photo: dno1967 via flickr
DCL
A while ago, when the New Economics Foundation report advocating a gradual transition to 21-hour work weeks came out I was quite enthusiastic about it—though at the same time acknowledging that it would require a shift in some of our basic and thoroughly ingrained structural economic assumptions. First and foremost of these is that economic growth is the solution to all the world's development problems and that Gross Domestic Product is an accurate measurement of national progress.
Well, Resurgence magazine is highlighting some commentary on that report and the the idea of economic downshifting and work sharing over at Share the World's Resources which is worth revisiting.
Two excerpts from Anna White's piece cover the main points, for those who don't want to dive in fully:
On the stranglehold of the growth is god paradigm,
The problem is that downshifting as well as other efforts to counter consumerism are incoherent in economic terms. In Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruining Our Lives, Madeleine Bunting reveals that while the majority of Britons accept it as self-evident that, for all but the poorest people, overwork 'is your choice', there is also widespread acceptance that this purported power to choose is often exceptionally hard to exercise. It is not only the clear structural bias towards full-time employment that makes it difficult to negotiate flexible working hours, but also the ingrained logic of social comparison—the need to 'keep up with the Joneses'—which constantly upgrades our perceived materialistic 'needs' as incomes rise. The widespread sense of having to earn enough to live a 'normal' consumer lifestyle, one that is sold to use through advertising and reinforced by cultural norms, reflects the immense structural and social barriers to work sharing that exist in industrial growth-driven economies.
And what can help the transition,
Overcoming the current structural bias towards long and unevenly distributed work hours requires a myriad of economic reforms. These could include income and wealth redistribution (including a substantially increased minimum wage); encouraging uncommodified forms of production and consumption (such as 'self-producing' or 'co-production'); creating new measurements of progress and prosperity; and freeing sources of finance from the burden of interest-accruing debt. Perhaps most importantly, it requires an end of the work-to-earn, earn-to-consume midset that currently dominates day-to-day life in many industrialized societies.
The big thing in all this—and which directly ties this all together with increasing resource consumption and biodiversity loss—is adjusting what is considering a normal level of resource consumption, globally.
As Fred Pearce has recently pointed out, the average person in the United States' lifestyle emits twice as much as the highest emitting Europeans, four times the greenhouse gases as the average person in China or the lowest emitting Europeans, about ten times more than the average Indian, and even more than that of the average Ethiopian.
A quick look at ecological footprint stats shows that the levels of resource consumption in the United States can only be extended to about 1.4 billion people before there is absolutely nothing left over for the five plus billion other human beings and all the other non-human forms of life on the planet.
A more equitable distribution of the world's natural resources at current population levels yields a lifestyle like the average Jordanian or Thai (according to Worldwatch Institute analysis).
Conceptually this is where we collectively have to head, and construct our economies towards that end: Relatively equitable distribution of the world's natural resources, and a steady state economy—no natural resource consumption beyond which can be sustainably and natural regenerated.
This has to be the baseline from which we plan both social and environmental policy, the most basic economic question: What level of economic activity and the resultant levels of natural resource consumption can be extended to ever person on the planet, while staying within the ecological limits of this finite planet?
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