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This week we follow up on Degrowth with Prosperity without Growth from Professor Tim Jackson. It’s a different take in that the Degrowth folks are skeptical of sustainable development, suggesting it is an oxymoron that glosses over the resource depletion issue. Prosperity without Growth is less severe in its prescription, suggesting more of a greening of the existing economic order than a replacement of it. This makes sense in that the degrowthers are more politically driven while Jackson’s view is more environmentally driven.
Jackson puts his cards right on the table: “Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.” And he does his best to smash that myth, pointing out the problems that by now most of us readers are familiar with. He suggests that moving to a more sustainable approach must and can be done given the dangers of continue to pursue growth at its current pace.
This earlier work by Jackson (2012) (this work is carried on now by the Post Growth Institute) was recognized by the APF for a Most Significant Futures work award. So naturally I turned to it in gathering concepts about sustainability-driven post-capitalism. It raises a question that I’ve wrestled with regarding several of the sustainability-driven concepts: are they chiefly about reforming the existing order – greening capitalism, so to speak – or proposing a new socio-economic regime. I’ve been toying with establishing a group of Horizon Two transition concepts, to join the two existing sets of transition concepts: (1) collaborative sharing platforms and (2) new sources of [economic] value.
Prosperity without Growth would seem a better fit with the transition concepts in that it is primarily about making the existing order more sustainable. It provides a dozen suggests for building a sustainable economy organized into three clusters:
(1) Building a Sustainable Macro-Economy
Debt-driven materialistic consumption is deeply unsatisfactory as the basis for our macro-economy. The time is now ripe to develop a new macro-economics for sustainability that does not rely for its stability on relentless growth and expanding material throughput. Four specific policy areas are identified to achieve this:
- Developing macro-economic capability
- Investing in public assets and infrastructures
- Increasing financial and fiscal prudence
- Reforming macro-economic accounting
(2) Protecting Capabilities for Flourishing
The social logic that locks people into materialistic consumerism is extremely powerful, but detrimental ecologically and psychologically. A lasting prosperity can only be achieved by freeing people from this damaging dynamic and providing creative opportunities for people to flourish – within the ecological limits of the planet. Five policy areas address this challenge.
- Sharing the available work and improving the work-life balance
- Tackling systemic inequality
- Measuring capabilities and flourishing
- Strengthening human and social capital
- Reversing the culture of consumerism
(3) Respecting Ecological Limits
The material profligacy of consumer society is depleting natural resources and placing unsustainable burdens on the planet’s ecosystems. There is an urgent need to establish clear resource and environmental limits on economic activity and develop policies to achieve them. Three policy suggestions contribute to that task.
- Imposing clearly defined resource/emissions caps
- Implementing fiscal reform for sustainability
- Promoting technology transfer and international ecosystem protection.
Jackson admits that it’s not clear if these steps will be enough. Is using a broom instead of leaf-blower, for example, really going to make a significant difference? Basically, while acknowledging the work of Herman Daly on the steady-state economy, he wonders if there a workable macro-economics for sustainability. Interestingly, the degrowth folks voiced much the same concern about the lack of agreement on how implement degrowth.
That’s not the problem we’re trying to solve here, at least not yet. We’re looking to identify visions of a post-capitalist world in hopes of catalyzing a positive image of the future to work toward. In simple terms, let’s see where we want to go before we start planning and acting. Sure, we should absolutely do sensible things in the meantime, but the lack of a guiding image is the key concern of the After Capitalism project. – Andy Hines
With respect to growth I believe the fundamental question one should ask; is the Growth either Malignant or “Healthy” and why do you consider it one and not the other? Technology is niether a panacea nor is it the dimiurge. Technology goes hand in hand with practical human experience and development. The greatest flaws that I see in human societies, is the construction of systems of governance and economies that fail to take into consideration just Two Constants 1. Human Nature 2. A lack of attention to Cycles that the Earth itself operates on, and a failure to adapt to those Cycles. A failure to take these two “Constants” into consideration can lalso lead to flaws in the accurate conception of The Future. Something to think about.