PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH
2011
A review of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson (Earthscan)
A real and lasting resolution of the crisis in the climate system requires a shift from a traditional economics concerned with the endless accumulation of material quantity to a new economics concerned with qualitative experience. In short, a concern with quantity of things must give way to a concern with the quality of life.
Such a transition is based upon a redefinition of the concept of prosperity. Prosperity is generally associated with a successful, thriving condition, a state in which things are going well for us. That feeling of well-being fits in with the material definition of wealth promoted by a social system organised around the goal of economic growth. Each day we are exposed to media of various kinds - TV news, business news, politicians' statements, advertisers’ inducements, corporate reports, etc - which encourage the belief that our material wealth, and hence all-round well-being, is inextricably linked to the growth of the gross national product and the confidence of the stock markets. These are the two principal ways by which the success or otherwise of capitalist economies are measured. Other ways of measuring prosperity - material wealth and well-being - such as employment and savings, follow these two.
The rationale is so simple as to seem uncontroversial. The GNP measures the total national output of goods and services. It seems obvious to say that if output is high and rising, so too will people be wealthy and happy. If output is falling, then the economy is in recession, unemployment will be rising, and wealth and well-being will be low. The same with stock markets. Falling stock markets mean falling pension values, and rising numbers of people losing out.
So it seems obvious that growth is a good thing. It’s also obvious that the world is flat, that objects stay at rest unless moved, that heavy objects fall at a quicker rate than light objects and that solid matter is, well, solid all the way through. All of these things are false. As any scientist knows, the physical senses mislead. And the problem is that we have a political and economic system geared around an appeal to the physical senses of individuals. The result is social system that has all the hallmarks of Plato’s cave and which stands in desperate need of enlightenment.
Tim Jackson, economics commissioner on the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission, states the contrast between appearance and reality starkly: "Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must." And that is what he does in Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet.
Before the global financial crisis, it would have been easy to throw the standard dismissive terms of utopian, idealist, dreamer at Jackson, just to save people the trouble of taking his critique of dominant conceptions of prosperity and growth seriously. It is, after all, that kind of fat-headed complacency and refusal to take ideas seriously that has got the world into this mess in the first place. In the wake of the global economic crisis, however, the primacy of growth at all costs no longer seems so obvious. Some very powerful figures - President Sarkozy, the Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz and economists at the Financial Times - are amongst the growing ranks of those who are contemplating the possibility of prosperity apart from GNP growth. Indeed, many are arguing that GNP growth may even be inimical to prosperity. A new movement is underway, one that is based upon tacit recognition of Ruskin’s old declaration that there is no wealth but life. It would be wrong to call this a post-materialism, because health, well-being and happiness are all material qualities in the new economics. The case against the capital system and its definition of prosperity is not that it is materialistic, but that it isn’t materialistic enough. We are moving beyond crude monetary measurements of prosperity and entering a new qualitative era.
Jackson has the knack of rendering complex economic arguments comprehensible so as to ensure a wide audience: "The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist." Agreed. We are finally catching up with liberal economist John Stuart Mill’s case for the stationary state.
I know not why it should be a matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth… It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object; in those most advance, what is economically needed is a better distribution.
Mill 1985:114
Here we come to the heart of the debate. It’s been a long time coming, but at long last it seems that the human race is about to address the inversion of object and subject, means and ends, which lies at the heart of the capital system. As Mill wrote: ‘It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary conclusion of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement’ (Mill 1985:116). Putting economics back into its place as the means of the ends of human life is the condition of human improvement.
From an ecological perspective, the endless growth entailed by the capital system is a thoroughly preposterous notion. A planet with finite resources cannot sustain an economic system that grows to infinity. Already, we can see how the use of natural resources is undermining the life-support systems of the planet. Those economists wedded to economic growth keep the faith and argue that it is possible to "decouple" GNP growth from resource use through increased efficiency and technological innovation. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that human ingenuity has cheated natural limits. Malthus’ dire predictions with regard to population were falsified, just, by technical means. And, so the argument goes, the spur to profit that is intrinsic to the capital system will give us the technical means by which we can continue to expand our economies whilst reversing environmental degradation too.
Jackson exposes this "decoupling" as a myth. Capital’s ‘ingenuity’ is firmly focused on short-term horizons. However, when it comes to prosperity, it is the long term that is going to count. The key is climate change. If the GNP keeps on growing, and we fail to make the necessary reductions in greenhouse gases to avert climate change, then we are stoking the destruction of prosperity beyond the short-term horizons of "next quarter's growth figures" and all the other economic indices upon which we place so much emphasis today.
This drift serves and is served by the pursuit of growth. But those who hope that growth will lead to a materialistic Utopia are destined for disappointment. We simply don't have the ecological capacity to fulfil this dream. By the end of the century, our children and grandchildren will face a hostile climate, depleted resources, the destruction of habitats, the decimation of species, food scarcities, mass migrations and almost inevitably war.
So our only real choice is to work for change. To transform the structures and institutions that shape the social world. To articulate a more credible vision for a lasting prosperity.
The dimensions of this task are both personal and societal. The potential for personal — or community-based - action is clear.
Jackson 2011: ch 12
Green idealist, utopian and dreamer? He well may be, but in light of the financial collapse and the global economic crisis, these might well be the qualities we are most in need of. Karl Marx referred to modern economists as ‘sycophants of the bourgeois’ (Grundrisse 1973: 273/4). Marx also called economists experts in the way of bourgeois stupidity. Do we really need to pay any respect to a ‘profession’ that commanded almost universal assent for the idea that complex derivatives were a prime example of increasing economic efficiency in the financial services industry? The cover of such economists has been well and truly blown. The economists haven’t got a clue as to how the economy works. Their job is merely to pretend that they know, convincing the workers to remain at the coalface and allow the rich and powerful to keep hitting the till.
The Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney wrote well here:
There has been no more mischievous habit of thought than the smiling illusion which erected into a philosophy the conception that industry is a mechanism, moving by quasi-mechanical laws and adjusted by the play of non-moral forces, in which methods of organisation and social relationships are to be determined solely by consideration of economic convenience and productive efficiency. By erecting an artificial barrier between the economic life of a society and its religion, its art, the moral traditions and kindly feelings of human beings, that doctrine degrades the former and sterilizes the latter.
R.H. Tawney, The Radical Tradition, p101
The economists are little more than the state priests of the capital economy, and now that their ‘expertise’ has taken us to the edge of a collapsed global economy, we may give them short shrift. Their science is as bankrupt as the economy they rationalise. (On balance, I think I made the right decision to abandon economics at Masters level and take up a more interesting and worthwhile subject. I found economics somewhat beside the point, a sort of politics by proxy that is designed to neutralise the dangerous questions of control, ownership and authority, and keep them out of political controversy, intervention and alteration. Economics is too important to be left to the economists. It is a subject best approached from other perspectives. ‘You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live’ – Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice).
The final chapter of Jackson’s book examines the many and varied opportunities for achieving "a lasting prosperity". Jackson advocates a grassroots transformation of our lives, listing things that we can all do and engage in. Instead of seeking prosperity in the consumption of "stuff", we need to cut back and seek a new type of prosperity outside the conventional trappings of material affluence: within relationships to others, the family, a renewed sense of community and in a functional society that gives meaning to our lives, turns our work into a vocation and enables us to place a value on the future.
Prosperity is not synonymous with material wealth. And the requirements of prosperity go beyond material sustenance. Rather, prosperity has to do with our ability to flourish: physically, psychologically and socially. Beyond mere subsistence, prosperity hangs crucially on our ability to participate meaningfully in the life of society.
This task is as much social and psychological as it is material. But the appealing idea that (once our material needs are satisfied) we could do away with material things flounders on a simple but powerful fact: material goods provide a vital language through which we communicate with each other about the things that really matter: family, identity, friendship, community, purpose in life.
Jackson 2011
In my own work, I emphasise the democracy of place, purpose and personality in the flourishing functional society, over against the democracy of egoistic desire and opinion that prevails under the capital system. The distinction differentiates the liberty that comes from unity in a common and just purpose from the licence of individualism. Is it capitalism or socialism? "Does it really matter?" Jackson asks. "Perhaps we could just paraphrase Star Trek's Spock and agree that it's capitalism, Jim. But not as we know it." And here we can breathe new life in the old Green slogan, ‘neither right nor left but in front’. The centre ground upon which a true democracy of place, purpose and personality rests stands in need of creation. That is our task in our eco-praxis.
And it is within reach. Listen to what Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, says:
And for what it's worth, as a creature of capitalism - a venture-capital-backed energy industry boss, a private equity investor, and an Institute of Directors director of the month - I am convinced that capitalism as we know it is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies and threatening our children with an unlivable world. Tim Jackson has written the best book yet making this case, and showing the generalities of the escape route. The specifics, post-Copenhagen, are all down to us.
I strongly recommend the book. In his Whole Earth Discipline Stewart Brand offers all manner of bold technological fixes and innovations to address the climate crisis – GM food, nuclear power, geoengineering, all manner of centralising and controlling technologies that fit the prevailing economic system like a glove. But he comes over all coy when it comes to economics: ‘We Greens are not economists. When someone needs fiscal advice, they don't usually hire an environmentalist, because they know we don't really know about money and we don't really care about money.’ (Brand ch 4 2009). Tim Jackson’s book and Jeremy Leggett’s endorsement as well as his own book Half Gone expose Brand’s claim as an uncharacteristic piece of false modesty at best, a politically motivated evasion and deception at worst. I studied economics two decades ago and found it a pseudo-scientific cover for politics and real world issues of power, resources, control and authority. I moved to philosophy for a challenge. I anticipated the banking collapse, stagnation in the global economy, the escalation of debt to unsustainable levels and …. well, everything mainstream economists either failed to spot or address. Other political economists had done the same, of course, but Brand is talking about ‘mainstream’ economics, the people Marx described as experts in the way of bourgeois stupidity. Paul Ormerod wrote a fine book entitled The Death of Economics. Heilbroner also wrote of The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economics.
Against Stewart Brand I can state clearly that ‘We Greens’ don’t need to know about any of this kind of economics, the economics which is so smart and sophisticated that it has bankrupted nations, impoverished societies and violated the planet. Here, in Tim Jackson at least, is one economist who can still hold his head up high. And here is an economics which recognises its affinity with ecology in sharing the same stem ‘eco’, from oikos, meaning household. In evaluating Brand’s claim that ‘we Greens are not economists’ against Jackson’s book, just ask yourself this question, who gains if greens remain silent on economics?