Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules–rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form–the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike–at all levels of government and in all three branches–design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians–and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care. 

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government—often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

OUR “UNFREE MARKET”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e., protective legislation) can be helpful. But most “unfreedoms” can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90% of the soybeans and 80% of the cornplanted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325%. For corn, the cost has risen 2,659% between 1994 and 2011. So through its monopolized control of seeds, it is driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market. Admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

SOCIAL INEQUITY BY DESIGN

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937% between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2% over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves. 

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19% since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41% from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50% below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27% of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes: “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.” 

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by wetikos to perpetuate wetiko.

THIRTEEN WAYS TO START FIXING THE PROBLEM

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority, in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life. 

How do we move toward this goal? Here are 13 ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100% publicly financed elections.

2.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.

3.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.

4.  End all corporate financial subsidies.

5.  End insider trading.

6. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.

7.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.

8.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25%.

9.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.

10.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plansand build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.

11.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council (which I cofounded) has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.

12.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.

13.  Mandate that women make up 50% of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must rein in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community, and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world. You can .

Jeffrey Hollender (@JeffHollender) is cofounder and former CEO of Seventh Generation, and now the CEO of Sustain Natural. He is the author of six books, including How to Make the World a Better Place: A Guide to Doing Good.

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here. This article was originally published in Fast Company.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.

[Photos: Flickr users Quinn Dombrowski, John Murphy, Tobin, Adam Swank, brownpau. vitaliy_73 via Shutterstock]

The post 13 Ways We Can Fix The “Free Market” So It Works For Regular People, Not Just The Rich appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For the past seven decades, GDP growth has stood as the primary economic objective of European nations. But as our economies have grown, so has our negative impact on the environment. We are now exceeding the safe operating space for humanity on this planet, and there is no sign that economic activity is being decoupled from resource use or pollution at anything like the scale required. Today, solving social problems within European nations does not require more growth. It requires a fairer distribution of the income and wealth that we already have.

Growth is also becoming harder to achieve due to declining productivity gains, market saturation, and ecological degradation. If current trends continue, there may be no growth at all in Europe within a decade. Right now the response is to try to fuel growth by issuing more debt, shredding environmental regulations, extending working hours, and cutting social protections. This aggressive pursuit of growth at all costs divides society, creates economic instability, and undermines democracy.

Those in power have not been willing to engage with these issues, at least not until now. The European commission’s Beyond GDP project became GDP and Beyond. The official mantra remains growth — redressed as “sustainable”, “green”, or “inclusive” – but first and foremost, growth. Even the new UN sustainable development goals include the pursuit of economic growth as a policy goal for all countries, despite the fundamental contradiction between growth and sustainability.

The good news is that within civil society and academia, a post-growth movement has been emerging. It goes by different names in different places: décroissance, Postwachstum, steady-state or doughnut economics, prosperity without growth, to name a few. Since 2008, regular degrowth conferences have gathered thousands of participants. A new global initiative, the Wellbeing Economies Alliance (or WE-All), is making connections between these movements, while a European research network has been developing new “ecological macroeconomic models”. Such work suggests that it’s possible to improve quality of life, restore the living world, reduce inequality, and provide meaningful jobs – all without the need for economic growth, provided we enact policies to overcome our current growth dependence.

Some of the changes that have been proposed include limits on resource use, progressive taxation to stem the tide of rising inequality, and a gradual reduction in working time. Resource use could be curbed by introducing a carbon tax, and the revenue could be returned as a dividend for everyone or used to finance social programmes. Introducing both a basic and a maximum income would reduce inequality further, while helping to redistribute care work and reducing the power imbalances that undermine democracy. New technologies could be used to reduce working time and improve quality of life, instead of being used to lay off masses of workers and increase the profits of the privileged few.

Given the risks at stake, it would be irresponsible for politicians and policymakers not to explore possibilities for a post-growth future. The conference happening in Brussels is a promising start, but much stronger commitments are needed. As a group of concerned social and natural scientists representing all Europe, we call on the European Union, its institutions, and member states to:

1. Constitute a special commission on post-growth futures in the EU parliament. This commission should actively debate the future of growth, devise policy alternatives for post-growth futures, and reconsider the pursuit of growth as an overarching policy goal.

2. Incorporate alternative indicators into the macroeconomic framework of the EU and its member states. Economic policies should be evaluated in terms of their impact on human wellbeing, resource use, inequality, and the provision of decent work. These indicators should be given higher priority than GDP in decision-making.

3. Turn the stability and growth pact (SGP) into a stability and wellbeing pact. The SGP is a set of rules aimed at limiting government deficits and national debt. It should be revised to ensure member states meet the basic needs of their citizens, while reducing resource use and waste emissions to a sustainable level.

4. Establish a ministry for economic transition in each member state. A new economy that focuses directly on human and ecological wellbeing could offer a much better future than one that is structurally dependent on economic growth.

• Dr Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Federico Demaria, Researcher, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Giorgos Kallis, Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Kate Raworth, Author of ‘Doughnut Economics’, UK
• Dr Tim Jackson, Professor, University of Surrey, UK
• Dr Jason Hickel, Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
• Dr Lorenzo Fioramonti, Professor, University of Pretoria, South Africa
• Dr Marta Conde, President of Research & Degrowth, Spain
• Dr Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, UK
• Dr Steve Keen, Professor, Kingston University, UK
• Dr Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA
• Dr Ann Pettifor, Director, Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME), UK
• Dr Serge Latouche, Université Paris Sud, France
• Dr Kate Pickett, Professor, University of York, UK
• Dr Susan George, President of the Transnational Institute-TNI, Netherlands
• Dr Joan Martinez Alier, Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia
• Dr David Graeber, Professor, London School of Economics, UK
• Dr Juan Carlos Monedero Fernández, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Dr Dominique Méda, Professor, University Paris Dauphine, France
• Dr Lourdes Beneria, Professor Emerita, Cornell University, USA
• Dr Inge Røpke, Professor, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Dr Niko Paech, Professor, University of Siegen, Germany
• Dr Jean Gadrey, Professor, University of Lille, France
• Dr Nadia Johanisova, Lecturer, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
• Dr Wolfgang Sachs, Research Director Emeritus, Wuppertal Institut, Germany
• Dr Stefania Barca, Senior Researcher, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Dr Gilbert Rist, Emeritus Professor, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland
• Dr György Pataki, Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
• Dr Simone D’Alessandro, Professor, University of Pisa, Italy
• Dr Ian Gough, Visiting Professor, London School of Economics, UK
• Dr Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Researcher, University of Valladolid, Spain
• Dr Amaia Pérez Orozco, Researcher, Colectiva XXK, Spain
• Dr Max Koch, Professor, Lund University, Sweden
• Dr Fabrice Flipo, Professor, Institut Mines Télécom-BS et LCSP Paris 7 Diderot, France
• Dr Matthias Schmelzer, Researcher, University of Jena and Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie, Germany
• Dr Óscar Carpintero, Associate Professor, University of Valladolid, Spain
• Dr Hubert Buch-Hansen, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
• Dr Christos Zografos, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
• Dr Tereza Stöckelová, Associate Professor, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
• Dr Alf Hornborg, Professor, Lund University, Sweden
• Dr Eric Clark, Professor, Lund University, Sweden
• Dr Miklós Antal, Researcher, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Jordi Roca Jusmet, Professor, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Philippe Defeyt, Chairman, Institute for Sustainable Development, Belgium
• Dr Erik Swyngedouw, Professor, University of Manchester, UK
• Dr Christian Kerschner, Assistant Professor, Modul University Vienna, Austria
• Dr Agata Hummel, Assistant Professor, University of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland
• Dr Frank Moulaert, Emeritus Professor, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Dr Frank Adler, Researcher, Brandenburg-Berlin Institute for Social Scientific Research, Germany
• Dr Janne I. Hukkinen, Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland
• Dr Jorge Riechmann, Professor, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
• Samuel Martín-Sosa Rodríguez, Responsable de Internacional, Ecologistas en Acción, Spain
• Dr John Barry, Professor, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
• Dr Linda Nierling, Senior Scientist, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Dr Ines Omann, Senior Researcher, Austrian Foundation for Development Research, Austria
• Dr Hug March, Associate Professor, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
• Dr Jakub Kronenberg, Associate Professor, University of Lodz, Poland
• Yayo Herrero, Miembro del Foro de Transiciones, Spain
• Dr Isabelle Anguelovski, Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr François Schneider, Researcher, Research & Degrowth, France
• Dr Vasilis Kostakis, Senior Researcher, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
• Dr Enric Tello, Professor, University of Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Andrew Sayer, Professor, Lancaster University, UK
• Dr Kate Soper, Emerita Professor, London Metropolitan University, UK
• Dr Klaus Hubacek, Professor, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria
• Dr Brent Bleys, Assistant Professor, Ghent University, Belgium
• Dr Jill Jäger, Independent Scholar, Vienna, Austria
• Dr Mauro Gallegati, Professor, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
• Dr Peadar Kirby, Professor Emeritus, University of Limerick, Ireland
• Dr Inés Marco, Researcher, University of Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Ivan Murray Mas, Assistant Lecturer, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain
• Dr Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Assistant Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
• Dr Aurore Lalucq, Co-Director, Veblen Institute, France
• Dr Gaël Plumecocq, Researcher, French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), France
• Dr David Soto Fernández, Associate Professor, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
• Dr Christian Kimmich, Researcher, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic
• Dr Giacomo D’Alisa, Researcher, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Dr Seth Schindler, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester, UK
• Dr Philippe Roman, Researcher, ICHEC Brussels Management School, Belgium
• Dr Lorenzo Pellegrini, Associate Professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Dr Erik Gómez-Baggethun, Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
• Dr Tommaso Luzzati, Assistant Professor, University of Pisa, Italy
• Dr Christoph Gran, ZOE Institute for Future Fit Economies, Germany
• Dr Tor A. Benjaminsen, Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
• Dr Barry McMullin, Professor, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Dr Edwin Zaccai, Professor, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• Dr Jens Friis Lund, Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Dr Pierre Ozer, Researcher, Université de Liège, Belgium
• Dr Louison Cahen-Fourot, Researcher, Institute for Ecological Economics, Wirtschaftsuniversität Vienna, Austria
• Dr Tommaso Rondinella, Researcher, Italian National Institute of Statistics, Italy
• Dr Julia Steinberger, Associate Professor, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Andrew Fanning, Marie Curie Research Fellow, University of Leeds, UK
• Jose Luis Fdez Casadevante Kois, Miembro del Foro Transiciones, Spain
• Dr Seema Arora-Jonsson, Professor, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
• Dr Astrid Agenjo Calderón, Lecturer, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
• Dr Tom Bauler, Professor, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• Dr Gregers Andersen, Independent Researcher, Denmark
• Dr Peter Söderbaum, Professor Emeritus, Mälardalen University, Sweden
• Dr Lourenzo Fernandez Priero, Professor, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain
• Dr John R Porter, Emeritus Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Dr François Thoreau, Senior Researcher, University of Liege, France
• Mariagiulia Costanzo Talarico, Researcher, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
• Dr Maria Nikolaidi, Senior Lecturer, University of Greenwich, UK
• Dr Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden
• Dr Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, Assistant Professor, University of Roskilde, Denmark
• Dimitar Sabev, Researcher, University of National and World Economy, Bulgaria
• Dr Mladen Domazet, Research Director, Institute for Political Ecology, Croatia
• Dr Hans Diefenbacher, Professor, University of Heidelberg, Germany
• Dr Marco Armiero, Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Dr Irene Ring, Professor, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
• Dr Christine Bauhardt, Professor, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
• Dr Dominique Bourg, Professor, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
• Dr Tomas Ryska, Lecturer, University of Economics, Czech Republic
• Dr Filka Sekulova, Researcher, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Andrej Lukšič, Associate Professor, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Dr Adrian Smith, Professor, University of Sussex, UK
  Dr Serenella Iovino, Professor, Università di Torino, Italy
• Dr Helga Kromp-Kolb, Professor, University of Renewable Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria
• Dr Roberto De Vogli, Associate Professor, University of Padova, Italy
• Dr Danijela Dolenec, Assistant Professor, University of Zagreb, Croatia
• Dr Alexandra Köves, Senior Lecturer, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
• Dr Antoine Bailleux, Professor, Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, Belgium
• Dr Christof Mauch, Director, Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Germany
• Ajda Pistotnik, Independent Researcher, EnaBanda, Slovenia
• Dr Branko Ančić, Researcher, Institute for Social Research for Social Research in Zagreb, Croatia
• Dr Marija Brajdic Vukovic, Assistant Professor, University of Zagreb, Croatia
• Dr Manuel González de Molina, Professor, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
• Dr Kye Askins, Reader, University of Glasgow, UK
• Dr Carlos de Castro Carranza, Profesor Titular de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
• Dr Annika Pissin, Researcher, Lund University, Sweden
• Dr Eva Fraňková, Assistant Professor, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Dr Helga Kromp-Kolb, Professor, University of Renewable Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria
• Dr Lidija Živčič, Senior Expert, Focus, Association for Sustainable Development, Slovenia
• Dr Martin Pogačar, Research Fellow, ZRC SAZU, Slovenia
• Dr Peter Nielsen, Associate Professor, Roskilde University, Denmark
• Yaryna Khmara, Researcher, University of Lodz, Poland
• Dr Ika Darnhofer, Associate Professor, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria
• Dr Isabelle Cassiers, Professor, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
• Dr Mihnea Tanasescu, Researcher, Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium
• Dr Daniel Hausknost, Assistant Professor, Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
• Dr Christoph Görg, Professor, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Austria
• Dr Andreas Novy, Professor, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
• Dr Fikret Adaman, Professor, Boğaziçi University, Turkey
• Dr Bengi Akbulut, Assistant Professor, Concordia University, Canada
• Dr Kevin Maréchal, Professor, Université de Liège, Belgium
• Dr Anke Schaffartzik, Researcher, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Milena Buchs, Associate Professor, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Jean-Louis Aillon, Researcher, University of Genova, Italy
• Dr Melanie Pichler, Researcher, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria
• Dr Helmut Haberl, Associate Professor, Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria
• Dr Julien-François Gerber, Assistant Professor, International Institute of Social Studies, Netherlands
• Dr John Holten-Andersen, Associate Professor, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Theresa Klostermeyer, Officer for Sustainability and Social Change, German League for Nature, Animal and Environmental Protection, Germany
• Dr Lyla Mehta, Professor, Institute of Development Studies, UK
• Dr Geneviève Azam, Professor, Université Jean Jaurès, France
• Dr Hermann E. Ott, Professor, University of Sustainable Development Eberswalde, Germany
• Dr Angelika Zahrnt, Professor, Institute for Ecological Economic Research, Germany
• Dr Melissa Leach, Director, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK
• Dr Irmi Seidl, Assistant Professor, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Switzerland
• Dr Shilpi Srivastava, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK
• Dr Elgars Felcis, Researcher, University of Latvia, Chairman of Latvian Permaculture Association, Latvia
• Dr Tilman Santarius, Professor, Technische Universität Berlin and Einstein Center Digital Futures, Germany
• Nina Treu, Coordinator of Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie, Germany
• Dr Laura Horn, Associate Professor, Roskilde University, Denmark
• Jennifer Hinton, Researcher, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Dr Friedrich Hinterberger, President, Sustainable Europe Research Institute, Austria
• Dr Miriam Lang, Assistant Professor, Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, Ecuador
• Dr Susse Georg, Professor, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Dr Silvio Cristiano, Researcher, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘Parthenope’ & Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy
• Dr Petr Jehlička, Senior Lecturer, Open University, UK
• Dr Maja Göpel, Professor, Leuphana University, Member Club of Rome, Germany
• Dr Geraldine Thiry, Associate Professor, ICHEC Brussels Management School, Belgium
• Dr Olivier Malay, Researcher, University of Louvain, Belgium
• Dr Richard Lane, Researcher, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Netherlands
• Dr Laura Centemeri, Researcher, National Centre for Scientific Research, France
• Dr Stephan Lessenich, Professor, Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany
• Timothée Parrique, Researcher, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Dr Ludivine Damay, Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• Dr Janis Brizga, Researcher, University of Latvia, Latvia
• Dr Claudio Cattaneo, Associate Professor, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Miquel Ortega Cerdà, Advisor, Barcelona City Council
• Dr Olivier De Schutter, Professor, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
• Dr Annalisa Colombino, Assistant Professor, Institute of Geography and Regional Sciences, University of Graz, Austria
• Dr Philip von Brockdorff, Head of the Department of Economics, University of Malta, Malta
• Dr Sarah Cornell, Senior Researcher, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Dr Ruth Kinna, Professor, Loughborough University, UK
• Francesco Gonella, Professor, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy
• Orsolya Lazanyi, Researcher, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
• Dr Eva Friman, Director at Swedesd, Uppsala University, Sweden
• Dr Pernilla Hagbert, Researcher, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Vincent Liegey, Co-Author of ‘A Degrowth Project’, Hungary
• Dr Manlio Iofrida, Associate Professor, University of Bologna, Italy
• Dr Mauro Bonaiuti, Lecturer, University of Turin, Italy
• Dr Marco Deriu, Researcher, University of Parma, Italy
• Dr Eeva Houtbeckers, Postdoctoral Researcher, Aalto University, Finland
• Dr Guy Julier, Professor, Aalto University, Finland
• Dr Anna Kaijser, Lecturer, Linköping University, Sweden
• Dr Petter Næss, Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
• Dr Irina Velicu, Researcher, Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Dr Ulrich Brand, Professor, University of Vienna, Austria
• Dr Christina Plank, Researcher, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria
• Dr Karolina Isaksson, Senior Research Leader, Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Sweden
• Dr Jin Xue, Associate Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
• Dr Rasmus Steffansen, Researcher, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
• Dr Irmak Ertör, Researcher, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Dr Maria Hadjimichael, Researcher, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• Dr Carlo Aall, Researcher, Western Norway Research Institute, Norway
• Dr Claudiu Craciun, Lecturer, National School of Political Studies and Administration (SNSPA), Romania
• Dr Tuuli Hirvilammi, Researcher, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
• Dr Tuula Helne, Senior Researcher, The Social Insurance Institution of Finland, Finland
• Davide Biolghini, Researcher, Rete italiana Economia Solidale (RES), Italy
• Dr Pasi Heikkurinen, Lecturer, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Anne Tittor, Researcher, University of Jena, Germany
• Dr Dennis Eversberg, Researcher, University of Jena, Germany
• Dr Herman Stål, Lecturer, Umea School of Business, Economics and Statistics, Sweden
• Dr Hervé Corvellec, Professor, Lund University, Sweden
• Dr Anna Heikkinen, Researcher, University of Tampere, Finland
• Dr Karl Bonnedahl, Researcher, Umea University, Sweden
• Dr Meri Koivusalo, Professor, University of Tampere, Finland
• Dr Martin Fritz, Researcher, Bielefeld University, Germany
• Dr Daniel Bergquist, Researcher, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
• Dr Yuri Kazepov, Professor, University of Vienna, Austria
• Dr Salvador Pueyo, Researcher, Universitat de Barcelona, Catalonia
• Dr Lars Rydén, Professor, Uppsala University, Sweden
• Patrick ten Brink, Director of EU Policy, European Environmental Bureau, Belgium
• Dr Ebba Lisberg Jensen, Associate Professor, Malmö University, Sweden
• Dr Alevgul H. Sorman, Researcher, Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Spain
• Dr Aram Ziai, Professor, University of Kassel, Germany
• Dr Panos Petridis, Researcher, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Austria
• Dr Gary Dymski, Professor, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Markus Wissen, Professor, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany
• Dr Wendy Harcourt, Professor, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University, The Netherlands
• Dr John Barrett, Professor, University of Leeds, UK
• Dr Silke van Dyk, Professor, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany
• Dr Vasna Ramasar, Senior Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden
• Danijela Tamše, Managing Editor of the Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination, and New Anthropology, Slovenia
• Dr Camil Ungureanu, Associate Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• Dr Mirela Holy, Lecturer, VERN’ University of Zagreb, Croatia

Cross-posted from The Guardian
Photo by wackybadger

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Photo by Christopher Lane Photography

The post Is it time for a post-growth economy? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Martin Kirk: When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he’s alluding, at least in part, to the promise of economic growth. Just as when Bill Clinton said, “it’s the economy, stupid,” he was really saying that “it’s about economic growth, stupid.” This is the Golden Promise of politics: more economic growth. Golden, because it is effortlessly translated in voters’ minds to mean more jobs, more money in the economy, and therefore more income in everyone’s pockets. Because economic growth is, obviously, a thing greatly to be desired.

Equally obvious is the knowledge that no economic growth is a bad thing. When economies and companies don’t grow, they stagnate and falter. Which means fewer jobs, lower wages, less money to invest, more business shut downs, and bankruptcies. In short, more misery for all.

It’s all so obvious, right? It’s one of the precious few things we can all agree on in this fractious age.

But there are some new strains of thought that take a more nuanced and sophisticated view of growth. That say, yes, all other things being equal, economic growth is a positive thing. But all other things are not equal. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and, for all its positives, economic growth has a dark side; its ecological impact. The impacts of our ever-growing economy have become so stark and so widespread that they are by any sane measure portents to catastrophe. Whether it’s the fact that Antarctic ice is now melting three times faster than we thought, or the unfolding “biological annihilation” that has already wiped out 50% of all animals and up to 75% of all insects, or the fact that, in spite of all this, we are pumping out CO2 at record levels, it takes willful ignorance or a blinding ideology to deny the severity of the crisis.

This creates a terrible paradox: Economic growth keeps economies stable today, but threatens not just future growth but medium-term social and civilizational cohesion, and ultimately the very capacity of this biosphere to sustain life. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year suggested that “the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most.” And that even this dire prediction is considered “conservative” by the authors, “given the increasing trajectories of the drivers of extinction.” In terms of practical politics, that means acting immediately, preferably yesterday.

Most politicians deal with this paradox by ignoring it. It’s by far the easiest option; one afforded every incentive and reward by this political economy and the beliefs that underpin it. This belief system has been dominant for a long time now. We are, as a society, deeply comfortable with it, which means many of its core assumptions are considered unassailable–too obvious to question. The most profound being this idea that growth is always good. Questioning this amounts to political suicide for any politician.

Or, at least, it used to. We are starting to see some movement in interesting corners of the global political landscape that suggest that some leaders are showing the sort of political courage needed to shift established norms. It may well be starting to become something of a bonafide political movement. It’s young and small, still, but so were all movements at one time.

A little thought experiment shows how growth can be a problem: Insert the word “a” before it. “A growth.” That feels very different from just “growth,” right? Growth is a big part of what we all understand happens in a healthy life. Children grow, knowledge grows, love grows. But “a growth” is what happens when life gets corrupted. “A growth” is when the growth is unchecked, and thus a symptom not of health but disease; when it takes on the character of an invader, attacking its host. The word for growth that gets out of control in this way, such that it becomes “a growth,” is, of course, cancer.

But wait, I hear you cry, technological progress will save us! We can just grow meat in test tubes rather than needing so much land and clean air space for cows and their methane-laden farts, or we can all switch to renewable energy, or recycle more and better, and then we can get back to the promise of infinite growth. Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is simply not possible. Yes, we can make dents in our impact with such measures, and we should with all possible speed, but the way the global economy is currently programmed means such things are important–but also entirely insufficient.

So, once we discard the vain hope of being able to grow the economy infinitely and indefinitely, what are we looking at? This is where the innovation and bravery come in.

A new alliance was formed in 2017, called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. What they are shooting for is one–or many different–economic model(s) that have, “the fundamental goal of achieving sustainable well-being with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of Nature.” Which means they cannot just reach for socialism or any other historical model–socialism, like capitalism, relies on growth, as does communism. They have recognized that we can’t rely on past thinking; we must genuinely put our best brains forward and innovate.

We’re not talking about a bunch of random, dreamy utopians here, but real politicians who have won real elections and are exercising real power. So far, the roster of governments signing up to the Alliance includes Scotland, Costa Rica, Slovenia, and New Zealand. Other governments that are actively looking at the issue include Italy, and there are political parties emerging, like the Alternative Party in Denmark, which is also embracing the innovation challenge. These are not what are often referred to as Tier 1 countries in the international order, but neither are they so small they are irrelevant.

Scotland, for example, provides a direct line into both the U.K. and (at least for the time being) the EU. Costa Rica has long been a pioneer of innovative economic and social thinking, with impressive results: It is routinely in the top three countries in the world when measured for the well-being and happiness of their people. New Zealand is, perhaps, the most newly bold. Its prime minster has not only called growth-at-all-costs capitalism “a “blatant failure” but also has said her government would no longer accept GDP as the sole, supreme measure of progress. “The measures for us have to change,” she said in October last year. “We need to make sure we are looking at people’s ability to actually have a meaningful life, an enjoyable life, where their work is enough to survive and support their families.”

And this is where social and economic forces start to align in very interesting and potentially powerful ways. And open the door for seeing electoral strategies in an agenda based on innovations to take us beyond traditional growth-at-all-costs economics.

Consider a few facts: More than 50% of millennials say they would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values, while 90% want to use their skills for good. And these trends are on the up. Deloitte’s 7th Annual Millennial Survey of 12,000 young people, for example–both millennials and gen Z–reports record low opinions of businesses. Fewer than half now believe that businesses behave ethically, and this directly affects how loyal they feel to their employers; 43% of millennials and a whopping 61% of gen-Zers expect to stay in a job no more than two years. And all this against a backdrop of general public opinion that is also looking increasingly unkindly on the economic paradigm we have.

These are conditions that can be worked with. They show that there is a large and growing instinct out there that thinks that we need fundamental change to the way we do economics. Not tweaking around the edges, but fundamental change at the very roots of the global economy. There is no neat or reliable evidence to suggest that challenging infinite growth is at the top of peoples’ minds, or likely to be a particularly easy sell. But there is significant doubt in growth-at-all-costs capitalism, and that is an opportunity for innovation. Combine that with the new thinking coming out of places like the Wellbeing Alliance, and you can start to sense the causes and conditions may well be aligning in favor of the emergence of wholly new, post-growth economies. It cannot come soon enough.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Cross-posted from Fast Company

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This is appealing to the liberal mind — it provides an apparent middle ground and removes the need to question the logic of the global economy. We can continue on our current trajectory if we make the “right” reforms and get the “right” kind of technology.

The hope of green growth is embedded everywhere, from the majority of domestic economic plans to major international policy schemes like the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. By uncritically supporting these policies, we are unwittingly perpetuating the neoliberal fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Logic of “Green Growth”

In some ways, the math is quite simple. We know that the Earth can only safely sustain our consumption at or below 50 billion tons of stuff each year. This includes everything from raw materials to livestock, minerals to metals: everything humans consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year — roughly 60 percent more than the safe limit. In order for growth to be “green,” or at least not life-destroying, we need to get back down to 50 billion tons while continuing to grow GDP.

A team of scientists ran a model showing that, under the current business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. That’s more than three times the safe limit. This type of economic growth threatens all life on this planet.

In the hopes of finding more optimistic results, the UN Environment Program conducted its own research last year. The team introduced various optimistic assumptions, including a carbon price of $573 per ton and a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation. They found that even with these policies, we will still hit 132 billion tons of consumption per a year by 2050.

In a recent article in Fast Company, Jason Hickel, a leading economic anthropologist, argues that there is no evidence to support green growth hopes. He concludes that although we will need all the strong policies we can get — carbon taxes, resources extraction taxes, more efficient technology, etc. — the only way to bring our economy back in line with our planet’s ecology is to reduce our consumption and production.

This is the core problem that no one wants to address. This is the taboo of Western civilization — the ground zero of values. It is the reason we make up fictions like green growth.

In order to start imagining and achieving real alternatives, we first have to dispose of the false solutions and distractions that pervade the discourse on social change. Right now, it is incumbent on the progressive movement to challenge green growth or any other prophylactic logic that keeps us bound within the ideological concrete of growth as our only option.

Growth as Distributed Fascism

Our global economy is a Ponzi scheme. We have a debt-based economic system that requires growth to exceed interest rates in order for money to be valuable. The World Bank and others tell us that we have to grow the global economy at a minimum of 3 percent per year in order to avoid recession. That means we will double the size of the global economy every 20 years.

For capital holders — rich countries and the rich within countries — this makes complete sense. They disproportionately benefit from the growth system. Growth is the source of their power. It is what keeps them not just rich, but ever-richer — which means ever-more powerful. They are where they are in this system because their interests align with the “Prime Directive” of the system: more capital for its own sake. The reason the people currently in power are in power is because they believe in growth, and because they are good at delivering it. That is the sole qualification for their jobs. Of course, they are not going to be able to see the problems growth causes; they are, by job-definition and personal identity, growth-fanatics.

As for the rest of us, we are tied into this system because growth is the basis for our livelihood, it is the source of our jobs, and our jobs are what allow us to survive in the debt regime.

It’s a tightly woven system that requires our collective complicity. Although we may know that every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet and creates more inequality, we are tied into the system through necessity and a set of values that tells us that selfishness is rational, and indeed, the innately and rightly dominant human behavior we must orient around. We’re coerced into a form of distributed fascism where we as individuals extract more, consume more, destroy more and accumulate more, without ever being able to step back to see the totality of a more holistic worldview.

Post-Growth as Localism

So, what must be done? The first place to start is to challenge the growth dependency of the current operating system. Then we start looking for the antidote logic. Capitalism is characterized by its imposition of monolithic values — the final outcome of the “American Dream” is for everyone to live as consumers in pre-fabricated houses; leveraged by Wells Fargo mortgages; living off Citibank credit cards; wearing Nike shoes; distracted by Facebook, Google and Apple products; drinking Nestle bottled water; and eating Monsanto laboratory foods, while bobbing our heads to Miley Cyrus or Jay-Z.

The antigen to monoculture is polyculture — many ways of being and living. This requires a transition to localism, which is another way of saying ways of life in which we are connected to our environment, so we see and understand the impacts of our consumption. Localism creates contexts in which we can look into the eyes of the people who make our clothes and grow our food, so that our choices can be informed by their impact on human relationships and well-being, not just convenience and a price tag.

This means working to strengthen local communities and create far more self-sufficient economies. Luckily, we have on hand ready guides and knowledge in the Indigenous cultures that have survived longest on this planet, and whose way of organizing and being are in greatest harmony with the biosphere. It means actively opting out of globalized industrialism as much as we can, by creating interdependence through sharing and cooperation, rather than dependence on economic trade and extraction.

At a national level, we could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator or a Bhutanese style Gross National Happiness, which are built around life-centric, intrinsic values and take account of negative externalities like pollution and resource degradation. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t necessitate endless growth and debt. And we could put caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the planet can regenerate.

This type of post-growth thinking must become the central organizing principle of society the way “self-determination” was the operating principle of post-World War I society (at least in rhetoric). Localization should be the rallying cry of both nation-states and communities alike who are nimble and brave enough to transcend the shadows of scarcity and self-interest. Localism requires a sensitivity and attunement to local contexts, geographies, histories and cultures. It requires us to contract new types of relationships with each other, with ourselves, with the state, and with Nature itself.

There is no traditional blueprint for these types of economic models. This may seem daunting. But our current trajectory is even more daunting. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively rejects the false god of growth and chooses a different path, our current economic system will crash under its own weight and take most life as we know it with it. As the late British economist David Fleming reminds us, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.”

Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules, a global collective of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change.

Photo by Aimée Wheaton

The post From “Green Growth” to Post-Growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

And the more we grow, the more we eat away at the web of life on which we all depend.

We have known about this problem for decades now, but we’ve been told not to worry: As technology improves and becomes more efficient, we’ll be able to keep growing the economy while nonetheless reducing our impact on the natural world. The technical term for this is “green growth,” which requires absolute decoupling of GDP from material use. According to the theory, we can speed this process along by incentivizing innovation; if we tax carbon emissions and material extraction, we can spur companies to invest in more efficient tech.

It sounds great, it’s promoted at the highest levels by tech billionaires like Elon Musk and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations, and it sits right at the center of big global plans like the Paris Climate Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. We’re all hanging our collective future on this hope. But is it really possible?

Here’s the magic number: 50 billion tons. That’s how much of the Earth’s materials and life forms we can safely use each year. That includes everything from wood to plastic, fish to livestock, minerals to metals: all the physical stuff that we consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year–way over the limit. So for growth to be green, we need to somehow get back down to 50 billion tons despite expanding the GDP.

When green growth theory was first proposed, there was no evidence on whether it would actually work–it was purely speculative. But over the past few years, three major studies have set out to examine this question. All have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under best-case scenario conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP growth from material use is not possible on a global scale.

It was a team of scientists led by Monika Dittrich that first pointed this out. They ran a model showing that under business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. At more than three times the safe limit, that means game over for human civilization as we know it.

Then the team ran the model with the optimistic assumption that every nation on Earth immediately adopts best practice in efficiency, with all the best available technology. The results were a bit better: We would end up hitting 93 billion tons per year by 2050. But that’s not absolute decoupling, and it’s a far cry from anything approaching green growth.

A second team of scientists tested the same question again in 2016, and found that even aggressive measures like a carbon price as high as $250 per ton and a doubling of technological efficiency don’t do the trick. If we keep growing the global economy by 3% each year, they found, we’ll still hit about 95 billion tons by 2050. No absolute decoupling. No green growth.

Finally, last year the United Nations itself weighed in on the debate, hoping to settle the matter once and for all. It modelled a carbon price rising to a whopping $573 per ton, added a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid tech innovation spurred by strong government policy. The results? We hit 132 billion tons by 2050–even worse than the two previous studies found. Worse because this time the scientists included the “rebound effect”in their model. As gains in efficiency reduce the cost of commodities, demand for those commodities goes up, cancelling out some of the reductions in material use.

And let’s not forget: All three of these models use radically optimistic assumptions. We’re a long way from even testing a global carbon tax, much less a tax of $573 per ton; and we’re not on track to double our efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite: Right now our efficiency is getting worse, not better.Why the bad news? The main reason is that tech innovation just doesn’t work the way most of us assume. We know that Moore’s law says that chip performance doubles about every two years–but this doesn’t apply to material use. There are physical limits to material efficiency, and once we start to reach them then the scale effect of growth drives material use back up in the long run. For instance you might be able to produce a wooden table more efficiently, but you can’t produce a table out of nothing. In the end you’ll need a minimum amount of wood, and once you reach that limit, then any growth in table production is going to come along with a corresponding growth in wood use.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of these results. Right now, our only plan for dealing with the ecological emergency that’s staring us in the face is to hope that tech innovation and green growth will mitigate the coming disaster. Yes, we’re going to need all the wizardry we can get–but that alone is not going to be enough. The only real option is in fact much simpler and more obvious: We need to start consuming less.

The tricky bit is that our existing economic operating system–capitalism–has a design flaw at its core. It requires that we produce and consume more and more stuff each year. If we don’t, then firms collapse and people lose their jobs and livelihoods. So it’s time to make room for new systems to emerge–systems that don’t require endless exponential growth just to stay afloat. This is where we need to focus our creative energy, rather than clinging to the false hope of “green growth” fantasies.

There are lots of ways to get there. We could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of a more balanced measure like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which accounts for negative “externalities” like pollution and material depletion. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t pump our system full of interest-bearing debt. And we could start thinking about putting caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the Earth can regenerate.

The old generation of innovators believed that tech would allow us to subdue nature and bend it to our will. Our generation is waking up to a more hopeful truth: that our survival depends not on domination, but on harmony.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the University of London who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa. He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, is available now.

Photo by eelke dekker

The post Better Technology Isn’t The Solution To Ecological Collapse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

That’s how much of the Earth’s materials and life forms we can safely use each year, without destroying the web of life.  That includes everything from wood to plastic, fish to livestock, minerals to metals: all the physical stuff that we consume.

Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year – way over the limit.  So for growth to be green, we need to somehow get back down to 50 billion tons despite expanding GDP.

When green growth theory was first mooted, there was no evidence on whether it would actually work – it was purely speculative.  But over the past few years, three major studies have set out to examine this question.

A team of scientists led by Monika Dittrich ran a model showing that under business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050.  At well over three times the safe limit, that means game over for human civilization as we know it.

Then the team ran the model with the optimistic assumption that every nation on Earth immediately adopts best practice in efficiency, with all the best available technology.  The results were a bit better: we would end up hitting 93 billion tons per year by 2050. But that’s not absolute decoupling, and it’s a far cry from anything approaching green growth.

A second team of scientists tested the same question again in 2016.  They chose a different approach: they put a price on carbon rising to $250 per ton, and assumed that we double our efficiency with rapid tech innovation.  The results were almost exactly the same. If we keep growing the global economy by 3% each year – which is what the World Bank and IMP say is required to stop this economic house of cards from collapsing  – they found that we’ll still hit about 95 billion tons by 2050. No absolute decoupling. No green growth.

Finally, last year the UN Environment Program itself – one of the main cheerleaders of green growth theory – weighed in on the debate, hoping to settle the matter once and for all.   They modelled a carbon price rising to a whopping $573 per ton, slapped on a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid tech innovation spurred by strong government policy.  The results? We hit 132 billion tons by 2050 – even worse than the two previous studies found. Worse because this time the scientists included the “rebound effect” in their model.  As gains in efficiency reduce the cost of commodities, demand for those commodities goes up, cancelling out some of the reductions in material use.

And let’s not forget: all three of these models use radically optimistic assumptions.  We’re a long way from even testing a global carbon tax, much less a tax of $573 per ton; and we’re not on track to double our efficiency.  In fact, quite the opposite: right now our efficiency is getting worse, not better.

We cannot rely on the myth of ‘green growth’. It’s trustworthy as ‘healthy cigarettes’ or ‘clean coal’.

So it’s time to make room for new systems to emerge – systems that don’t require endless exponential growth just to stay afloat.

There are lots of ways to get there.

We could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of a more balanced measure like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which accounts for negative “externalities” like pollution and material depletion.   We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t pump our system full of interest-bearing debt. And we could start thinking about putting caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the Earth can regenerate.

The old generation of innovators believed that tech would allow us to subdue nature and bend it to our will.  Our generation is waking up to a more hopeful truth: that our survival depends not on domination, but on harmony.

More information on post-growth economics

The Post-Growth Institute – https://www.postgrowth.org/post-growth-economics

Culture Hackers towards #PostGrowth: share, remix, create your own content.

Cross-posted from The Rules. 

The post Can We Trust ‘Green Growth’? DIY Fact Check appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AL: Firstly, I want to express my deep gratitude for Tamera, for the pioneering research you are doing here, and for doing this work for so long, in the face of a slow-moving, defensive culture. This is my third time here and every time I’m back, I feel more immersed in the field that you’ve co-created. There are two related questions that I want to start with: (1) how do we expand this field of healing and solidarity, both vertically and horizontally (2) and what do you think needs to happen globally in order for these ideas to become widely accepted?

Dieter Duhm during an interview.

DD: Thank you for being here. What has to be done to spread the ideas for an intact Earth are two things: first, the proper utilization of our global information system – the Internet and other media – for spreading basic information in service of human liberation from the existing systems of political power. That is one global track we need to establish everywhere, in a language that can be understood everywhere. At the same time, there is another level where certain groups on Earth transform their inner system of life, where the inner issues of sex, love, partnership, community, authority, power are being solved. These are groups that find this place of truth within themselves and between each other, where all those interpersonal struggles are being worked on. We need both, the two levels – the new groups for this inner anchor and a global information field for the anchor in the world.

AL: Is it possible that this can happen in the next twenty years? Are you hopeful?

DD: I only know that this is absolutely necessary. I personally am hopeful but I realize how long this kind of change takes. Building the global field for the new information has so far always failed due to the conflicts within the groups. I have for many years been active in the Marxist movement, in the German student movement. I realized we can never establish the Marxist struggle against the imperialist economy so long as people in the movement fight each other. It’s been the same for fifty years.

Sculpture shows the sign for Tamera and the Healing Biotopes Plan at the shore of Tamera’s big lake.

I believe that we, as humanity, are at a place in our evolution where the shift can happen really quickly. We are in the midst of a transformational process that is accelerating exponentially. Many people are already experiencing this transformation. We are reaching the point where we can start to communicate about this and share wisdom among these new nodal points of change. In that sense, I am hopeful.

AL: Yes, hope seems to be the only path. Despair is a luxury for the privileged. There’s the old Buckminster Fuller line: we have a choice between utopia or oblivion. Do you think our option set is this binary?

DD: Buckminster Fuller was totally right in this place. Either we come to utopia or we will perish. There is no third way. A large part of our intellectual culture tries to find a third path, like the Social Democratic parties. They neither want concrete utopia nor to perish, but there is no other way. We are globally at the place of total decision. Humanity is unequivocally at this decision-making point.

AL: In some ways, the reformists and the liberals are more the problem than the Rightwing reactionaries. I’m sure you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s line from The Soul of Man Under Socialism where he said that the worst slave owners were the ones who treated their slaves well because they actually removed their conditions for emancipation.

DD: Intelligent, violent rule uses sugar, and only afterwards the whip. First, they feed you sugar so you will obey; however, if you don’t obey, you will be eliminated. In that regard, the statement is true but only partially so. I am still glad that slaves aren’t treated as brutally. Sometimes I’m happy that there is still a liberal system in Germany. It’s difficult to accept, but in some ways, those are the buffers that still save us from the worst at the moment. It doesn’t matter how hypocritical they are. This is still a buffer for the existing society so that not everything falls into catastrophe right away.

AL: What were the key moments that allowed you to arrive at your personal philosophy? How did you become free – intellectually, spiritually, etc.?

DD: My childhood was difficult. After the Second World War, my family had to flee from Berlin to Southern Germany, and when we got there, near Lake Constance, the parents told their children, “Drive out those refugee children.” The parents had nothing to eat and the neighbors vented their anger against us. And the neighbor’s children persecuted us. They treated us in an incredibly terrible way. They undressed us and threw us into the nettles and put tar on us. They tied us to a pole and threw shit at us, and such things. There wasn’t the possibility for a refugee child to get out of this situation. And at the same time, I kept going back to these strawberries, and the flowers in the fields. And the little Viola flowers at the side of the cereal fields. This was my home, in Nature, and this is where I encountered God. And through these experiences I knew, in addition to the cruelty of this world, there is healing, there is this higher power, and I followed it.

I always wanted to go back to Nature, to the places where there were no people so I could find this connection with God again. Until God told me, “Now you need to go to the people”. And so, I learned to do that too.

AL: This connection between struggle and liberation and politics and spirituality, how do you see this playing out in the global political field? What needs to happen?

DD: We need to enter into the universal field of healing, of life, in which all living beings are interconnected. We call this field the “sacred matrix.” We need to know that. We need to know that, for example, the peace community of San José de Apartadó [based in Colombia], are connected with this healing field. And then we need a group of people here that comes together in that knowledge and sends them a message. A message that reminds the people over there, telling them, “You are part of this healing field.”

Healing also consists of connecting with this healing field itself. That is the miracle of Life. What we need to do is to globalize the miracle of Life. Yes, we need to globalize the miracle of life. The original power field of Life has to be opened to the whole planet. It is of course there anyway, but we need to connect with it consciously. We need to activate it by manifesting it in real communities. That’s a political task of a new kind. If a small but critical mass does this, then the global healing field will be activated. It’s very simple and very possible, and of course, we have no other choice but to make this happen.

AL: In some ways, this is the message for the ones who want to listen, but what would you say to the power elites, the one percenters?

DD:  We don’t need to tell them anything special. We want to create a global morphogenetic field based on the sacred matrix that’s capable of overcoming the existing system. The other thing is – the members of the “one percent” are also just humans. Some of them will realize early enough that it’s good to change sides and support the new system. In the gatherings we are hosting in Portugal, Colombia and the United States, we often have high-ranking representatives of the existing system who know very well that global capitalism has become untenable. We have to build a public lobby that can be heard, a lobby that’s a bit stronger than the NGO complex and is focused on supporting Life.

We need to set an example in the public conscience for an efficient political power which is no longer an opposition, neither inside nor outside of parliament. This belongs to the past. Le Corbusier, the famous architect, said, “We make the revolution by offering the solution.” So, lets find a group of influential people that collaborate in the solution.

AL: I’d like to pivot to a more controversial question: what do you think the role of psychedelics are in the revolution?

DD: Humanity has had a culture of sacraments, medicines and drugs throughout history. We need a sensible continuation of the global traditions of medicine that we’ve had all over the Earth. The question is: which plants, and under which circumstances?

I think that groups that want to reconnect with the universal consciousness should work with the helping agents in a very conscious and ritualistic way. This is how it’s always been. In most cultures, a symbiotic relationship with medical plants is normal. What is abnormal is the life we are leading in the West, the mental sickness of our times, and the collective abuse of the sacred plants.

We now need to translate the experiential content of the medicine work and shamanic practices into real social structures and continuous Life practices, into genuine spirituality.

AL: Let’s transition to what might seem a more banal question in a place like Tamera. I know you spend a lot of time exploring the role of Eros here. Why do you think that the Left resists it so much?

DD: This may sound like I’m avoiding the question but bear with me. It could be related to the biography of certain key characters in the historical trajectory of the Left. For example, Karl Marx had a housekeeper, a woman, where he lived in Trier, that he desired for years.  As he was walking up and down his carpet, developing his thoughts, he was probably deeply repressed [laughter]. He couldn’t deal with his own sexuality. And he’s just one of many unembodied men who transposed their pathologies into their writings, in the cannon of Leftist thought.

Leftist dogma has been so limited by Dialectical Materialism. The theory didn’t leave any space for the woman, for the body, for Eros. They really believed that with their concept of political economy, they would be able to change the world. But it was written by a sexually repressed young Marx in Trier, to the foibles and limitations of human experience. It’s incredible how much global movements or ideas can be bound to a single person.

AL: I can only imagine what it must have been like in post-World War II Germany, being as liberated as you were, to hold these types of ideas. Now, forty years later, do you feel like the world is catching up or do you feel a mounting sense of frustration?

DD: I didn’t know that it would take so much time. I was totally frustrated for many years, yes.I couldn’t relate to most of my comrades in Germany, and I don’t think they understood my ideas. When I wrote the book Fear in Capitalism in 1972, it became a best-seller, and was widely read among Leftist circles in Germany. I thought that was an opening to a broader discourse. But all of the books that followed were just rejected. It was a collective rejection. It was a defense against specific insights in the realm of sexuality and our inner driving powers. They were based on a different emphasis than simply rational economics.

My thoughts didn’t fit with the thoughts of consensus culture. I felt like a singularity. I was a lone rider, a crazy. Year after year, I needed to see how I could stay faithful to my path, how I could continue. And Sabine helped me [Sabine Lichtenfelds is Dieter’s life partner and the co-founder of Tamera].

I was never just simply frustrated though. It was more complex than that. I knew at some point there would be a change and now the shift is happening, there is a lot of work to be done. And it’s exciting. There are many co-workers here who look forward to this work. Tamera and I are in a new situation. The next generation is taking the reins – they understand the critique of the existing system and they are embodying the solutions.

AL: Do you have any sense of regret, or lessons, in the way you’ve lived your political life?

DD: No, I don’t have regrets in a linear sense. Perhaps I wasn’t courageous enough in some ways. I regret that I had such a thin skin, that I didn’t have enough power to accelerate the process. I made so many mistakes that I don’t regret [laughter]. You know, if you’ve been misunderstood and harvest negative projections all the time, you get angry. You condemn other people, you go in this hostility state. I wish I didn’t treat anyone unjustly on this path. And if I did, well sometimes, there was no other way and I am sorry.

AL: For me and many activists of this next generation, we see what you’ve done as the hugely courageous and radical, especially in the context and era that you did it in.

DD: It’s hard to say.

At some point, I realized, my life is guided. I no longer needed to do the exercise of courage, but I needed to agree to what was required of me, the decisions that were required of me. The decision to step out of my profession, to give away my possessions, to let go of my marriage, and to do all these things at once was a decision I had to make. But I didn’t need courage. It was just like it was.

AL: So the courage to be carried and the courage to choose Life is the ultimate courage?

DD: Yes, if you want to say that. We do need that kind of courage, yes.

International peace pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine in 2007, initiated by Tamera.

DD: To help establish the new infrastructure, the new systems. To help establish the network according to where your talents are and your joys. To help build communities around the world. The new system consists of these two tracks: the upper and the lower, the spiritual and the political. We must help create communication between these two tracks. We must create a new language that brings these two tracks together. And we must show our solidarity for the various resistances that are actively protecting the sacred. When communities in places like Standing Rock start to see that we are standing with them, they will see that they are embedded in an international community. Together we can reconnect with the original power field of Life. If we can start to believe again in this planetary community then a global field will arise in which Indigenous knowledge can come together with a futurological perspective. And that is a great vision to serve.

AL: Deep gratitude to you and Sabine, and thank you for blazing the trail for all of us.

Cross-posted from Kosmos Online

All images courtesy Tamera

About the Author

Alnoor Ladha, Co-founder, Executive Director – The Rules (www.therules.org)

Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, storytelling and technology. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of /The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

Photo by RAM DAIRY

The post The Deschooling Dialogues: An Interview with Dr. Dieter Duhm appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy by about 1.9% per year, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That’s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3% per year, which means we’re headed for trouble.

If we want to have any hope of averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to do something about our addiction to growth. This is tricky, because GDP growth is the main policy objective of virtually every government on the planet. It lies at the heart of everything we’ve been told to believe about how the economy should work: that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress, and that if we want to improve human wellbeing and eradicate poverty around the world, we need more of it. It’s a powerful narrative. But is it true?

Maybe not. Take Costa Rica. A beautiful Central American country known for its lush rainforests and stunning beaches, Costa Rica proves that achieving high levels of human wellbeing has very little to do with GDP and almost everything to do with something very different.

Every few years the New Economics Foundation publishes the Happy Planet Index – a measure of progress that looks at life expectancy, wellbeing and equality rather than the narrow metric of GDP, and plots these measures against ecological impact. Costa Rica tops the list of countries every time. With a life expectancy of 79.1 years and levels of wellbeing in the top 7% of the world, Costa Rica matches many Scandinavian nations in these areas and neatly outperforms the United States. And it manages all of this with a GDP per capita of only $10,000 (£7,640), less than one fifth that of the US.

In this sense, Costa Rica is the most efficient economy on earth: it produces high standards of living with low GDP and minimal pressure on the environment.

How do they do it? Professors Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea argue that it’s all down to Costa Rica’s commitment to universalism: the principle that everyone – regardless of income – should have equal access to generous, high-quality social services as a basic right. A series of progressive governments started rolling out healthcare, education and social security in the 1940s and expanded these to the whole population from the 50s onward, after abolishing the military and freeing up more resources for social spending.

Costa Rica wasn’t alone in this effort, of course. Progressive governments elsewhere in Latin America made similar moves, but in nearly every case the US violently intervened to stop them for fear that “communist” ideas might scupper American interests in the region. Costa Rica escaped this fate by outwardly claiming to be anti-communist and – horribly – allowing US-backed forces to use the country as a base in the contra war against Nicaragua.

The upshot is that Costa Rica is one of only a few countries in the global south that enjoys robust universalism. It’s not perfect, however. Relatively high levels of income inequality make the economy less efficient than it otherwise might be. But the country’s achievements are still impressive. On the back of universal social policy, Costa Rica surpassed the US in life expectancy in the late 80s, when its GDP per capita was a mere tenth of America’s.

Today, Costa Rica is a thorn in the side of orthodox economics. The conventional wisdom holds that high GDP is essential for longevity: “wealthier is healthier”, as former World Bank chief economist Larry Summers put it in a famous paper. But Costa Rica shows that we can achieve human progress without much GDP at all, and therefore without triggering ecological collapse. In fact, the part of Costa Rica where people live the longest, happiest lives – the Nicoya Peninsula – is also the poorest, in terms of GDP per capita. Researchers have concluded that Nicoyans do so well not in spite of their “poverty”, but because of it – because their communities, environment and relationships haven’t been ploughed over by industrial expansion.

All of this turns the usual growth narrative on its head. Henry Wallich, a former member of the US Federal Reserve Board, once pointed out that “growth is a substitute for redistribution”. And it’s true: most politicians would rather try to rev up the GDP and hope it trickles down than raise taxes on the rich and redistribute income into social goods. But a new generation of thinkers is ready to flip Wallich’s quip around: if growth is a substitute for redistribution, then redistribution can be a substitute for growth.

Costa Rica provides a hopeful model for any country that wants to chart its way out of poverty. But it also holds an important lesson for rich countries. Scientists tell us that if we want to avert dangerous climate change, high-consuming nations – like Britain and the US – are going to have to scale down their bloated economies to get back in sync with the planet’s ecology, and fast. A widely-cited paper by scientists at the University of Manchester estimates it’s going to require downscaling of 4-6% per year.

This is what ecologists call “de-growth”. This calls for redistributing existing resources and investing in social goods in order to render growth unnecessary. Decommoditising and universalising healthcare, education and even housing would be a step in the right direction. Another would be a universal basic income – perhaps funded by taxes on carbon, land, resource extraction and financial transactions.

The opposite of growth isn’t austerity, or depression, or voluntary poverty. It is sharing what we already have, so we won’t need to plunder the earth for more.

Costa Rica proves that rich countries could theoretically ease their consumption by half or more while maintaining or even increasing their human development indicators. Of course, getting there would require that we devise a new economic system that doesn’t require endless growth just to stay afloat. That’s a challenge, to be sure, but it’s possible.

After all, once we have excellent healthcare, education, and affordable housing, what will endlessly more income growth gain us? Maybe bigger TVs, flashier cars, and expensive holidays. But not more happiness, or stronger communities, or more time with our families and friends. Not more peace or more stability, fresher air or cleaner rivers. Past a certain point, GDP gains us nothing when it comes to what really matters. In an age of climate change, where the pursuit of ever more GDP is actively dangerous, we need a different approach.

Photo by ohadby

The post Want to avert the apocalypse? Take lessons from Costa Rica appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We are told everyday that unfettered economic growth and the accumulation of personal wealth is desirable, yet, though we may not always have the words to challenge it, we know the mantra ‘greed is good’ cannot be true: we see everyday and everywhere the toll it is taking on our lives, our communities and our environment.

Thanks predominantly to the overconsumption of natural resources by rich countries, the entire planet faces ecological collapse. We are overshooting the Earth’s biocapacity by 62% each year, and, as a result, species are dying off between 1,000 and 10,000 times the normal rate.

Corporations and states continue to treat people as commodities, our suffering and deaths are considered “negative externalities”; sacrifices at the altar of GDP growth. Inequality continues to rise, leading to social breakdown and vast waves of migration. Just 5 men have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3 billion people.

If human imagination and potential are boundless, why must we believe, when it comes to our economic model, that ‘there is no alternative’? Is this really the best we can do – continue to wait for wealth to trickle down?

At The Rules we believe that we are living within a system that by its very design values profit over people and planet. Capitalism stems from the same logic that saw it fit to sell people as slaves across the Atlantic; a logic that has given us sweatshops, and conflict minerals; farmers’ suicides and oil spills;.

The Rules is here to help midwife the transition to a post-capitalist world. As a time-bound project, we will exist until 2023, working to expose the core logic of our global system.

We are here to connect the dots between various local struggles, and between the millions of us who are feeling the pain of this failing system.

Stories are powerful. The status quo is set by the stories we have been told for decades, and so to challenge it, we must tell stories of beautiful alternatives and amplify those told by others.

Together, we have the power to change the stories, change our cultures and change the rules.

The post Postcapitalism & Beautiful Alternatives: A brief introduction to The Rules appeared first on P2P Foundation.