By Joe Mancini
Published in September 2021
Windstorms follow any discussion about how the Western world can generate economic growth. Possibly this is because of the omnipresence of climate change’s unmistakable toll in the form of wildfires, forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, floods, and mud slides. Mother Earth is clearly rebelling and it is easy to see that excessive use of resources, excessive burning of fossil fuels, excessive dumping of chemicals is at its limit. A system devoted to economic growth continues to make the problem worse and change is desperately needed.
Increasingly the growth model is not adding up. Often economists recommend efficiencies to exploit opportunities to generate growth and jobs, all of which seems necessary to pay for increased government services. Yet, this very activity will increase the use of resources, carbon, and chemicals. The dilemma of this score card is real. How can we make different choices.
Resource Constraints
Resource and supply constraints have some economists making direct connections between the present situation and the 1970’s. Nouriel Roubini is forecasting that the 2020s will see the kind of stagflation that plagued economies in the 1970s, when oil boycotts resulted in higher government spending, while growth faltered and inflation grew.
The 1980s response to stagflation was high interest rates and a prolonged embrace of globalization that exported jobs, deregulated substantial parts of the economy and consistently chipped away at the safety net for low-income workers. This continued for forty years and these policy responses are now exhausted. Large parts of the labour force need increased supports as precarious work barely pays for rent and food. High interest rates on top of a debt-fueled economy will stop growth in its tracks.
Beyond Globalization
Three books have been published this summer that catch a new spirit – a new direction that attempts to jolt us out of old habits and rethink how to live well within the abundance that we have. When More is Not Better, Post Growth, and The Day The World Stopped Shopping hint at new thinking to challenge assumptions that have been taken for granted since the 1980s.
In the early 1990s, a series of books like Your Money or Your Life, and Voluntary Simplicity were published to help families make decisions to live simply. In contrast these books from the summer of 2021 have a message of simple living focused on how our society can restructure the core of the economy, to change the way we consume by changing the rules of consumption.
When More Is Not Better
Roger Martin, a world-renowned business strategist, who grew up in Elmira, wrote When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency to demonstrate how the economy is better described as a complex adaptive system rather than as a machine. The narrative of a machine works well for justifying efficiency, profit maximizing, and a winner-take-all mentality.
Martin points to the machine image of seeking efficiency over sufficiency as the main culprit behind the stalled growth and the malaise of our economy. He proposes that seeking a fair distribution of benefits will strengthen our resilience and dynamism. He documents a wide array of alternatives that recognize the non-linear nature of complex systems where the main drivers of the economy – businesses, government, and educators bias their decision-making toward undoing the concentration of benefits that accrue to the winners.
Redistribution, in Martin’s way of thinking, is multileveled and creative, rewarding initiatives and ventures that practice fair distribution. Less is More is a strategy to use the resources we have while fairly redistributing the benefits in ways that build our communities and create opportunities for all.
Post Growth
Tim Jackson in Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, imagines a world beyond capitalism where “relationships and meaning take precedence over profits and power.” Jackson, who is both an economist and a playwriter, seeks to integrate a wider understanding of the role of the economy. Using insights from 200 years of thinking on the meaning of work, entropy, limits, and economics as storytelling, Jackson reminds us of the basic social necessities that humans need to thrive in community. He has deep concerns for the damage caused by relentless growth, inequality, and financial instability. He offers this book as a counter-narrative reminding the reader of the nature of the human condition.
Jackson is deeply concerned for the process of allowing most jobs in the labour market to become a meaningless artifact of our efforts. Work is now a secondary concept, where the efficiency of production is primary. Craft, relationship, dedication, and community have been thrown to the edges of output. The focus of work is no longer the work but the “accelerated process of wasteful consumption.” You can see and feel this process in the way clothing, shoes, furniture, and housewares are produced and distributed. As the work content gets smaller, the marketing content grows. It is well known that consumer products are now mainly throw-away, cheaply made goods that spend the majority of their time being shipped and languishing in warehouses. Not only is the human content lost, so is the meaning of the product and so goes the meaning of work.
What Jackson finds surprising, is how the COVID-19 shutdown has made it crystal clear that our understanding of the meaning of work is backwards. The tragic lesson is that those precarious workers who for decades have seen their hours reduced while living on temporary contracts and minimum wages – all of a sudden became valued workers. These workers used their hands to care, to process, to clean – to essentially keep large sections of our economy operating. For Jackson, these are the very jobs and workers that have been seen as expedient, the target of productivity drives. A changed economy means those who offer care, craft, and service are seen in a new light. An economy for all means the true meaning of work needs to be nurtured and sustained.
The Day the World Stopped Shopping
In March 2020, while J.B. MacKinnon was writing about growing consumerism, the consumer economy briefly collapsed. The Day The World Stops Shopping started as a project to untangle the contradiction that governments need increased consumerism to help pay for rising deficits. The problem is that through an ecological lens, western countries already consume resources five times faster than they can generate. MacKinnon set out to answer the question, how is it possible to reduce consumerism by 25% and not create high unemployment and runaway deficits?
The pandemic gave MacKinnon a front row seat as his experiment went live. The economy survived and people adjusted to working less through income provided by government cheques. Many people were relieved by the reduced pace and the different priorities that emerged. In this experiment government income tanked, but the learning and the experience give us a model for the challenges ahead.
MacKinnon comes up with multiple examples of how to reduce the intensity of consumerism. One idea is going back to a work week where the seventh day is completely shut down, returning to a true restful day off for 90% of the population. Another is to model our level of consumption after countries like Ecuador whose economy is designed to consume resources at a sustainable rate. It is well documented that countries with a mid-range GDP have high levels of quality of living because there is more room for sharing and community building, when the pace is not frantic. A third idea is the development of a circular economy where goods cost more but are 100 percent recyclable. This would slow down the velocity of consuming as there would be incentives to produce goods that are long lasting and then recirculated/recreated through local factories. Just creating systems of local, circular packaging would create jobs and eliminate enormous waste.
MacKinnon fully explores many more ideas that would result in reduced consumption. He is convinced that a lifestyle of lower consumption means less time worrying about status and more time to build relationships and connect with others. MacKinnon demonstrates for the reader that achieving a reduction in consumer society is not only possible, it is desirable.
So how can change happen? Tim Jackson provides insight into this as he summarizes the effects of the COVID-19 shutdown in March 2020:
“With an alacrity that was almost shocking, the coronavirus revealed what capitalism has long denied: that it is possible for government to intervene in the health of society. Dramatically if necessary. To ‘furlough’ workers. To protect livelihoods. To invest in care. To use the sovereign power over money itself – a power denied for ideological reasons by those who would profit from tragedy – as a legitimate vehicle for change.” (p.165)
All three books advocate for dramatic changes in the way society fundamentally operates, while pleading for a wiser use of resources. Governments and businesses can take a stronger lead to generate structures of fairness. Both can double down on rethinking how goods and resources are circulated and how work and income is distributed fairly and sustainably. The years ahead will demand new thinking to navigate the ecological and social challenges ahead. The three books reviewed here give us a glimpse into the road map that can lead us to change.
