a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

No one has to wait for the help of future historians to see that the last fifty years of world history have been the Boom years, the years of unprecedentedly explosive growth in human population and — for some of the humans—unprecedentedly explosive growth in material prosperity. The human population has leapt from around 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion and the global economy is estimated to be about 80 times bigger now. A century of preparation made this shocking growth spurt possible, and there is an agreed upon name for that century: “The Industrial Revolution.” During the last fifty years, the prevailing economic system of that Revolution, Capitalism, has been able to make the increasingly prosperous part of the human race, which has actually shrunk as a portion of the overall population, able to rule politically (mostly through nation-states) over every other part –and over the earth and all other living beings on it.

When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring fifty years ago, at the beginning of the Boom years, she could see the Boom coming. The world population was having its Baby Boom largest yearly increases ever. Industrial development was metastasizing. She could issue the needed warning to the human beings: Rethink yourselves! You are at war with the earth and all living beings upon it! Ecologists writing today have an even more dire message to deliver. We are at the limits of the earth’s ability to sustain the burden of the human economy that has grown up on it and is warring against it, devouring it. Irreversible damage has been done to parts of the earth, some parts are already moribund silent springs, many species have become extinct. There is no precedent for the Boom years’ reduction in overall biodiversity, which is as crucial to planetary health as multicultural diversity or plurality is to human well-being. Earth resources that human beings have relied upon for their capitalist production processes are running out –oil is “peaking”–and the pollution from those processes is now at murderous levels, causing diseases in all the species. Continuing to use what is left of the Industrial Revolution’s fossil fuel sources will further disturb the earthwide eco-system, increasing climate change, which will bring further devastating effects. We face a time of natural resource war, and in parts of the world that war is already being waged.

It is a remarkable thing about the present moment that there are now economists listening to this awful message. Economics has been the science from which Capitalism has for one hundred and fifty years gotten its blueprints and –even more importantly—gotten its rationale, the reinforcement of its prejudice that Capitalism is the greatest, a miraculous human invention. The rationale for the prejudice (the narcissistic self-regard, I would call it) has been this: Capitalism, which produces prosperity at first only for capitalists, will eventually be good for the whole human species—all our big and little boats will rise together as its wonders trickle down. In the Marketspeak of financiers, this goes: leave Capitalism alone, let the markets be free, and we will all benefit! In the moral catechism terms of American Republicans: capitalism is Good, even Godly. But a scientific adviser to capitalists who listens to ecologists cannot, obviously, join this choir; if he has any integrity at all, he must sing a different song.

The song that the British economist Tim Jackson has written, called Prosperity Without Growth: Economics For A Finite Planet, is pretty simple: from here going forward, all our boats are going to sink. The little boats, already almost beyond being bailed out, will go first and the big ones, despite being furiously bailed out during sudden storms and swells, will not be far behind. With an array of charts and graphs, factoids, formulas, models, and all the other familiar paraphernalia of economists, Jackson demonstrates that Capitalism’s defining assumption is faulty: endless growth is not good or Good, it is ruinous, the earth cannot sustain it.

Tim Jackson is out to save Capitalism from itself. He argues that a change of blueprints and goals will keep the Capitalism-organized world from the coming disaster and –this is his good news–still permit prosperity of a redefined sort. Capitalism’s goal must be sustainable growth, concentrated in the areas of the world that are underdeveloped and poor. This will help alleviate the tragic inequality that Capitalism has produced, particularly in the Boom years, and give the people in the underdeveloped world –a numerical majority– a chance to participate in the world society of sustainable growth. “A resilient economy—capable of resisting external shocks, maintaining people’s livelihoods, and living within our ecological means—is the goal we should be aiming for…” The new blueprint for Capitalism is clear: Capitalism should be redirected and retooled to be primarily organized around alternative energy and food and service production and geared for reduced reliance on fossil fuels. The goods produced by capitalism must all be green. Governments must “incentivize” and reward green capitalism with all their policies, including tax policies.

For the people of the world who have benefited from Capitalism’s growth-fixation, and who are the primary consumers of its goods, Jackson also proposes a new goal. People living in the developed –over-developed–world must learn to reduce their individual and institutional use of earth’s resources; they must heed the early 1970s environmentalists’ messages that “small is beautiful” and that endless growth produces not happiness, but the well-provisioned misery of shoppers who have sold their souls to the transnational company store –that is, to the faulty assumptions that more and bigger are better, and that power comes from wealth. Jackson reports the voluminous current empirical research that demonstrates how, past a certain point of material provision, happiness among the well-provided-for does not grow. We have to “shift the social logic of consumerism.”

With this demonstration, Jackson is not on new territory. Statistical demonstrations of his happiness point have been available for years, and you can find their consequences much more deeply explored in –for example–William Greider’s excellent The Soul of Capitalism. And then there is a whole treasury of literature on the topic of “Money can’t buy happiness” and (since the Greeks) “King Midas will find himself living all alone when everything he touches has turned to gold.” Maybe economists should be required to read Edith Wharton, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But, nonetheless, Jackson’s book will show you with lots of graphs that consumers swimming in their consumer goods become alienated, adrift, spiritually without compass, afraid that their lives are meaningless.

Jackson’s book is not as powerful as the books about economics now coming from ecologists, like Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, which is a sequel to his pioneering The End of Nature. But I think Jackson’s work is very important just because it is by an economist (with a team behind him and dozens of international like-minded colleagues to reference and talk with). He’s the kind of person a G20 leader might be able to hear. And his book shows that the group-think of Economics as a discipline, which has made it the propaganda department for “we are good” Capitalism, is breaking up. Surely a wonderful development. A ray of reality has entered Economics, and from there it might bounce over into political leaders who are at the moment pre-occupied with the world economy in mostly monetary policy terms. Jackson tells them, clearly, that the world economic crisis and the ecological crisis are the same crisis.

But, to my mind, the advice Jackson has given to ‘we the people,’ the non-specialists like me for whom the mathematical formulas in his book are gibberish, is not the right advice. In effect, he has countered the infamous what-to-do-in-an-emergency advice of the George Bushes of this world–the “just go shopping” obscenity offered after 9/11–with a “be careful what you shop for,” “be careful what you wish for.” This is not political guidance, it is economic guidance. Fine as far as it goes, but it does not go very far.

When Tim Jackson talks in his book about the relationship he thinks should obtain between the political domain and the economic domain, he focuses on “good governance.” He makes it clear that he thinks governments must take the lead in organizing the new sustainable world economy, using the new “ecologically literate macro-economics” that is being formulated in government-sponsored but independent think-tanks like his own. Conservatives of the “limited government,” anti-social-planning sort will obviously not be pleased; Jackson is a social democrat.

But on the question of what governments need to do vis-à-vis citizens, Jackson is in a debate with himself. Governments tell their citizens what to do in lots of ways that are called laws, and governments seek to influence citizen behavior in lots of ways –with public health policies, for example. But what about a huge matter like changing profligate living habits into sustainable living habits? Jackson cites the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who has concluded –he is a man of many strident conclusions—that sustainability “just doesn’t come naturally” to our species. So should a government try reprogramming? Won’t this mean authoritarianism? But then Jackson argues with Dawkins: it is a mistake to assume that all human motives are short-sighted, selfish and individualistic. Don’t underestimate the longer-sighted, less oriented to ‘immediate gratification,’ altruistic motives that are also part of the human (and animal) record. Can’t these better motives be benignly supported with governmental policy?

Reading a discussion like this one, where aan expert behaves like a concerned parent trying to figure out how to get the badly behaving children to do is good for them, I always want to say, but wait a minute, governments are supposed to be representative of the citizens –what have the citizens to say on the topic of sustainable living? Have you asked? Have the citizens had the benefit of an educator to stimulate their discussion? I will turn in my next post to an example of citizen action that I think speaks to the missing political consciousness in this fine economist’s really brave book.

[Note, please enter your email under SUBSCRIBE on the homepage if you wold like to be notified when a new post goes up.]