Transcript ppt, 4043 K - Green Economist

The Economics of Happiness
Molly Scott Cato
Professor of Strategy and Sustainability
University of Roehampton
Green Party Economics Speaker
Nature is not a place to visit, it is home
Gary Snyder
Economics for Life
• What is the economy for?
From financialisation to a
provisioning economy
• Who do we think we are?
Replacing status
competition with reembedding
• Where do we belong?
The bioregional economy
• The lubrication of a fully functioning economy
is the most basic role
• But it is incompatible with the role as a
commodity in international speculation
What is financialisation?
• ‘The financial growth of the past few decades
does not represent a subordination of public
authority and political capacity to the
expansionary forces of global financial markets
but has rather been a process whereby new
organisational linkages were forged and
particular relations of institutional control were
constructed and consolidated. Fundamentally,
financial expansion is a process of
institutionalisation whereby the web of capitalist
power is cast over a wider set of social relations
and becomes more rather than less rooted and
organically embedded in the fabric of social life.’
Loss of Values
• ‘Art critic Alastair Sooke
tracks down the ten
most expensive paintings
. . . Gaining access to the
glittering world of the
super-rich, Sooke
discovers why the
planet's richest people
want to spend their
millions on art.’
Loss of Control
• ‘The most striking
revelations in the 322-page
prospectus launched the
Glazer family last week to
seek £500m in new bond
loans for Manchester
United were the five short
paragraphs detailing the
millions of pounds the
family is personally taking
out from the Old Trafford
football club.’
A Balanced Economy
Challenging our preconceptions
• ‘the origins of the
cataclysm lay in the
utopian endeavor of
economic liberalism to
set up a self-regulating
market system’
• ‘previously to our time
no economy has ever
existed that, even in
principle, was
controlled by markets’
Welfare and community
• Side by side with family
housekeeping, there have been
three principles of production
and distribution:
 Reciprocity
 Redistribution
 Market
• Prior to the market revolution,
humanity’s economic relations
were subordinate to the social.
Now economic relations are
now generally superior to social
ones.
Citizens’ Income
• Automatic payments depending on need
• Tax-free and without means
• Income tax and employees’ national insurance
contributions would be merged into a new
income tax
• The tax-free allowance would balance out the
Citizens’ Income for higher earners
Important changes in welfare
• Citizenship becomes the basis of entitlement
• The individual would be the tax/benefits unit
• The Citizen’s Income would not be withdrawn as
earnings and other income rises
• The availability-for-work rule would be
abolished
• Access to a Citizen’s Income would be easy and
unconditional
Can we imagine buying happiness?
Can we make the rich pay for their
emissions?
Do we spend enough time making
friends?
Income and Social Connectedness
8.5
Life Satisfaction (0-10)
8.0
7.5
7.0
6.5
Strong Social Connections
Average Social Connections
6.0
Poor Social Connections
5.5
5.0
4.5
4.0
Low Income
Low-Medium
Income
Medium
Income
High-Medium
Income
High Income
Transition and Innovation
• Market drives only
profitable innovation
• Built-in obsolescence
works to stimulate
further demand
• Pheobus cartel:
evidence of pressure
against innovation
• What alternative
incentives can we find?
‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’
Wordsworth
• ‘As a nation we are already so rich that consumers
are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy
a very large share – perhaps as much as 40 per cent –
of what is produce, and the pressure will get
progressively less in the years ahead. But if
consumers exercise their option not to buy a large
share of what is produced, a great depression is not
far behind.’
• A McGraw-Hill executive writing in Advertising Age in
1955
Opportunities offered by the
transition to a green economy
What is a bioregion?
• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than
political) boundaries’
• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘lifeplace’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and
ecological character capable of supporting unique
human and non-human living communities. Bioregions
can be variously defined by the geography of
watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and
related identifiable landforms and by the unique
human cultures that grow from natural limits and
potentials of the region
An economic bioregion
• A bioregional economy would be embedded
within its bioregion and would acknowledge
ecological limits.
• Bioregions as natural social units determined
by ecology rather than economics
• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic
resources such as water, food, products and
services.
• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity
Key characteristics of the bioregional
economy—
•
•
•
•
Locality
Accountability
Community
Conviviality
Locality but not autarky
• Cultural openness and
maximisation of exchange
that can be achieved in a
world of limited energy,
within a framework of
self-sufficiency in basic
resources and the limiting
of trade to those goods
which are not indigenous
due to reasons of climate
or local speciality.
Accountability as reconnection
• Your bioregion is
your ‘backyard’
• Each bioregion
would be the area
of the global
economy for
which its
inhabitants were
responsible
Community not markets
• Reclaiming of public
space for citizenship
and relationship.
• ‘putting the economy in
its place’
• Market as agora—
public space for debate
and sharing of ideas,
not just commerce
Conviviality instead of productivity
• I choose the term
‘conviviality’ to designate
the opposite of industrial
productivity. I intend it to
mean autonomous and
creative intercourse
among persons, and the
intercourse of persons
with their environment
• I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced
below a certain level, no amount of industrial
productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates
among society's members. (Illich, 1974).
Environmentally focused thinktank
• Sharing ideas about the
new paradigm
• Launched in July 2012
• Recent papers on
university funding and
guardians for future
generations
• Major project on
alternatives to growth
• www.greenhousethinktank.org
Find out more
www.greeneconomist.org
gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
Green Economics: An
Introduction to Theory, Policy
and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)
Environment and Economy
(Routledge, 2011)