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

The post What if economic growth isn’t as positive as you think? 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.

In Extraenvironmentalist #92 we first speak with Paul Vigna about his new book The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order to discuss how the Bitcoin currency and the blockchain distributed ledger system are laying the groundwork for alternatives to today’s monetary system. Then, we talk about the potential influence of exponential technologies on education, learning and other areas of the economy with Jim Jubelirer.

// Books

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey

//Clips (in order of appearance)

Full Story: on Bitcoin
Bitcoin vs. Banks
This Money’s so Safe, You’ll Never Touch It

// Music (in order of appearance)

Postiljonen – Supreme (Niva Remix) via Soundcloud
Future Elevators – Modern World via The Planet of Sound
Rodriguez – Hate Street Dialogue (GingerAle Remix) via IndieShuffle

// Production Credits and Notes

Our editor Kevin via Sustainable Guidance Youtube Channel

Episode #92 was supported by donations from the following generous listeners:

Kathryn in Washington
Erin in Vermont
Robert in Kansas
Lee in Arizona

Cross-posted from the Extraenviromentalist.com

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