{"id":48780,"date":"2014-10-20T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2014-10-20T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=48780"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:38","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:38","slug":"the-new-economy-versus-todays-flat-earthers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/10\/the-new-economy-versus-todays-flat-earthers\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Economy versus Today\u2019s Flat Earthers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Only madmen and economists, Kenneth Boulding once said, believe exponential growth can go on forever.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_48781\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Flat-Earth-A-Siegel.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-48781\" class=\"size-full wp-image-48781\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Flat-Earth-A-Siegel.jpg\" alt=\"As absurd as this looks, it is no less absurd than an economic system designed for an infinite planet. Photo Credit: A Siegel\" width=\"300\" height=\"326\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Flat-Earth-A-Siegel.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Flat-Earth-A-Siegel-276x300.jpg 276w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-48781\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">As absurd as this looks, it is no less absurd than an economic system designed for an infinite planet. Photo Credit: A Siegel<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>19 Oct 2014 &#8211; <\/em>Beyond all reason and evidence, standard economics remains dedicated to the idea of perpetual increase in our species\u2019 stock of wealth, income, and material wellbeing. Their infinite planet thinking has a long pedigree: from John Locke toward the end of the 17th century to Adam Smith in in the middle of the 18th, the planet was obviously capable of supporting expansion of the human estate for untold generations to come. In their world, vast reaches of the globe had yet to be mapped by Europeans. Humans everywhere were relatively scarce, their powers not yet global in scale, not yet amplified by the\u00a0extraordinary energies of coal and oil.<\/p>\n<p>But the seven billion of us who are alive today live on a substantially different planet. It doesn\u2019t have supposedly infinite tracts of untramelled, virgin land, ripe for being ravished by swaggering, overconfident exploiters. We need\u00a0a new, steady state economy suited to the planet we have, not the one that economists thought we had two hundred years ago. We need a post-infinite-growth economy (and new breed of economist) respectful of the notion that there are ecological limits to economic activity. Absent that, our civilization is set to destroy its root in nature.<\/p>\n<p>But the New Economy Movement is about more than ecological sanity. It seeks other practical and desirable solutions, like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a living wage for workers;<\/li>\n<li>a more equitable distribution of the fruits of production;<\/li>\n<li>sharp limits to the political influence of corporations and the exceedingly rich; and<\/li>\n<li>a relocalization and reduction in the scale of economic activity that will bring production into better relation with workers, customers, neighbors, and the planet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We seek, in a word, economic justice.<\/p>\n<p>That can seem a very different goal than sustainability, but it isn\u2019t. Ironically enough, mainstream economists recognize the two goals are related. The remedy they offer for the injustice of poverty is the same remedy they offer for environmental problems: more economic growth. Only if we are wealthier, their argument goes, will we be able to afford environmental quality or solve the problem of poverty.<\/p>\n<p>The New Economy Movement must show\u2013must insist\u2013that this is mistaken. It must show that the attempt to solve our ecological and social crises through economic growth is a fool\u2019s task, because both crises have a common cause: an infinite-planet, perpetual-growth economy has met the limits of a finite planet.<\/p>\n<p>When a financial system designed for infinite growth hits a local or planetary limit, it becomes a pump that sucks money from those who have less and gives it to those who have more. On a finite planet, a perpetual-growth economy eventually encounters the source-and-sink limits of ecosystems, either transgressing them and causing species loss, climate change, and ecosystem failure, or crashing because the limit can\u2019t physically be broken.<\/p>\n<p>In the Infinite Planet Thinking of mainstream economics, human population growth is always a good thing: humans are \u201cThe Ultimate Resource,\u201d capable of infinite imagination, infinite invention. But in the world as it is, human invention is limited by physical law: you\u2019ll never have a car that you can push backwards and fill the gas tank. Ultimately, on a finite planet with a human economy operating at its ecological limit, any further growth in human population or the human economy\u00a0degrades our quality of life, further increases our ecological footprint, and leads to the loss of democracy as we yield to technocracy\u2013rule by environmental experts\u2013or ignore ecological constraints and thereby condemn our civilization to collapse. Meanwhile, population growth produces an oversupply of labor that drives down wages, diminishing the middle class and dividing us into rich and poor, captains and serfs.<\/p>\n<p>Economic growth and human population growth proceed as if the planet were infinite\u2013and those who express concern are challenged with being anti-human, pessimistic, or \u201cneo-Malthusian.\u201d It\u2019s time to change the discourse. With repeated and creative messaging, the phrase \u201cInfinite Planet Thinker\u201d will come to sound as outmoded and ridiculous as \u201cFlat Earth Theorist.\u201d And when that happens, the principles and programs that CASSE and the New Economy Movement seek to advance will be on their way to general acceptance. I think that when they see it framed this way, most people will choose the new, steady state economy. Imagining the possible, and working to make it real, is more realistic than continuing to assume the planet is impossibly infinite.<\/p>\n<p><em>Editor\u2019s Note: This article is presented as part of\u00a0<\/em><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.neweconomyweek.org\/\" ><em>New Economy Week<\/em><\/a> <em>(13-19 Oct 2014), five days of conversation around building an economy that works for everyone.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/steadystate.org\/the-new-economy-versus-todays-flat-earthers\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DalyNews+%28The+Daly+News%29\" >Go to Original \u2013 steadystate.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Only madmen and economists, Kenneth Boulding once said, believe exponential growth can go on forever. Beyond all reason and evidence, standard economics remains dedicated to the idea of perpetual increase in our species\u2019 stock of wealth, income, and material wellbeing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}