Notable Quotes #21: Ken Boulding on Car Culture, c. 1974

[Scene from the 1973 OPEC oil embargo.]

The most obvious and dramatic change has been the sharp rise in the price and the decreased availability of gasoline for private automobiles. This situation seems likely to persist for quite a while, perhaps indefinitely, and in the United States will probably survive the lifting of the Arab oil embargo. This is already producing a marked effect on the tourist industry and the automobile industry. The long-run effects, however, are much more difficult to predict because they depend on the response of technology to stress, which has a strong element of uncertainty in it. There will undoubtedly be pressure for energy-conserving forms of transportation. There is a fair amount of short-run flexibility in this regarding terms of car pools and minor improvements to public transportation. The long-run effects, however, depend both on changes in the technology of supply and to some extent on what might be called the "technology of demand," the adaptation of preferences and life-styles to changing price and income structures.

I must confess that I think in this regard a good deal more effort will be put into the supply problems than into the demand adjustments. The automobile, especially, is remarkably addictive. I have described it as a suit of armor with 200 horses inside, big enough to make love in. It is not surprising that it is popular. It turns its driver into a knight with the mobility of the aristocrat and perhaps some of his other vices. The pedestrian and the person who rides public transportation are, by comparison, peasants looking up with almost inevitable envy at the knights riding by in their mechanical steeds. Once having tasted the delights of a society in which almost everyone can be a knight, it is hard to go back to being peasants. I suspect, therefore, that there will be very strong technological pressures to preserve the automobile in some form, even if we have to go to nuclear fusion for the ultimate source of power and to liquid hydrogen for the gasoline substitute. The alternative would seem to be a society of contented peasants, each cultivating his own little garden and riding to work on the bus, or even on an electric streetcar. Somehow this outcome seems less plausible than a desperate attempt to find new sources of energy to sustain our knightly mobility.

[From Kenneth Boulding's "The Social System and the Energy Crisis," Science, April 1974.]