THE NEW PATH TO PROSPERITY
Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity by Andrew Simms
Books predicting the apocalypse are plenty. In my own writing I always try to emphasise the conditional nature of the language when it comes to the threat of the eco-catastrophe to come. If current trends and tendencies continue unabated, if current consumption patters continue, if carbon emissions continue to expand, if human beings fail to change their behaviour, then, indeed, the eco-catastrophe result. The point of the conditional language is to make it clear that such predictions are designed to be falsified. There is nothing inevitable about the environmental crisis we face. The solutions we need are all in or well within our grasp, from technical know-how to financial resources. Even the change in behaviour. It can all be done.
So it is good to read a book which inverts the usual mode of argumentation with respect to the environmental crisis: we know about the apocalypse to come, here is how we can avoid it.
The cover of a giant thumb raised upwards to an image of the sun conveys the affirmative, optimistic, message delivered in the book. Andrew Simms is concerned to emphasise that human beings have the ability to resolve the problems that continue to mount up on planet Earth. The advantage of such an approach is that it inspires hope and thereby encourages the change in behaviour that is required if current trends and tendencies are to be reversed. As such, the book is a call-to-arms, an invitation to get involved in worldchanging.
That such a book needs to be written suggests that the world of politics is continuing to fail. After all, when the leader of the Conservative Party when it was in opposition, David Cameron professed a concern with environmental issues and the "general well-being". As secretary of state for energy and climate change, Ed Miliband made short work of climate change deniers. In 2009 he launched a ferocious attack on those who cast doubt on the science of climate change, describing former chancellor Nigel Lawson and former shadow home secretary David Davis as "saboteurs".
"It is profoundly irresponsible for people like Nigel Lawson, who has held high office, and David Davis to be doing what they are doing. It is very dangerous. People sabotaging the [Copenhagen] process deserve the name saboteur," Miliband said. "There are interests who do not want an agreement at Copenhagen. Anyone who comes forward at this moment and starts saying 'we can stick our heads in the sand' is irresponsible." Davis had written in the Independent that the Earth appeared to be cooling, not warming, and that the leaked emails seemed to show leading scientists "conspiring to rig the figures to support their theories". Yes, the same old lame claims of the deniers. That so much political capital could have been made out of such thing science is a sign of entrenched political power and financial muscle. Miliband was correct to reply that ‘This is scientific consensus from around the world. It's as universal a view as you can get. One chain of emails does not undo scientific consensus." (The Guardian Friday 4 December 2009).
The problem is, of course, that the environment is a long-term collective good, the very last thing taken into consideration in the short term cycles of politics and interests of economics. The economic crisis has squeezed the room for environmental questions, flagging up the point at issue – the contradiction between political and economic arrangements organised around the short term self-interest and the long term collective good that benefits all. The financial crash has had the effect of suppressing any political debate concerning the very things that brought the economic crisis about, how to solve it and what its environmental implications are. I don’t know whether to call this an institutional or a psychological failure, it seems to be both, the one feeding the other. Unfortunately, this neurotic condition passes for normality in the world of politics. In Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton cites French sociologist Bertrand Guillaume, who posed the question whether we can continue to gamble with democracy. Guillaume’s point is that a high awareness of the dangers of global warming does not necessarily translate into the action required to stop it, so that catastrophe can be 'both inevitable and impossible'. If a large proportion of citizens refuse to comply, then slashing emissions may require a 'benevolent tyranny'. Hamilton rejects that view and instead argues that the answer is not to abandon democracy but to radicalise it. (Hamilton 2010: 207). That sounds good, but it does rather presume the existence of precisely what is missing at the moment – an active, informed, organised citizen body.
All we have is the incremental, pragmatic politics that is utterly inadequate in face of the challenges before us. And that is before we even mention the survival instincts of the capital system, the way that the ruling class organise and act to identify and neutralise threats to its power and interests. They have seen socialism and the trade union movement off, they will see scientists and the environmentalists off. They will see us all and the planet off, if we let them. Whilst social inequality is widening, the planet is heating and glaciers are melting, what passes for political debate about social and environmental justice is pathetic. It seems as if the whole of official politics revolves around economic growth and selfish interest.
So we are crying out for vision. In these circumstances, Andrew Simms’ arguments for an economy based on renewable energy, zero growth and a shorter working week are a breath of fresh air.
Andrew Simms is an economist who works with the New Economics Foundation.
Andrew Simms is the author of Tescopoly, a withering indictment on the supermarket chain which seems hell-bent on eating up our towns and cities. I have heard the phrase Tescopolis used to express the way that the urban public realm is being turned inside out to serve the imperatives of private consumption. Simms uses the concept of "clone towns". In my own work I develop a conception of the ecopolis, a Green polity based upon an ecological praxis and sensibility (In Search of Ecopolis 2011).
Andrew Simms offers a new economics which is appropriate to the ecopolis. Cancel the Apocalypse explains why the human race cannot carry on as it is, and proceeds to outline the contours of an alternative. His argument addresses the banking system, energy generation, the global air-travel business, meat-eating and much more besides. And Simms has the knack of making clear the extent to which the seemingly impossible is entirely within our grasp. He brings seemingly massive and intractable problems down to human scale. He writes of the five days in 2010 when the ash from an Icelandic volcano caused European airspace to shut down. "Flying was something we thought we couldn't live without, [but] the world did not come to a standstill." There is plenty more in our consumer culture we think are necessities but which we can easily live without, the better for our health and well-being. Simms points out that the county of Cornwall has to dispose of 4,000 tonnes of junk mail every year – "500 dustcarts' worth, costing them around £700,000". Simms proposes obstructing the capitalist machine by means of a ban on billboard advertising. Utopian? Vermont, Maine, Hawaii and Alaska have already instituted a ban. And that’s the point. Too often, citizens are beaten without even fighting. There is plenty that is within our grasp now that we fail to achieve through a paralysing political pessimism and cynicism.
He is one of a number of economists who are developing a new concept of ‘prosperity’, one that pays more attention to the qualitative dimension of wealth, exposing the delusions of quantitative measures. Simms holds those economic principles long considered orthodox to be responsible for bringing us to the brink of environmental ruin. He rejects those principles, what Galbraith used to call the ‘conventional wisdom’, and demands a compete transformation of contemporary lifestyles as the only way to avoid ecological collapse. And this is where the positive message starts to become more disturbing. For all of the upturned thumb of environmental cheeriness, the message remains gloomy. The changes in behaviour required are so profound that many may be inclined to think that the apocalypse is well-nigh inevitable. It is difficult to read what needs to be done without becoming pessimistic about humanity’s prospects. The recommendations that Simms makes are all possible. It’s still possible that I could climb Everest one day. It’s just that it’s easier to shop at Tesco.
Simms's central thesis is familiar enough. The incessant pursuit of economic growth is environmentally destructive and unsustainable on a planet of finite resources. This is right. Simms is also right to expose the inadequacies of the concept of wealth measured in terms of an increase in a country's gross national product. It is perfectly possible for the GNP to increase as a result of cleaning up the ecologically damaging consequences of economic growth. But what, in conventional economic terms, is an increase in wealth is, in ecological terms, a destruction of wealth. Where economic development has reached a certain standard of living, economic growth no longer generates improvements in human wellbeing, in terms of happiness and life expectancy, yet continues to use up finite natural resources and fuel global heating.
The argument is fairly well known, and is gaining adherents. Take Adair Turner, a former director of the CBI, who told Simms that if anyone thinks "the most important objective of public policy is to get growth from 1.9 per cent to 2 per cent and even better 2.1 per cent", then they're worshipping a "false god". Turner goes on to declare that "extra growth does not automatically translate into extra human welfare and happiness". Turner is correct and this view is becoming increasingly influential.
The Easterlin paradox was named after the economist Richard Easterlin. Easterlin found that once a certain level of income was achieved, which allowed for basic needs for housing, food, water and energy to be met, average happiness would no longer increase with any increase in income. The Easterlin paradox therefore states that up to the point at which basic needs were satisfied, an increase in income brings an increase in happiness, but that beyond that point, any further increase in income doesn't yield an increase in happiness. Beyond material security, an increase in money detracts from human needs.
And this is where the new, qualitative definition of prosperity is pertinent. Happiness beyond the basic level of material satisfaction is about the realisation of human potentials and the exercise of the human faculties. In the capitalist economy, however, beyond this level comes an endless accumulation of material quantities, individuals already richer than they need be competing with each other on an endless hedonistic treadmill in pursuit of positional goods. And even though those involved accrue more money and more goods than before they entered the competition, their failure relative to others ensures a diminution of happiness.
Such views are not new in economics, as anyone who has read John Stuart Mill and Thorstein Veblen knows. As Simms points out, when attacking the fetish of growth-ism, the idea that there are necessary limits to economies accompanied capitalism from its birth. He points to John Stuart Mill who, in 1848, argued that "a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement". One could also point to Ricardo on land and rends, Malthus on population, and Marx who identifed the biggest constraint of all with the narrow accumulative purpose of capitalist relations.
Still, this notion of limits is not in the vocabulary of modern economics. Still, Simms delivers a message that has been heard many times from outside the modern ‘profession’. Listen to what the sociologist C Wright Mills has to say about the relationship between work and leisure: 'Each day men sell little pieces of themselves in order to try to buy them back each night and weekend with the coin of "fun"'. Such leisure does not deliver the happiness which work denies, no matter how much an increased income boosts purchasing power. For leisure has itself been turned into an industry. The techniques of mass production have been developed into techniques of mass consumption, with organized spectator sport, game shows, soap operas, movies, 24 hour news as entertainment, all of which offers passive absorption and escape rather than genuine fulfilment of human qualities. Mass leisure activities 'astonish, excite and distract but they do not enlarge reason or feeling, or allow spontaneous dispositions to unfold creatively'. Instead, mass consumption creates a fantasy world into which the drones, denied fulfilment in work, seek refuge and retreat in their leisure hours. For Mills, this is a world in which 'the amusement of hollow people rests on their own hollowness and does not fill it up'.
To the economics ‘profession’, such words are heresy. The very things which are denounced as diminishing human happiness make money, and that is reason enough for the high priests of the capital system.
Simms puts our predicament down to habit. And there is much to be said for his view. Coming from a history of death, natural necessity and underemployment, and in more recent times of unemployment, depression and war, it is easy to see why economic growth, rising living standards and mass consumption seems like a veritable paradise. To argue that this is not a genuine happiness is so counter-intuitive that anyone proposing the views seems to live in another universe entirely. So the capital system, with its relentless and endless pursuit of economic growth, has taken root, not just in the whole supporting institutional infrastructure, including the state and the public realm, but in the psyche of the demos themselves. And, taken together, this ensures that economic growth remains the central, indeed the only pillar, of human social organisation. Economic growth – that humdrum euphemism for capital accumulation – has replaced the overarching morality upon which civilisation was founded. Regardless of the cost to economies, no matter how much societies unravel at the core, no matter how much damage is inflicted on the planet, economic growth is a god that cannot fail. All the promises of progress that have been made are conditional upon this endless economic growth. But, of course, since this growth cannot end, since capital must continue to accumulate or collapse, the peace, freedom, democracy and happiness will always be continually pushed further into the distance, always just out of reach, never to be attained. Economic growth continues in perpetuity. The planet and the people on it may not.
Simms is right to offer a positive alternative rather than just a threat of the ecological collapse to come. He is right to think that we need to inspire people to change behaviour and change direction. He is right to emphasise that societies can prosper in other, more qualitative, more sustainable ways. He is right to point to the damaging effects of our addictions to flying, consumption and fossil fuels.
When Simms urges individuals to behave more like "citizens" and less like "consumers", he is calling for a switch from the self-centred behaviour, short-termist behaviour of private individuals to the long term concern for the public good. He is calling for the ecopolis. Good luck to him. It’s a message I have delivered more times than I care to remember. But it amounts to no less than a complete inversion of the direction of the last few centuries, an era in which happiness and freedom have been re-located from the public realm, where it concerned the common good of all, and dissolved into the private realm of choosing, egoistic individuals. If the Greens can turn that around, they will have succeeded where the idealists of the nineteenth century, the socialists of the twentieth century, and the new republicans and the communitarians of the contemporary age have all failed. To keep with the cheery mood of the book, I shall affirm that it is possible to recover the common good and simply say ‘Jerusalem tomorrow’.
Simms’ book give us plenty to think about and plenty to start doing. The book is packed with good ideas concerning how to live greener, happy and more fulfilling lives. And Simms is good at shredding the figure of homo economicus – selfish, self-maximising man – as an ideological construct of the prevailing economic system. The idea that human beings are instinctively selfish creatures has no basis in evolutionary psychology, biology or anthropology, it is a construct made in the image of capitalism. And it is not a construct conducive to human happiness or planetary health. It is a mythology that allows the rich to keep hitting the till, the machine to keep grinding on, and social inequality to keep growing.
Identifying seven apocalyptic threats, Simms makes clear the magnitude of the environmental problems which confront us. His analysis leaves no doubt that society stands in need of radical transformation.
But how many people are prepared to engage in such a radical project? I’m not even sure that Simms himself is clear as to just how radical a transformation is required to ensure the changes he recommends. Quickly, Simms calls for a greater emphasis upon the "quality" of economic activity, and a recovery of community values, as against the increasing quantity of material goods and private satisfactions. He also proposes that the "productivity trap" - increased output with fewer workers as a result of technological innovation – be sprung by public sector services like health and education.
At this point, I hear the good ship ecopolis crashing on the rocks. Over twenty years ago now, John McDermott wrote the book Corporate Society Class, Property and Contemporary Capitalism (1991 Westview). In it, McDermott showed how, with the rate of profit flagging in the private economy, corporate capital would come to encroach upon the world of public services. McDermott warned that the public sector, guided by notions of citizen equity and entitlement, is increasingly threatened by the steady expansion of the private corporation into "the government business."
That is, one can now discern a movement on the part of profit-oriented firms to move into the "government business." Already, important parts of the postal delivery business; the provision of children's day care and care for the elderly; the administration of prison systems, school systems, technical training and retraining of workers; sanitation and water services; and many other traditional governmental functions are being carried out by profit-oriented corporations. Sometimes entire functions are spun off to private enterprise: The growing security industry, which already employs two-thirds of all security and investigative personnel in the country, is agreeable to contracting for a town's police functions. Or this or that government agency will subcontract out part of its tasks to a private company, typically for program development, training workers, part-timers, computer programming, and so on. This major development still awaits its chronicler?
McDermott 1991: 117
McDermott writes that the rhetoric of free-market individualism is an ideology which is concerned to rationalize the corporate takeover of the "government business."
The failure to achieve clarity on issues of political economy leaves any reform or democratic or environmental movement easy prey to those who still have an understanding of what political economy is.
In the prevailing economic system economic growth is not an optional extra subject to political deliberation. Simply put, capital must continuously expand its values or collapse. Without the accumulation of capital, the central dynamic of the economic system ceases to work, and a fall in production, employment and income follows. The result in the financially straitened circumstances which follow is seldom a search for a new economic system, more often social unrest, conflict and political instability.
One of the many frustrating consequences of the collapse of Marxism is that we are having to learn the old lessons all over again. We can be sympathetic to the Green idealists who think that they can avoid the hard questions of political economy – social relations, class division, exploitation – and talk vaguely of ‘the economy’, as though future direction is a simple matter of political and moral choice. The problem with this kind of openness is that it entertains any number of social relations, but cannot mobilise a social agency in support of one. In contrast to socialism, the Green dimension of radical democracy is confines itself to cultural, lifestyle and political changes that leave capitalist divisions of labour untouched. Prioritising political changes and democratic ideals whilst ignoring the relation between state formations, the process of accumulation, social relations and constructions of meaning have a long and unhappy history in liberal reform movements. Such values and ideals tend to assume the existence of the very thing that needs to be created – a public realm which connects the individual and general interest via social identity. Appeals to the long term good of all may well be correct in themselves lack social relevance in that they presuppose a social identity that does not exist. It is certainly true that the environment is a universal issue, given that we all depend on nature’s life support systems for our health, happiness and survival. But we also depend upon ‘economic growth’ – capital accumulation – for income and hence our participation in the social world we have constructed for ourselves. When short term selfish interest and long term common good collide, human beings who live and work in a market society of atomised relations will have no choice but to choose the short term selfish interest, as a matter of their own survival. For a different choice to be made, we need a different social identity, one that connects egoism and altruism, the individual and the common good.
The capital system is a regime of private accumulation organised around self-interest, not a public domain concerned with the long term common good. Failure to appreciate this point continually leads reformers to overestimate the power of governments and public opinion to constrain business interests.
I would recommend Simms’ book for the many interesting ideas he proposes and for the invitation he extends to all to get engaged in worldchanging, not only to avert the looming eco-catastrophe but, more positively, to create the sustainable society as a happy habitat.
That said, having read more than a few such books, I just can’t help but feel that the absence of a critical political economy perspective will ensure that the message lacks a social relevance in that it appeals to everyone and no-one. Without a social agency possessing a structural capacity to act and hence a material futurity, a message lacks a critical, transformatory purchase in the everyday material terrain in which we all live. We need an eco-praxis that really engages with issues of power, control, authority, production and distribution. And we need a transformatory social agency that is equipped not only to see through the fetish systems of power, production and politics that limit our options and determine our futures, but to break through them.