Recession & Environment

As the recession pulls back on the bull of economic growth a wonderful thing is happening! Just listening to BBC Radio 4 last night in more than one place people are talking about a reassessment of the value of our economy! Maybe I don't need to write my book, maybe the change is coming all by itself.

"People are rediscovering that the best things in life are free" says a National Trust warden - days out with the family, landscapes all are free. In another place the discourse on sustainable economy appears to have risen in the consciousness. The extinction of the fossil fuel based economy is on the horizon. In the long term because no new fossil fuel is being produced and we are using it at a staggering rate. In the short term because of carbon based taxes. Now is the time to redeploy capital toward the economy of the future. This attitude is just part of the larger awareness that just as we have lived beyond our means financially so we are living beyond our means ecologically and the "environment crunch" is going to be far more catas-trophic than anything we see now.

Laterally a separate discussion was had by the editor of the magazine Wired on the arrival of a true free economy based upon the almost zero cost of digital data replication. While I don't rate this as a productive direction itself, it shows that the ingrained economic thinking of the industrial revolution is being eroded and the possibility of reconceiving our personal interactions in terms other than a limited model of exchange value is having its genesis.

One sad relapse to the old thinking is the attempt by the government to stimulate jobs by further fuelling the old archeic industries. First it was the banks, then Heathrow and now they are talking of refinancing the car industry. There are very good reasons why the car will fail, and very good reasons why the car should fail. I discuss the many sides on my web page, but to me the most damaging is the rise of the supermarket. When people drive to the shops they can travel further and carry more. It destroys local shops and communities as all products are brought under one roof. It leads to less frequent shopping, more food storage, more packaging and more centralised food distribution. That encourages road usage and diminishes the impact of local agriculture. It centralises capital and gives increased powers to supermarkets who then use this to drive prices down and thus exploit farmers, livestock and the countryside. Food quality reduces, animal welfare reduces, environment reduces, jobs reduce and health reduces while pollution rises. It is a terrible scar on current society. And this is just one side!

As also discussed on my web page things are most efficient when they are shared. Most obviously space is shared. If we cut the world up into individual plots of land we would have to live our whole lives on only 3.5 football pitches - and on the land would have to be the roads, crops, livestock, mining, industry, sewage, waste disposal and everything we use! A remarkable fact! It is only possible because we centralise and share these resources.

Given the advantages of economy of scale and division of labour how odd it is that while supermarkets exploit the power of centralisation we have a transport system going in the opposite way! Instead of giving the money to the car industry why not take this wonderful opportunity to let the dinosaur die and instead fund public transport. The problem is that a public transport system could be created that offered people greater freedom than the car but for less money and with less jobs. The reason is basic economics.

However we have this growing problem that efficiency works against the fundamental tenet of ancient thinking that we must work for what we receive. This is plainly absurd yet the dogma is so entrenched that it seems few people have questioned it. I won't discuss the details but consider returns on capital investment - the backbone of the current division between rich and poor. What work does an investor do? Yet they get handsome returns.

If we make the economy efficient then we will make people unemployed. Yet we are beginning to accept that we must increase energy efficiency to protect the environment and ultimately create a sustainable economy (unless we rapidly work out how to exploit other planets). So with these two competing problems it is only a matter of time before we have to find a way of distribution wealth separately from labour! For now give the car money to the future of transport namely the public transport system.