We formerly had a crime in this country – usury. The idea that one could earn income by providing capital to another was considered as unacceptable a few centuries ago as pimping is today.
Our global economy does require liquidity and this can only come from lending, hedging (which isn’t always damaging speculation), and trustworthy, regulated markets.
But underneath our meteoric rise in both population and economic activity the last two centuries has been a mix of fossil resources that are either running short or causing troubles through their continued use.
We need to do better without using more: that’s the fundamental difference between growth and development.
Here’s a simple way to visualize the difference between growth and development. As this skater pulls her arms and legs in her spin (economy) accelerates. She isn’t using more energy, she’s focusing it. Growth would be the overweight American kid who caught a glimpse of this event while channel surfing and stuffing her face with Twinkies.
So, development is focused and muscular and good for you, while growth produces stuff like this:
If we’re going to do more with less it’s simple, but it requires a radical change in thinking – we have to define what ”MORE” is in terms that make sense for the long haul.
There is a linear relationship between U.S. Gross Domestic Product, its friend the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and energy use. Our energy supplies will be decreasing, and if our entire sense of well being is predicated on this imaginary thing called the DOW having a value assigned to it of around 13,000, well, we’re screwed. Our liquid fuels are going to decline 3% to 5% annually and our economy is going to follow suit.
There are a variety of alternatives to the DOW as a measure of national well being. The Misery Index gets mentioned occasionally, but life is more complex than a job and the interest rates on your credit cards. Bhutan focuses on Gross National Happiness and they are much happier than us. I think they’re on the right track, but it’s a bit too cutesy for an aging superpower to implement. We in the west are talking about it, however, as this 2005 article in Time shows.
I went digging to see if there was a way to do this in the U.S. and there is a group in Vermont working on Gross National Happiness:USA. They’ve been around for a few years now, they’re branching out in various ways, but what I was looking for was a simple to understand metric that could replace this horrid DJIA number.
I found this GNH Survey from May of this year and it looks like they have a measurement plan.
So this is a good start on a measurement that focuses on what humans (read: citizens, voters) need, rather than corporations.
And if we focus on development we can probably use the Millennium Institute’s fine integrated planning tool, Threshold 21 as a way to measure where we are now, and where we’ll go if we implement various policies.
The only thing that’s certain in these times is that the Republican party’s plan of Giving Oligarchs Presents isn’t working for most of us ..