Transcript The Waste Economy

Economic Growth &
Dematerialization
What is Economic Growth?
Who benefits from it?
Where did it come from?
How can it be stopped or changed?
Can we go from Growth to
Development?
Industrialism: Accumulation
• Production-for-production’s-sake
• Invisibility of key factors
• Centralization of production, massive
upfront investment
• Focus on labour productivity : resources
substitute for human energy
• Cog-labour: humans as component parts
• Regulation: controls as limits
• Scarcity-based: role of waste since WWII
• Globalization: free trade & intellectual
property
Industrialism & Capitalism
technical
financial
matter
money
workplace
labour market
(cogs)
(commodities)
Questions
• can financial and material
accumulation be severed?
• does the profit-motive need to
be the main economic driver?
• does use-value always need to
be a spin-off, side-effect, byproduct, or trickle-down of
monetary accumulation?
• can markets be driven by social
& environmental values?
Markets and Material
Connection between needs,
wealth & markets.
the Invisible Hand: worked...
1. for an economy focused on
meeting primary needs—
simplicity.
2. in a situation of relative scarcity
3. in the absence of sophisticated
information technology
Class Society
...based in relative
scarcity:
1. control of scarce
resources & ...
2. monopoly of high
culture
...by a minority.
The Threat of Abundance
• Productivity boom of the Roaring Twenties
– output outdistances worker wages
• Crisis of effective demand & structural
overproduction: Great Depression as a
reaction to potential abundance.
• White-collar work, universal education: the
threat to cultural monopoly.
– increasingly social character of production; rise of
industrial unionism
Propping Up Effective Demand
after WW II
• The Waste Economy: suburbanization,
permanent war economy. The artificial
reproduction of scarcity. The Effluent
Society.
• The Paper Economy: planned inflation
and the establishment of the debt-based
economy. The economic treadmill.
The Postwar Waste Economy
Permanent War
Economy
The Suburb
Economy:
Oil / Autos /
Subdivisions
“The greatest misallocation of resources in
human history.”
…James Howard Kunstler
The Next Phase (post-1980) :
Casino Capitalism
• 70s: Costs of waste come due
• Rise of the Info economy:
– new source of effective demand:
producer services
– new sources of empty wealth
creation: in effect redistributing
real wealth from poor to rich.
Financialization of the
Economy: diversion of
information revolution into new
forms of waste.
Living in De-Material World
Redesign not controls
Direct focus on human (& environmental)
need
The Service Economy:
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
encouraging provision of services not
stuff.
Servicizing (voluntary EPR).
The “Lake Economy”: economic biomimicry:
sectoral orientation: regenerative food, energy,
manufacturing, c ommunications.
New forms of economic security
Conscious support of the Commons
Disarming the autonomous power of money
Building a community/ecosystem base:
localization.