Despite rhetoric about the employment capacities of new technologies, Zygmunt Bauman’s (Liquid Times) spectre of ‘redundant humans’ hovers over the 21st century. Agriculture is now highly capitalised, while mining and construction strive to follow suit. Manufacturing in developed countries has been ‘hollowed out’ by capital flight and offshoring. The service sector’s factor input mix is already changing. Advanced countries have difficulty maintaining their high-wage relativities as labour is fractioned and displaced in this race to the bottom. Scale and artificial intelligence technologies are ascendant, while intra-national inequality is growing as the paradox of thrift threatens. At stake is not simply the face of capitalism as we know it, but also a wider economic rationale and form of industrial organisation. Developed nations have achieved their status through capital deepening and substitution, technological progress and productivity growth. None wants to be relegated or sidelined, so the drive continues. Two points pertain. First is the view of Cardiff academic, Finn Bowring, that the aim of the most efficient enterprises is the elimination of work. Second, this insight arouses the fear, however fanciful, that it might simply not be possible to go on inventing new products or services to create work. Strangulation by Gordian knot?

The post-truth age of alternative facts, along with the widespread embrace of relativism and neo-liberal individualism should resuscitate our interest in what is, and what is not, ‘rational.’ Rationality has been theorised in both philosophy and psychology, with greater progress achieved in procedural than in substantive definitions. Irrationality was the muse to the MAD nuclear standoff of the Cold War but was subsequently quarantined in the back blocks of the humanities. Aided by the onset of global crises interpreted through the IPAT identity of Ehrlich and Holdren, this paper assembles available evidence to interrogate the conditions which potentially constitute irrationality. As a corollary, it moves some way toward a substantive definition of rationality. This field is important for two reasons. First are the calls for environmental ‘sustainability’, whatever that might entail. Second is the implicit assumption that, in its quest to turn unknown into known entities, model building in the physical and social sciences proceeds under conditions of rationality. The contrarian might remark that both these positions are tenuous if the planetary milieu as a whole is becoming less rational.