Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Isn't there any other economic critiques of the current Way Of Things outside of using the anti-capitalist bogeyman?
In the 20th century, the three major challenges to free-market capitalism as espoused by Adam Smith and his followers have been the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the environmental and oil shocks of the 1970s, and the "Great Recession" of 2007 onwards.
The Depression raised the question of whether or not the free market was itself self-correcting, and the answer is generally accepted as a pretty emphatic "no". It wasn't until massive amounts of government-induced spending, partially through the New Deal, but largely as part of World War II and post-war reconstruction efforts (e.g., the Marshall Plan) that the economy really got off the ground again, and even through the 1950s and 1960s, there was concern that the malaise of the 1930s would return.
What happened instead were a series of environmental and safety concerns -- Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, and more so the question of whether or not the modern post-Industrial Revolution age was sustainable: the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth.
These were immediately followed by peaking of US domestic oil extraction in 1971, and the first effective middle-east oil embargo from the recently-formed OPEC (several earlier attempts had been made, notably during the Suez crisis of the 1950s, but US domestic extraction could take up the slack). It was also a decade in which the last vestiges of the gold standard were removed from most major world currencies (the Swiss Franc continued through the 2000s), with the cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement, unilaterally, by the US.
The turbulent 1970s turned into the prosperous 1980s and 1990s, which some attribute to opening up of the North Sea, Alaskan North Slope, and offshore Gulf of Mexico to oil development. Crashing oil prices are thought to have played a major role in the collapse of the former Soviet Union, long dependent on its oil exports for hard currency.
There were also massive political shifts underway. Within the US, the previously white-Democratically-dominated South was split amongst a now black Democratic and white Republic party, while moral and other issues were used to create unity amongst an otherwise increasingly class-divided Republican party elsewhere. Labor unions lost a huge amount of power both due to general decline among US manufacturing companies (particularly automobiles, steel, and other heavy industry), as well as federal action (the 1980s air traffic controllers' strike and dissolving of the union by President Reagan).
While real returns on business investment were falling (look up Deloitte's Center for the Edge study "The Shift Index"), financial wealth creation was increasingly coming from the financial sector itself, and asset inflation of securities and later, real estate (itself driven by securities return demands).
There has been economic growth, mostly in the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, and China, but most especially in the latter two, with growth in China quite simply blowing away any previous economic revival anywhere, including the post-WWII European and Japanese recoveries. Unfortunately for economics, the growth in India and China has come largely with an almost precise parallel growth in primary energy consumption, a huge portion of that exceptionally dirty coal (in both traditional particulate, smog, and heavy-metal pollution as well as CO2 emissions). Much of the "economic decoupling" of growth from primary resource consumption in the rest of the world disappears if you factor India and China back into the equation.
Then came the 2000s: the dot com collapse, the Bush tax cuts (favoring the wealthy markedly), two unfunded wars, peak oil in 2006, the housing (asset) bubble, 2007 global financial crisis, and growing inequality worldwide.
To put it bluntly, conventional economics predicted little if any of this. The models of the Limits to Growth types appear to be playing out, though with some variance (the post-oil embargo efficiency improvements and reduced oil consumption, as well as fracking and other "enhanced recovery" petroleum extraction methods have pushed back the net fossil hydrocarbon liquids by 5-15 years). The criticisms of Marx, Malthus, Toynbee, and others over the inequality of capitalism have resurfaced with a vengeance. Claims of a "new" economy or "information" economy are proving largely illusory. The Web 2.0 economy is largely funded by advertising, the bulk of which are FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and electronics consumables themselves, as well as exceptionally liberal central bank monetary policy.
And the critics of economics are mainstream: you'll find articles questioning received wisdom in the Financial Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and elsewhere. Critics include Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith, Steve Keen, Herman Daly, and a handful of others -- hardly the bulk of the profession, but some key thinkers.
And as others have noted, "anti-capitalist" is at best a label of convenience applied to a system that could be characterized by a great many things. I've called it the economic orthodoxy (as opposed to heterodoxies). Salient characteristics include free markets, laissez-faire (according to some), corporatism, financialization, globalization, commoditization, computerization, automation, extraction, nonsustainability, and others.
All of which tends to be a bit of a mouthful. There's also a fair bit of disagreement among critics on just what the most relevant elements of failure are (as is typically the case -- it's easy to agree that you don't like the old boss, harder to select a new boss you happen to agree on).
To some extent I feel you are avoiding the basic question, though. What do you think the solution is ? The only real argument in favour of capitalism is simply that it has survived where other systems have not. Natural selection.
Granted, economic systems haven't always failed for "good" reasons. Some were conquered. Others built an economy based on oil, and oil ran out. Others strip-mined colonies. Islam built it's civilization on slavery, and can be said to be a continuation of Rome (mostly of the bad parts of the Roman empire, but ...). But, like natural selection, there are no good and bad reasons, hell, there aren't even really (known) reasons at all, and it doesn't really matter "whose fault it is", they failed, and when they failed, that was the end of the road. Capitalism, by contrast, has risen from the ashes more times than a drunk pyromaniac phoenix.
The vast majority of critiques on capitalism are simply expressing a refusal to change (in some cases ironically). In a way, it's a form of conservatism, even if different from what we usually call conservatism. Or, in some cases, much worse : an attempt to resurrect dead societies (like the many attempts at resurrecting the caliphate we see now, hell, those even fight like the Roman empire did, which frankly justifies killing them all in my humble opinion, but ...). But sadly[1], there's a reason these societies died (and in the vast majority cases, like the islamic one for example : good riddance). If you resurrect them, that reason will simply surface again, and kill them in the cradle.
Right now we are in a boom phase of capitalism, and yes, it looks like we may be at the end of the boom (then again, it's looked like that for 10+ years now, and before that we had 1980, 1972, the cold war, 40-48, 30-40, 14-18, "revolutionary" Europe, and so on and so forth, and all of those look to me much, much worse than our current situation. So to some extent I feel inclined to say to people complaining about the economy "big fucking whoop". But it certainly is getting a little bit worse. On the other hand today, I can name 50+ things that could easily resurrect economic growth, and only one of them needs to happen. We could discover a useful fusion principle, we could find a way to mine plate-edge methane gas, we could find a way to produce really cheap solar panels (we're not too far from making that happen, actually), we could ... If you ask me "what could anyone have done to avoid what's coming" in 1938 or 1912, I'd have said "other than changing the religion/ideology of a great many people overnight, nothing can be done". Most societies never even tried to dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. Certainly the Ottoman empire, for example, "deserved" what was coming to it. So did the kingdom of France. So did ... Most of these civilizations had people working in them that had at least the seeds of a solution to their problems, and, generally speaking, they killed those people. I'm pretty confident in saying that we are currently not doing that.
Anyway, I may be rambling a bit here. My question is simple : what is the way out of the current conundrum ? If history is a guide, the way out is simply a huge war, a new superpower, and a new dollar, and more capitalism. That's what happened to Spain, Britain, Portugal, ... and that's what fixed their versions of financial industry stupidities. I will agree that it looks like the US is getting buried in financial industry stupidities as well, but ... In history two economic systems have lasted really long times : slavery, and capitalism. The choice seems obvious to me.
[1] I say sadly out of nostalgia. But having read stories from the Roman empire, medieval China, from the Colonies, from the Ottoman empire (I talked to the grandfather of an Armenian immigrant. That was enlightening, especially the parts about the supposed "tolerance" of the Ottoman empire. By that standard Hitler was a saint), stories from 19th century Europe (hell, my granddad actually told me some stories his dad told him about what life was like in France between the revolution and WWI), I'd say it is a very good thing indeed that you can't resurrect societies.
For the first, I think adopting a systems approach as suggested by Limits to Growth would be a good start, and find the writings of ecological economists (Odum, Daly, Hall) to be superior to most of the orthodxy, with Hall perhaps among the most rigorous.
In terms of the economic system itself: I don't see a solution to the present crisis. There are too many people, consuming too many resources, and yet we want to increase both values. There's a simple formula that was derived in the 1970s that describes this: I = P x A x T
Impacts is equal to population times affluence (material resource utilization per capita) time technology.
Alternatively: k <= S x A x P
Sustainability x Affluence x Population is subject to a maximal constraint k.
Which means that you can optimize at best any two of the three. Your choices are high affluence and large population, but low sustainability. High population and high sustainability but low affluence. Or high affluence and high sustainability, but low population.
Or of course, optimizing for at most one or zero aspects.
The "solutions" in this case involve deciding reducing population, accepting crushing poverty (as existed for much of human history), or wipe ourselves out.
I'm not predicting an imminent collapse of the global order, but things could turn south on relatively short notice. More likely this is a scenario which will play out over decades, possibly a couple of centuries paralleling the rise of human population following the Industrial Revolution.
Economic growth has to top out at some point, simply due to physical planetary limits. And no, we're not going to overcome those any time soon, if ever. Even planetary space travel is tremendously expensive, let alone interstellar travel. And there are multiple things we'd have to solve to address near-term challenges, with energy, phosphorus, other minerals, soil, and fresh water chief among them. Look up Leibig's Law of the Minimum -- any one constraint is sufficient to limit growth, and we're facing many.
Your past civilizations and empires weren't global in scope and yet even their falls typically precipitated long periods of darkness. And yes, life for much of human history was pretty interesting, in a Chinese curse sense of the word.
The solution in a nutshell? A man (or all humans) have got to know their limits.
But if you look at animal or plant (or bacteria) species, they absolutely don't do this. They just grow to whatever the current capacity of the world is (meaning they would immediately choose the "low sustainability option you present).
This is despite the fact that most non-human species are most definitely living in a world that is being filled close to capacity.
So the argument to this solution is that it's not possible. It's not a Nash equilibrium and any set of humans that picks an option like that will simply die through natural selection, and this will not result in increased sustainability at all.
Humans are distinctive for a number of reasons, including that we've got the ability to model complex relationships and project forward into the future. Jared Diamond's Collapse looks at a number of civilizations which have fairly effectively managed to live within their means, though they do so by adopting moralities which are quite extreme, and generally unacceptable, to Western views, including infanticide and ritual suicide.
Most of those cultures are also fairly small. Playing out this game on a global scope, where communications can circle the world in under a second, people in under a day, and massive quantities of goods in a few weeks (via ship), is a rather different game.
If you're interested in more, look up David Korowicz, Joseph Tainter, or for a real blast of optimism, Olduvai Theory. Korowicz in particular looks at issues of global supply chain contagion and what that might have to offer by way of negative dynamics.
My point of "knowing limits" isn't that that knowledge be expressed consciously. But it will be established.
http://energyskeptic.com/2014/david-korowicz-2013-catastroph...
The two problems with Marx are (1) he was writing ~150 years ago and things have changed in industrialisation and (de)colonisation; and (2) his proposed solutions and those of his immediate followers were found to fail badly.
This does not necessarily invalidate subsequent leftwing economics. However, use of Marxist language and terminology is usually the sign of a crank. It really needs updating for the present world and modes of discussion.
> I find it interesting that there's this continual
barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism;
If you see the current system being bad for you, why wouldn't you critique it? And why wouldn't you use/mention the oldest critique of it? Especially parts that have been validated.
It's a bit like saying, "Listen I'm going to talk about Parsers, but completely ignore anything written about parsers, before 2009. I'm especially going to ignore Dragon Book."
It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems. I don't mean to say this is like that, but there's a fun little similarity there on the surface.
> I'd like to see serious engagement with the subject
rather than dismissal of the current state
If you think closely about it, replacing humans with cheaper, tireless, less error prone systems (be that robots or robot-like humans), you score a double whammy. You maximize production AND reduce the costs.
> It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the
capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the
popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems
It's like a man in debt going to a loan-shark out of desperation.
What is interesting that around ~81 years after that episode, we have another.
If you dispute my statement, can you show another system that produces objectively better outcomes than capitalism?
The usual argument seems to be that capitalism (or the free market, or free enterprise) is the "greatest engine of wealth creation" ever. The origins of that assertion are vague. It's part of the platform of the Libertarian "Campaign for Liberty", founded in 2008:
"We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.
"We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments."
The phrase seems to have emerged popularly during the Gingrich "Contract for America" campaign of the mid 1990s.
In the 1930s through 1950s, "engine of prosperity" was a claim attached to numerous entities or policies: railroads, advertising, debt, tariffs, etc.
In 1961, capitalism is attached to the phrase, but not in a positive light:
"was it that converted capitalism from the cataclysmic failure which it appeared to be in the 1930s into the great engine of prosperity of the postwar Western world?” In pursuit of that question, the Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of ..."
From Recent Books on International Relations - Page 998, via Google Books.
It's not until 1961 that I see the claim linked positively to capitalism or free markets, and there it's in the context of a prior political claim:
"I, too, would agree with Senator Bennett that our free enterprise economy is the greatest engine of prosperity and high living standards known"
National Alliance of Postal Employees (U.S.). - 1961, via Google Books.
Comparing per-capita GDP rankings with the Wall Street Journal / Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, I find some correspondence, but it's at best weak.
Only half of the top 10 of each list coincide, and of the top 5, only one of the top 10 IEF nations is present (Singapore).
Six of the top-20 ranked per-capita income states come from outside the top-20 of the IEF (GDP/IEF rank): Qatar (#1/27), Norway (#4/31), Austria (#11/25), Sweden (#12/27), Iceland (#14/23), and Kuwait (#17/66). Three of these are oil states (Qatar, Norway, and Kuwait), four are highly socialized progressive states (Norway, Austria, Sweden, Iceland).
The correspondences are Singapore (#3/2), United States (#6/10), Hong Kong (#6/1), Switzerland (#7/5), Canada (#9/6), and Australia (#10/3).
Looking at the highest ranked IEF states, three of the top 10 fail to fall within the top 20 income states (IEF/GDP rank): New Zealand (#4/30), Chile (#7/54), Mauritius (#8/63).
Of the lowest IEF scores, several nations have oddly high income rankings: Argentina (#160/55), East Timor (#166/48), Iran (#168/78), Equatorial Guinea (#170/44), and Venezuela (#174/73).
Several highly respected economists have observed that economics cannot explain growth (Paul Krugman and Tony Atkinson). Most modern orthodox theories of growth date to Robert Solow's work in the 1950s, but they're strongly criticized. J.K. Galbraith associated prosperity with population and land, environmental and biophysical economists point to the associations with access to energy, though there's more than just that.
Looking at a list of nations with maximum per-capita GDP, particularly looking at the CIA's rankings (more comprehensive than the IMF or World Bank's rankings), six of the top ten nations are banking havens: Liechtenstein, Bermuda, Monaco, Jersey, Falkland Islands, and the Isle of Man. And the top-ranked nation is an oil state with a remarkably low IEF ranking: Qatar, #27 on the IEF scale. That's fewer than 50 places higher than one of the lowest per-capita GDP nations, Madagascar. Kuwait, 17th by income, is 66th on the IEF scale.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2arikp/capitali...
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf57z/econ_pau...
How do you measure happiness of the population, self-fulfilment, solidarity, sustainability, etc?
Capitalism has run its course in my very subjective opinion. Hopefully there will be a successor that is more sustainable and people friendly, and hopefully it won't involve the invisible hand of the free market, state enforced monopolies, laissez faire or unsustainable consumerism.
My main point, though, is this: What is your better alternative? Everybody's got criticisms of capitalism (me included), but as a broad organizing pattern for society, what is your alternative? How has that alternative actually worked when it's been tried? Is there real-world experience, or just theory?
I don't know what will replace Capitalism, or even what shape it'll take. As you say, flawed alternatives have been attempted -- and some were better at particular aspects, and some even forced Capitalism to take its current form in order not to perish. So you could argue modern day Capitalism owes its shape at least partly to competing systems.
In this case, we haven't made any inroads in deciding about the relative merits of Capitalism, Socialism or any other -isms, since there haven't been any nations that implemented them. Not truly.
I don't know about you, but it seems like a fruitless viewpoint. I believe Capitalism as practiced in the real world has run its course. This, of course, doesn't mean it's going to go in the next few decades, but I believe its days are counted. Call it optimism.
But you're nitpicking. The central of my comment is that you absolutely cannot assert that Capitalism is "objectively" better than every other system. Objectively better at what? By whose objective measurements?
There is no 'damning and well-supported' case against Capitalism, if there is then I'm yet to find it (and believe me I've been looking). There is however a damning well-supported case against what many wrongly refer to as Capitalism i.e Corporatism.
There is absolutely no 'mysticism' to the market, it's very quantifiable. Theory of subjective value, marginal utility, subjectivism, individualism etc. The likes of Menger, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Spooner and co have written hundreds of thousands of pages detailing every last aspect of human/value interaction. But the core tenets are pretty simple. Certainly no mysticism or ambiguity.
- Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism.
- Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation.
I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates.
This is about private property. Marxists deny the right for individuals or companies to own the "means of production".
"- Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation."
This is also about private property because aggressive redistribution of wealth is by definition impinging on the right to accrue private property.
"I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates."
This is socialism which sits in the middle of the one dimensional spectrum of economic systems.
Also how do you define productivity? Because I assure you that a sweatshop is more productive per dollar than any shoe factory in Sweden.
Unless you mean maximizing the sum productivity and humanity at the expense of one or the other. But humanity is a little harder to quantify eh? :)
And yes, of course I believe that productivity and happiness are two different things and that they need to be balanced. I don't believe in trickle down economics, or that they are two different facets of the same variable on a linear axis that somehow move in unison as you slide left/right up/down.
You can probably quantify humanity (like the Gross National Happiness people are trying to do) somehow, but it's of course not going to resemble true science. I do think there are some basic markers of a civilized society that I have a hard time understanding how some people disagree with though. These include public access to nature and beaches, good education for everyone, good healthcare for everyone, etc. To me, this is a separate _economical_ issue from how much the government meddles in the work life of its citizens. If it's easy for you to think of these issues on one axis be my guest, but it is not a mental model that works well for me.
Cheers!
Many of these philosophers based their critiques on Marx. Some went further back to Kant, Hume, and Spinoza. Others start with Nietzsche.
We do not regularly separate profits ( which are derived from consumer surplus ) and rents ( which are not ) , which leads to much confusion. There may be less confusion this way than if we try to understand what is or is not a rent.
>This caused conflicts with those who had the idea work consisted of doing as little as possible for the most finanical reward. Liberals.
The idea of a "work ethic" (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one!) is so pervasive in most people's minds that they label people who have appropriate capitalist values (i.e., work is a competition between the boss and worker; each attempts to maximize value for minimal cost) by their political enemies.
But of course your statement is correct either way. Interesting how both sides see themselves as lone warriors against a sea of villainy.
Also not mentioned in the article, Crary co-heads one of the best independent publishers, Zone Books. And every book is beautifully and minimally designed by the legendary studio of Bruce Mau.
Disclosure: author is my wife's grad school advisor.
http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are...
"While you are in bed dreaming about how some day you too might own an electric car, many EV owners are doing something dramatic; something unusual..."
The trouble with everyone bashing 'Capitalism' now is that people draw a false parallel between 'Capitalism' and 'Corporatism' and run a mile in the opposite direction and adopt quite predictable Marxist views.
If we're going to get into Marxism, this was a man who never had a real job... he mooched off of his factory owning friends (so a complete hypocrite) and took advantage of a maid working in his families service and brought about a child of whom he never cared for. He isn't a good role model, and couldn't even live by his own views.
So is sleep an affront to them all ?
Yes, a hundred times yes!!!
> I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on.
There I will have to disagree. The three examples you provided are modern (post Enlightenment) economic systems. I am sure there are more examples along the world history, but it is far fetched to say it is common to all systems.
> Hell, even natural selection agrees on that.
Strongly disagree. Every instance of rapid growth in nature either finds a balance with the larger ecosystem or self destroys (by causing severe, though not necessarily terminal, damage to the larger ecosystem). Think cancer. Think the introduction of exotic species into isolated ecosystems. Think the depopulation of the Americas during the XV and XVI century due to European diseases.
> So is sleep an affront to them all ?
In a way, yes. At the end of the day, power means access to limited resources. Besides the obvious cases (access to actual raw materials), time is a limited resource for every human being. But you can expand in a way your life span by having other people do what you want instead of what they want. Ultimately, there is a hard limit on how much this vicarious life extension is available: Num_people_under_your_control * 24_hrs_per_day / biological_needs_factor. Given than people usually need in the ballpark or 8 hrs of sleep per day, this is the single largest component of biological_needs_factor.
Be it a capitalist robber baron, a communist dictator, or a mercantilist king, they get more power by having their people sleep less and work more... up to a point.
I'd like to know a few examples of that. You know, a long time ago I visited one of the interior countries in Africa, and got an up-close experience of what's probably the closest thing to original human settlements I'm going to see in my lifetime. They know about the modern world, and they've got some kids that left for the city and learned French. So you can talk to them.
When you look at these people, you would swear that "laid back lifestyle" doesn't quite cover it. They do the bare minimum necessary to survive, and a little bit to get comfortable. As the locals say, they will never amount to anything. And, frankly, these people are right. They will never build (granted, maybe not never ever, but ...).
So you might think. No economy ... no pressure, right ? Wrong.
You see, they are acutely aware of the land's carrying capacity. So they have a choice :
1) don't have kids (or not more than their group can take). Result : neighbouring tribe that didn't see the light comes over, kills all the men, and uses the women and children to expand. Besides, you may have noticed, sex is fun. Kids are fun. And I guarantee that any argument for abstinence will fall on deaf ears.
2) Have kids, and while they don't know the math behind it, they are aware that they'll exceed the carrying capacity of their land in a matter of time (incidentally, you may want to avoid visiting tribes that are close to this limit, don't worry, they'll place markers at the edge of their territory and tell you. Don't ignore them, and if you suddenly see a number of people appear on a ridge, turn fucking back).
BTW: the problem with option 2 is that destructive behaviour can delay the point where they do run out of resources, at a great cost. You see, when the land can't normally support them anymore, they can burn it, which gives them access to a great amount of meat. It's simple : you burn a piece of forest (surprisingly, doing this well takes a surprising amount of skill). You have archers cover the sides of it. Animals who are normally unreachable either try to escape, taking their chances with the archers, or they burn. In both cases : Food ! Of course, at some point, everything is burned. The next step : war (if successful : the tribe splits up, because social structures don't last when groups are 50+ kilometres apart, if unsuccessful, well, we all know what happens in that case).
So truth be told, that system is absolutely trying to maximize productivity and consumption.
> Strongly disagree. Every instance of rapid growth in nature either finds a balance with the larger ecosystem or self destroys (by causing severe, though not necessarily terminal, damage to the larger ecosystem). Think cancer. Think the introduction of exotic species into isolated ecosystems. Think the depopulation of the Americas during the XV and XVI century due to European diseases.
This is not true. You forget how natural selection works. There's lots of different tactics. Take rabbits for example. No biologist ever is going to call any rabbit population anywhere on the planet balanced. And you do have a point, rabbit populations breed themselves into extinction daily. Cats do the same. In theory the whole thing should end in a "natural balance", somehow it never does.
The way life survives is simple. Natural selection :
1) multiply, and use it to try a million new things
2) 99.99% of them die off
3) use the remaining 0.01% to GOTO 1
So the purpose of natural selection most definitely is to use bubbles to their maximum advantage. Yes, some species have a slowdown factor built in, but not a very big one.
The reason nature uses bubbles ? If you don't someone else will. And then, you get to deal with all the after effects of strip-mining the bubble, yet you did not get the advantages during the strip-mining that could have allowed you to expand into areas that aren't so heavily effected by the after-effects of the bubble.