to be few psychological studies of the mind of the peasants: office workers are much easier to find and study, nowadays. But anthropologists have studied peasant civilizations in depth. One of these studies is in the book of Peter Farb "Humankind" published in 1978. Farb was an American anthropologist who had studied mainly native Americans, but who had a broad interest in human behavior in general. "Humankind" was a condensate of his thought (he died in 1980). After more than 30 years, the book is dated in many respects, but it is still well worth a look even today. I remember having read it for the first time in the early 1980s and, rereading it now, I see how much it has shaped my vision of the world.

Here are some excerpts of Peter Farb's description of the way of thinking of peasants as it appears in the chapter titled "The Perennial Peasants". The pattern that emerges doesn't agree with the idyllic view of a zero growth world made of small, self-sufficient units as it is often presented today. It shows that the limitation of material resources affects also the perception of all (as termed by Farb) "the good things in life", such as friendship, manhood, honor and sex. We don't know the shape of the discount function in the mind of peasants but, from this description, they seem to be even less worried about the future than we are. That is, perhaps, a logic consequence of the fact that in a zero growth world the future is just the same as the present.

People living in a future zero growth world will not necessarily live and think as ancient peasants, but surely there is a lot of food for thought here.