by From Jamie Morgan and current issue of RWER If climate emergency indicates anything, it is that we are urgently in need of an economics that is “fit for purpose”. Consider what “fit for purpose” now means. An adequate economics now has to be one that helps us understand the difficult decisions that are likely to confront us in the coming years. On a global scale we are going to have to leave fossil fuels in the ground, restore aquifers and water systems, reinvigorate ecosystems, greatly accelerate reforestation, bring a halt to using the oceans as a dumping site for plastics and numerous other chemical pollutants, reduce acidification of the oceans and so on. But fundamentally, on a global scale we are, unless there is some miraculous technological miracle, going to have to do less.
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from Jamie Morgan and current issue of RWER
If climate emergency indicates anything, it is that we are urgently in need of an economics that is “fit for purpose”. Consider what “fit for purpose” now means. An adequate economics now has to be one that helps us understand the difficult decisions that are likely to confront us in the coming years. On a global scale we are going to have to leave fossil fuels in the ground, restore aquifers and water systems, reinvigorate ecosystems, greatly accelerate reforestation, bring a halt to using the oceans as a dumping site for plastics and numerous other chemical pollutants, reduce acidification of the oceans and so on. But fundamentally, on a global scale we are, unless there is some miraculous technological miracle, going to have to do less. That means we cannot continue with throwaway consumerism or with continual economic-material-energy growth. We are going to have to use durable, replaceable and repairable goods, but more fundamentally we are going to have to consider our consumption decisions differently in regard of whether we buy something at all – since this seems basic to “low impact living”. This, however, is antithetical to both the system as is and the mechanisms and interests that currently “keep the economy going”.
I may be able to choose not to buy or fly but I cannot create income, employment and alternatives to employment on a system-wide basis – nor can I know unaided whether in fact the sum total of activity is within feasible planetary limits domestically and globally. Only the state in its relations with other states and in its relations with the private sector can know and do these things – working to create the pathways of feasible transition and transformation that parallel activity from all other aspects of society. And yet states are caught between their current evolved and developed interest configurations derived from the neoliberal period and the necessity to address profound and basic problems. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a “self-annihilating corporation” and there is considerable resistance from any industrial sector to recognition that its time has come.
The implication then, is that any adequate economics must recognise the politicised dilemmas of socio-economic organisation. It cannot evade political economy. It cannot evade discussion of the norms that inform the structuring of economy and the mechanisms that induce consequences from those structurings. In any case, only the state can configure its Green New Deal to what the world really allows and we are going to have to think about what preserves and stabilises the world, which is a radically different perspective than commodifying it as resources to exploit. And we are going to have to act and act quickly. That something can be phrased as cannot be “evaded” “must” or “have to”, of course, does not mean we will treat things that way and this too is a dilemma – resisting the obvious and refusing to deliberate will not prevent adverse outcomes, it merely increases the likelihood that worst cases become inevitabilities.
While these are not new ideas and certainly not original to me – they are now the reality that confronts us, a reality that mainstream economics has been antithetical to, since it has encouraged unsustainable trends in almost all aspects of economy: climate and resource profligacy (via “growthism” and approaches to theory that have invited complacency regarding if and when to accept that “enough is enough”), extreme inequality, insufficient attention to basic human services, well-being, profit over public purpose, and so on.[1] As advocates of degrowth, postgrowth etc. point out, however, an alternative need not default to some somber theory of parsimony contrasted with neoliberalism’s profligacy. It does not demand we conceive the future as a second best joyless existence. Rather it offers the prospect of “just transitions”, building a future society and economy reoriented on what really matters to us. Green New Deals already hold out the prospect of redirecting great swathes of socio-economic activity from consumption to social, welfare and health services, and there is no law of nature that prevents us redirecting attention from consumerism, taking more note of use-value and placing greater value on “relational goods” i.e. the sense of well-being derived from participation – the relation itself – encompassing a wide variety of activities from the informal interaction of friends to more formal communitarian pursuits.[2]
[1] See the edited text Fullbrook and Morgan (2021); Gills and Morgan (2020a, 2020b, 2020c); Spash (2020).
[2] See Donati and Archer (2015).