[p2p-research] Fwd: New article in UK Ecologist: The Cinderella Economy!

Thu Jan 28 20:30:31 CET 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ZTANGI PRESS <ztangi at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:26 AM
Subject: New article in UK Ecologist: The Cinderella Economy!
To: Jasecon Festival <jasecon_festival at npogroups.org>

Greetings all,

I am sending this beyond the JASecon working group and copying the entire
article in the body of this email because it is only available to Ecologist
subscribers . For convenience I have copied into a Word doc and that is
attached to facilitate wider distribution through your networks. Sorry for
the word breaks. I need to learn how to reformat from online sources. I
appended my brief online "comment" to the article at the end.
-bernard
- - -

*Farmers' markets, coops and repair shops will seed the new economy*

Tim Jackson

*The Ecologist*
                                                        26th January, 2010

*
*

*It's called the 'Cinderella economy'. You know it as the local, sustainable
businesses that don't make the GDP ﬁgures soar, but do provide jobs and*  *glue
communities together...*

Society is faced with a profound dilemma. To resist growth is to risk
economic and social collapse. To pursue it relentlessly is to

endanger the ecosystems on which we depend for long-term survival.

For the most part, this dilemma goes unrecognised in mainstream policy. It’s
only marginally more visible as a public debate.

When reality begins to impinge on the collective consciousness, the best
suggestion to hand is that we can somehow ‘decouple’

growth from its material impacts. And continue to do so while the economy
expands exponentially.

The sheer scale of action implied by this is daunting. In a world of 9
billion people all aspiring to western lifestyles, the carbon

intensity of every dollar of output must be at least 130 times lower in 2050
than it is today. By the end of the century, economic

activity will need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere not adding to
it.

Never mind that noone knows what such an economy looks like. Never mind that
decoupling isn’t happening at anything like that

scale. Never mind that all our institutions and incentive structures
continually point in the wrong direction. The dilemma, once

recognised, looms so dangerously over our future that we are desperate to
believe in miracles. Technology will save us.

Capitalism is good at technology. So let’s just keep the show on the road
and hope for the best.

* *

*Eco-fundamentalists*

No surprise then, that the response to the recession was a ubiquitous call
to re-invigorate consumer spending and kick start

growth. Those inclined to question the consensus were swiftly denounced as
cynical revolutionaries or modern day luddites. ‘We

do not agree with the anti-capitalists who see the economic crisis as a
chance to impose their utopia, whether of a socialist or

eco-fundamentalist kind,’ roared the Independent on Sunday late in 2008.
‘Most of us in this country enjoy long and fulfilling lives

thanks to liberal capitalism: we have no desire to live in a yurt under a
workers' soviet.’

With that confusingly-attired bogey-man looming over us, kick-starting
growth looked like a no-brainer. And the closest we got to

doing anything other than business as usual was the possibility that somehow
out of the crisis we might create a ‘different engine

of growth’ as Achim Steiner from the UN Environment Programme called it.
'Green growth' became the holy grail of economic

recovery.

Similar proposals had been voiced for some years by ecological economists.
Pointing out that ‘ever greater consumption of

resources is [in itself] a driver of growth’ in the current paradigm, Robert
Ayres argues that ‘in effect, a new growth engine is

needed, based on non-polluting energy sources and selling non-material
services, not polluting products’.

* *

*Business as usual. Minus the carbon*

This idea is still essentially an appeal to decoupling. Growth continues,
while resource intensity (and hopefully throughput)

declines. But here at least is something in the way of a blueprint for what
such an economy might look like. It gives us more of a

sense of what people are buying and what businesses are selling in this new
economy. Its founding concept is the production and

sale of de-materialised ‘services’, rather than material ‘products’.

Clearly this can’t just be the ‘service-based economies’ that have
characterised certain Western development over the last few

decades. For the most part those have been achieved by reducing heavy
manufacturing, continuing to import consumption goods

from abroad and expanding financial services to pay for them.

So what exactly constitutes productive economic activity in this new
economy? Selling ‘energy services’, certainly, rather than

energy supplies. Selling mobility rather than cars. Recycling, re-using,
leasing, maybe. Yoga lessons, perhaps, hairdressing,

gardening: so long as these aren’t carried out using buildings, don’t
involve the latest fashion and you don’t need a car to get to

them. The humble broom would need to be preferred to the diabolical
‘leaf-blower’, for instance.

The fundamental question is this: can you really make enough money from
these activities to keep an economy growing? And the

truth is we just don’t know. We have never at any point in history lived in
such an economy. It sounds at the moment suspiciously like something the
Independent on Sunday would instantly dismiss as a yurt-based economy – with
increasingly expensive yurts.

* *

*A new economy*

But this doesn’t mean we should throw away the underlying vision completely.
Whatever the new economy looks like, low-carbon

economic activities that employ people in ways that contribute meaningfully
to human flourishing have to be the basis for it. That

much is clear.

So rather than starting from the assumption of growth, perhaps we should
start by identifying what we want a sustainable

economy to look and behave like. Clearly, some form of stability – or
resilience – matters. Economies which collapse threaten

human flourishing immediately. We know that equality matters. Unequal
societies drive unproductive status competition and

undermine wellbeing not only directly but also by eroding our sense of
shared citizenship.

Work – and not just paid employment – still matters in this new economy.
It’s vital for all sorts of reasons. Apart from the obvious contribution of
paid employment to people’s livelihoods, work is a part of our participation
in the life of society. Through work we create and recreate the social world
and find a credible place in it.

* *

*An ecologically-bounded economy*

Perhaps most vital of all, economic activity must remain
ecologically-bounded. The limits of a finite planet need to be coded

directly into its working principles. The valuation of ecosystem services,
the greening of the national accounts, the identification of an
ecologically-bounded production function: all of these are likely to be
essential to the development of a sustainable economic framework.

And at the local level, it’s possible to identify some simple operational
principles that these new economic activities need to fulfil.

Let’s call these activities 'ecological enterprises' if they satisfy three
simple criteria:

• they contribute positively to human flourishing;

• they support community and provide decent livelihoods;

• they use as little as possible in the way of materials and energy.

Notice that it isn’t just the outputs from economic activity that must make
a positive contribution to flourishing. It’s the form and

organisation of our systems of provision as well. Ecological enterprise
needs to work with the grain of community and the

long-term social good, rather than against it.

* *

*Enter the Cinderella economy*

Interestingly, ecological enterprise has a kind of forerunner. The seeds for
the new economy already exist in local,

community-based social enterprise: community energy projects, local farmers'
markets, slow food cooperatives, sports clubs,

libraries, community health and fitness centres, local repair and
maintenance services, craft workshops, writing centres,

watersports, community music and drama, local training and skills. And yes,
maybe even yoga (or martial arts or meditation),

hairdressing, and gardening.

People often achieve a greater sense of wellbeing and fulfillment, both as
producers and as consumers of these activities, than

they ever do from the time-poor, materialistic, supermarket economy in which
most of our lives are spent. So it’s ironic that these community-based
social enterprises barely count in today’s economy. They represent a kind of
Cinderella economy that sits

neglected at the margins of consumer society.

Some of them scarcely even register as economic activities in a formal sense
at all. They sometimes employ people on a

part-time or even voluntary basis. Their activities are often labour
intensive. So if they contribute anything at all to GDP, their

labour productivity growth is of course ‘dismal’ – in the language of the
dismal science. If we start shifting wholesale to patterns

of de-materialised services, we wouldn’t immediately bring the economy to a
standstill, but we’d certainly slow down growth

considerably.

* *

*Employing people seen as worthless*

We’re getting perilously close here to the lunacy at the heart of the
growth-obsessed, resource-intensive, consumer economy.

Here is a sector that could provide meaningful work, offer people
capabilities for flourishing, contribute positively to community

and have a decent chance of being materially light. And yet it’s denigrated
as worthless because it’s actually employing people.

This response shows up the fetish with labour productivity for what it is: a
recipe for undermining work, community and

environment. Of course, labour productivity improvements aren’t always bad.
There are clearly places where it makes sense to

substitute away from human labour, especially where the working experience
itself is poor. But the idea that labour input is always and necessarily
something to be minimised goes against common sense.

In fact, there’s a very good reason why de-materialised services don’t lead
to productivity growth. It’s because for many of them

it’s the human input to them that constitutes the value in them. The pursuit
of labour productivity in activities whose integrity

depends on human interaction systematically undermines the quality of the
output.

* *

*The value of work*

Besides all that, work itself is one of the ways in which humans participate
meaningfully in society. Reducing our ability to do that

– or reducing the quality of our experience in doing so – is a direct hit on
flourishing. Relentless pursuit of labour productivity in

these circumstances makes absolutely no sense.

So in summary, it seems that those calling for a new engine of growth based
around dematerialised services are really onto

something. But they may perhaps have missed a vital point. The idea that an
increasingly serviced-based economy can (or

should) provide for ever-increasing economic output doesn’t quite stack up.

On the other hand, we’ve made some clear progress here. The Cinderella
economy really does offer a kind of blueprint for a

different kind of society. New, ecological enterprises provide capabilities
for flourishing. They offer the means to a livelihood and

to participation in the life of society. They provide security, a sense of
belonging, the ability to share in a common endeavour and

yet to pursue our potential as individual human beings. And at the same time
they offer a decent chance of remaining within

ecological scale. The next economy really does mean inviting Cinderella to
the ball.

Tim Jackson is economics commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable
Development Commission (SDC), and

professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey. His book,
*Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for*

*a Finite Planet* (£12.99) is published by Earthscan.

- - - -

Response to Tim Jackson

I am impressed that the ideas of Mr. Jackson have a platform in the UK
through his work with government’s Sustainable Development Commission. The
new economy that is developing everywhere, generally under the radar of the
mainstream media, provides both an avenue for practical, eco-friendly and
community-centered economic development and, as a consequence of the pursuit
of these values, the development of human qualities of cooperation,
self-empowerment and joy. Human aspirations that the dominant economy
trashes.

“Work” under these circumstances needs redefinition along the lines that Mr.
Jackson proposes. Its not so much that we need a new measure of its value
beyond “productivity” as we need a new appreciation of how useful “economic”
activities sustain our desire to attain a pleasurable life within a society
of friendships. In this regard a re-reading of Huizinga’s  *Homo
Ludens*proves worthy.

In the San Francisco Bay area the grassroots economy encompasses a diverse
palate of ventures that can be reached via the “portal” at www.jasecon.org.

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