Not Much Great About 'Delusion'

If you didn’t know, Costco stores sell toilet paper in packs of 36. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal reported that the average American uses 8.6 squares of toilet paper per bathroom visit, for a total of roughly 57 squares a day. Charmin Ultra has 264 squares per roll, which translates to about 30 bathroom visits. So one Costco-size pack of toilet paper overarms the eager customer with enough toilet paper to absorb more than 1000 bathroom visits. That, says Steven Stoll, is just plain excessive.

In “The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth,” Stoll beseeches his readers to be more economical with their toilet paper use—or something to that effect. Costco, he tells us in the book’s introduction, is a Grand Canyon of superabundance. According to Stoll, it is a tribute to our society’s devotion to the pursuit of economic expansion and the lack of moderation that characterizes that pursuit. His book traces the modern veneration of economic growth back to its intellectual and social origins, which he identifies as the era of philosophical idealism that followed the industrial and mechanical innovations of the early 19th century.

Throughout this historical investigation, Stoll weaves—or, rather, interjects—a stilted biography of John Adolphus Etzler, the titular “Mad Inventor” (who you’ve never heard of because he never invented anything that actually worked). Etzler’s life and energies were spent striving to harness the earth’s natural forces—wind, current, sun, rotation—believing that if he did so he’d be able to create enough wealth to sustain more than a trillion people. Infinite wealth could be generated, he thought, by concentrating infinite power on the infinite resources of the earth. Unsurprisingly, his contraption—which was christened “The Satellite” but was little more than a glorified plow—failed to bear the fruits Etzler dreamed of.

The Satellite and the mentality that would inspire someone to conceive of such a project is, Stoll says, “an emblem of our own assumptions.” The view of nature as having infinite resources and society as being destined to achieve ultimate prosperity by tapping those resources is the same utopian aspiration, he argues, that “the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mall of America, and the Williams-Sonoma catalog partake of.” But in an era where criticisms of Chicago Boy free-market capitalism are as trendy as Katy Perry songs, Stoll’s book offers little in the way of originality or groundbreaking argumentation.

Most annoyingly, Stoll seems to conflate a belief that the Earth has infinite resources with a belief in the infallibility of economic growth. Clearly the two overlap, but the recognition that our natural resources are very, very limited does not necessarily mean that economic growth should stagnate. There’s something almost Malthusian about Stoll’s argument, and indeed his brief history of Malthus is not decidedly dismissive of Malthus’s infamous “trap.” Innovation is usually heralded as the solution to the problem of limited resources; after all, if Malthus could have foreseen the genetic engineering that was employed in the Green Revolution, would he have been so sure that agricultural production couldn’t sustain an interminably growing population?

Stylistically, Stoll promises more than he can deliver in his attempt to tie together biography, historical analysis, and modern sociological and economic criticism in less than 200 pages. Everything from his summary of Hegel’s philosophy to his explanation of economic theory is oversimplified. And while this makes the book readable, since few of us really want to muddle through an in-depth analysis of the master-slave dialectic or production functions, it ultimately limits the persuasive power of Stoll’s argument.

Indeed, the disjointed nature of the book often makes it difficult to ascertain what exactly Stoll’s argument is. He doesn’t quite engage us in a criticism of overconsumption or materialism, nor does he really champion the need for environmental sustainability. Stoll offers us mostly platitudes, empty truisms about the unnecessary excess of our commercial world.

And yet these truisms are not entirely irrelevant. In the 1930s the economist John Maynard Keynes told us that the “ecosnomic problem” is not the permanent problem of the human race. One hundred years from now, he wrote, our grandchildren would have found a solution to that problem. But 80 years after the Great Depression, in the midst of an unprecedented banking crisis that has many Americans wondering if the economy will bring our nation to ruin, it is a fair question as to whether the extraordinary growth of the past few decades has brought us any closer to finding a solution to the “economic problem.”

At his most lucid, Stoll warns us not to hold our breath in waiting for technological innovation to save the day. The best suggestion that Stoll can offer us is an increased “efficiency,” but this seems like a band-aid solution at best. Even if we all use fewer squares of toilet paper each time we wipe, we’re still going to need more of it if our population, life expectancy, and beverage consumption continue to grow.

Maybe there are some lessons to be learned from the historical origins of economic growth. But if the past holds the key to the future, Stoll’s historical investigation brings us no closer to finding it.

—Staff writer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.