In times like these, the comics are the happiest part of the newspaper so I always read them first. A couple of weeks ago in Arlo and Janice, Arlo says to Janice, "Everyone is in debt, but we have to keep spending or the economy collapses. Who dreamed up this system?"
In the last panel we see Laurel and Hardy " the point being that whoever dreamed up this system must be hapless clowns. I've been thinking along the some lines as Arlo, feeling caught in a funhouse that's not much fun.
What happens to a world economy built to a frightening extent on overspending Americans when Americans stop spending? Is it sustainable? Clearly not; that overleveraged house of cards began to collapse last year and it's still imploding.
And do we really want to spend our lives overspending so the Chinese can build more factories to employ more people so they can overspend, too? Aren't we more than just consumers?
But is there an alternative to an economy built on overconsumption and debt? If there is, now would be a good time to take a serious look at it.
I've been thinking back to when I studied economics in college. At the time, the discipline of ecological economics was in its infancy. I decided to go back and check on it as a possible path toward a saner alternative to the madness we have now for an economic system. So I read "Beyond Growth, The Economics of Sustainable Development," by Herman E. Daly, a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a former World Bank economist.
The fundamental idea of ecological economics can be expressed in a story Daly tells in the introduction. In 1992, Daly was asked to review a draft of a World Bank report on development and the environment.
In this report, Daly writes, was a diagram called "The relationship between the economy and the environment." There was a simple box in the center of the picture labeled "the economy," with arrows going into it labeled "inputs" and arrows going out labeled "outputs" and nothing else. Daly suggested that it would be good to draw a bigger box around the whole diagram and label it "the environment." Then the relationship between the economy and the environment would be clear.
Specifically, writes Daly, "The economy is a subsystem of the environment and depends upon the environment both as a source of raw material inputs and as a 'sink' for waste outputs."
Under this view, an economy cannot get too large or it will overwhelm the natural systems that support it. That is where we are now. Anyone who thinks the world economy can grow enough to provide a American-style lifestyle to every citizen of Brazil, India and China without devastating the environment is simply dreaming.
There's an alternative to growth, and that's development. Development means making the best of what we have in man-made, natural and human capital: making systems that are more efficient, last longer, and are easier on the Earth.
According to Daly, development also means population control " both through birth and immigration " to make sure populations don't overwhelm natural systems. Development also means more equitable distribution of wealth and income. Those last two points are probably why sustainable development is a tough sell politically. But what is the alternative?
I'm encouraged that a part of the Obama recovery plan seems to be shaping up to be development: fixing our long-neglected infrastructure, developing "green" industry. Maybe this painful pause in our endless growth will allow us space to think about and build a saner, more humane and more sustainable economic system.
- Anne Macquarie, a private sector urban planner, is a 19-year resident of Carson City.