Today I came across a powerful appeal to shift away from the neoliberal paradigm of Free Market supremacy toward a more rational allocation of resources between the earth's seven billion people from noted Economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Need versus greed
Jeffrey D. Sachs
04 Mar 2011
The world is hitting global limits in its use of resources. We are feeling the shocks each day in catastrophic floods, droughts, and storms – and in the resulting surge in prices in the marketplace. Our fate now depends on whether we cooperate or fall victim to self-defeating greed.
The limits to the global economy are new, resulting from the unprecedented size of the world's population and the unprecedented spread of economic growth to nearly the entire world. There are now seven billion people on the planet, compared to just three billion a half-century ago.
Our planet will not physically support this exponential economic growth if we let greed take the upper hand. Even today, the weight of the world economy is already crushing nature, rapidly depleting the supplies of fossil-fuel energy resources that nature created over millions of years, while the resulting climate change has led to massive instabilities in terms of rainfall, temperature, and extreme storms.
We see these pressures every day in the marketplace. Oil prices have surged to more than $100 per barrel, as China, India, and other oil-importing countries join the United States in a massive scramble to buy up supplies, especially from the Middle East. Food prices, too, are at historical highs, contributing to poverty and political unrest.
Environmental stress
On the one hand, there are more mouths to feed, and with greater purchasing power on average. On the other hand, heat waves, droughts, floods, and other disasters induced by climate change are destroying crops and reducing the supplies of grains on world markets. In recent months, massive droughts have struck the grain-producing regions of Russia and Ukraine, and enormous floods have hit Brazil and Australia; now, another drought is menacing northern China's grain belt.
Everywhere in the leading countries – the US, the United Kingdom, China, India, and elsewhere – the rich have enjoyed soaring incomes and growing political power. The US economy has been taken over by billionaires, the oil industry, and other key sectors. The same trends threaten the emerging economies, where wealth and corruption are on the rise.
If greed dominates, the engine of economic growth will deplete our resources, push the poor aside, and drive us into a deep social, political, and economic crisis. The alternative is a path of political and social cooperation, both within countries and internationally. There will be enough resources and prosperity to go around if we convert our economies to renewable energy sources, sustainable agricultural practices, and reasonable taxation of the rich. This is the path to shared prosperity through improved technologies, political fairness, and ethical awareness.
I agree with Jeffrey Sachs analysis wholeheartedly, and can't add much except to say we as a species need to start taking our environmental and economic predicament a whole lot more seriously than we are currently doing. Sachs timely essay dovetails with the thesis of my diary from last night:
World Food Prices hit all time High World's Poorest on edge of survival
Please take the time to read the Sachs piece in it entirety.