Enough Is Enough

by Rob Dietz

  Now is the moment to get started on the economy of enough, and it’s about time! The concept of a steady-state economy has been developing for centuries. Economists have long considered a transition from a growing economy to a stable one. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith anticipated such a transition. He believed that in the long run, population growth would push wages down, natural resources would become increasingly scarce, and division of labor would approach the limits of effectiveness. He even estimated that the period of growth would last for about two hundred years.5

  In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill, a pioneer of economics and a gifted philosopher, developed his idea of the “stationary state.” He believed that after a phase of growth, the economy would reach a constant population and constant stock of capital, and he viewed this scenario as a positive development:

  It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds cease to be engrossed by the art of getting on.6

  One of the twentieth century’s foremost economists, John Maynard Keynes, looked with anticipation toward the day when society could focus on ends (happiness and well-being, for example) rather than means (economic growth and individual pursuit of profit). His essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” strikes a steady-state chord and hints at the transition to a nongrowing economy:

  I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable. … We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.7

  These leading thinkers from the last three centuries were onto something. Today in the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of ecological economists, sustainability scientists, well-being researchers, and concerned citizens are recognizing the urgent need to make the transition away from growth and focus instead on sustainable and equitable well-being. The blueprint continues to develop, but the steady-state design has yet to be put into practice. To be sure, the blueprint can be improved (especially as societies gain experience with the policies), but enough ideas exist today to break ground on the new economy.

  The Grand Construction Project

  Crises tend to have a cascading effect, with one crisis paving the way for the next. It’s precisely because of this effect that we face a frightening combination of economic and environmental crises, including a debt-riddled financial system, widespread unemployment, inequities between the haves and the have-nots, climate change, species extinctions, and dwindling supplies of natural resources. But solutions can also have a cascading effect.8 Once we decide to get on with the process of building a steady-state economy, the policies and strategies can reinforce and feed off one another.

  When the cascading effect has been set in motion, the steady-state economy will advance from a rough sketch to a reality. It’s a lot to take in—this process of building a whole new economy—but remember that the economy is a human construct. Economic “laws” are not like the law of gravity. They can be changed. In the end, economic institutions and the policies that support them are dependent on culture. With culture serving as the source for what happens in the economy, it follows that an economic paradigm shift will occur only in response to a cultural shift. People have to grasp that consumption is only a small fraction of the complete picture when it comes to well-being and life satisfaction. Citizens everywhere, but especially those living in high-consuming nations, need to work toward this cultural shift—a process that will require effective activism.

  Bill McKibben, the author of Deep Economy, understands the arguments in favor of this cultural shift, and he also has a feel for effective activism. As the founder of 350.org, he has successfully organized grassroots campaigns and global public actions aimed at solving the climate crisis. Despite his successes, McKibben retains a down-to-earth demeanor. When prompted to discuss his experience as an activist, he almost seems surprised that someone would seek his advice on the subject. Even so, his advice is helpful for anyone interested in working on the cultural shift needed to build a steady-state economy. Some of his principles are:

  • Get people interested and trust them to do good things. His metaphor for this principle is a potluck dinner; if you set a date and time, people will bring food, and things generally work out.

  • Combine science and art. The scientific facts provide the starting point, but art and imagery provide the inspiration.

  • Have fun. One of the best ways to motivate people to join a cause is to create opportunities for them to enjoy themselves.

  • Consider options besides attack and escalation. In many circumstances, creative and artistic actions can be more effective than aggressive ones.

  • Use different currencies. Entrenched interests mostly use money as their currency, and while activists can also use money, they may find power in other currencies, such as shared goals or close community ties.

  Achieving a monumental shift in culture and the way people behave may sound daunting, but there’s hope that it can be done. All we need to do is look at the numerous ways in which culture and behavioral norms have shifted over time. And in today’s hyper-connected world, changes can happen faster than at any point in history.

  As the cultural shift gets under way, as researchers continue to advance the thinking on how to manage a nongrowing economy, and as publicity for the concept of an economic transition builds, it will be time to start the earnest work of putting the policy pillars in place. Policies such as democratization of economic institutions, ecological tax reform, and work-time reduction are positive responses to systems that aren’t working. However, implementation will require us to overcome ingrained ways of doing things. Plenty of opportunities and challenges will arise during this process. We should begin with the most politically feasible policies (taking advantage of the opportunities), and use these to spur complementary changes (to overcome the challenges). Since there is already strong support for adopting new indicators of progress, it makes sense to push for this change to start the cascade of other changes that are needed.

  Walking in a different direction from the rest of society is a challenging thing to do. Belief in an unpopular idea, even if it’s true, can be an isolating experience (just ask Galileo!). It can also be disquieting to support policies that—because they are counter to the conventional wisdom of economic growth—are viewed by many as harmful. In considering the transition to a steady-state economy, it’s tempting to give in to the mainstream fear that without growth there will be unemployment, but remember that the mainstream has generally not considered the hopeful blueprint for a steady-state economy. Many jobs will be available in the transition to a steady-state economy, and these jobs will have more meaning than much of the busywork involved in making a bigger economy. As Thoreau wrote, “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”9

  At the same time, the transition will offer opportunities for improving quality of life. It may be true that improving quality of life and economic growth once went hand in hand, but the diminishing returns of growth and the negative consequences of too much growth have changed that. As McKibben colorfully describes:

  For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. … But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It’s More or Better.10
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  This is a heartening assessment of our future prospects, and it’s a good thing, too, because it will take boldness to adjust our aim and throw the stone at Better. It will take boldness to open our minds to what science and our own senses are telling us. And it will take boldness to break out of old economic patterns, unseat entrenched elites, and reconcile our actions with the capacity of the planet.

  Real action to achieve a prosperous and sustainable economy does not include bailouts and futile attempts to squeeze more growth out of an already overgrown economy. It certainly does not involve throwing more and more debt-based “stimulus” money into an unstable system of finance, or cutting valuable public services. Real action requires us to recognize the limits to growth, and embrace the viable and desirable alternative: a steady-state economy. But we must act now, for time is the ultimate limit that we face, and it’s the one commodity that we can never have enough of.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1: HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH?

  1. E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 122.

  2. Wendell Berry, “Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest (1979),” in The Gift of Good Land (New York: North Point Press, 1982), 47–76.

  3. Herman Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003).

  4. Dan O’Neill, Rob Dietz, and Nigel Jones, eds., “Enough Is Enough: Ideas for a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources. The Report of the Steady State Economy Conference” (Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy and Economic Justice For All, Leeds, U.K., 2010), http://steadystate.org/enough-is-enough/ (accessed October 12, 2011).

  5. Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan, 2009).

  6. Tim Jackson, “Investment, Productivity, and Ownership” (Steady State Economy Conference, Leeds, U.K., June 19, 2010), http://steadystate.org/learn/leeds2010/videos/ (accessed October 12, 2011).

  CHAPTER 2: WHY SHOULD ENOUGH BE THE GOAL?

  1. Telephone conversation between Kenneth Boulding and Lindsey Grant, March 1988.

  2. Jack Santa-Barbara, interview with Rob Dietz, November 14, 2011.

  3. Herman Daly and John Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

  4. Angus Maddison, “Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2008 AD” (Groningen Growth and Development Centre, University of Groningen, 2010), http://www.ggdc.net/MADDISON/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_02-2010.xls (accessed November 22, 2011).

  5. Fridolin Krausmann et al., “Growth in Global Materials Use, GDP and Population during the 20th Century,” Ecological Economics 68, no. 10 (August 2009): 2696–2705.

  6. Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009): 32.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Brad Ewing et al., Ecological Footprint Atlas 2009 (Oakland, Calif.: Global Footprint Network, 2009), http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_Atlas_2009.pdf (accessed December 5, 2011).

  9. Global Footprint Network, “National Footprint Accounts: 2010 Edition” (Global Footprint Network, 2010), http://www.footprintnetwork.org (accessed December 5, 2011).

  10. Quoted in Steven Stoll, “Fear of Fallowing: The Specter of a No-Growth World,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2008.

  11. Thomas Friedman, “The Inflection Is Near?” New York Times, March 7, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08friedman.html (accessed December 5, 2011).

  12. Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2011), 2–3.

  13. David Murphy and Charles Hall, “Year in Review—EROI or Energy Return on (Energy) Invested,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1185 (January 2010): 102–118.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Energy data represent total primary energy consumption and are from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “International Energy Statistics” (2011), http://www.eia.gov/countries/data.cfm (accessed November 28, 2011). GDP data are from the World Bank, “World Development Indicators, September 2011 Edition” (University of Manchester: ESDS International, 2011), http://dx.doi.org/10.5257/wb/wdi/2011-04 (accessed November 24, 2011).

  17. Andrew Simms, Victoria Johnson, and Peter Chowla, Growth Isn’t Possible (London: New Economics Foundation, 2010).

  18. Ibid., 24.

  19. James Hansen et al., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” The Open Atmospheric Science Journal 2 (2008): 217.

  20. Jeremy Grantham, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” GMO Quarterly Newsletter, April 2011, reprinted in The Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853 (accessed November 14, 2011).

  21. Leslie Christian and Carsten Henningsen, Portfolio 21 Annual Report, June 30, 2011.

  22. Happiness data are calculated based on the method used by Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 30. Happiness data for 1946–1971 are from the American Institute of Public Opinion, as reported in Tom Smith, “Happiness: Time Trends, Seasonal Variations, Intersurvey Differences, and Other Mysteries,” Social Psychology Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1979): 18–30. Happiness data for 1972–2010 are from the National Opinion Research Center, “General Social Survey 1972–2010, Cumulative Datafile” (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2012), http://www3.norc.org/GSS+Website (accessed February 14, 2012). GDP data are from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Current-Dollar and Real GDP” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 2012), http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm (accessed February 14, 2012).

  23. Life satisfaction data are from Ruut Veenhoven, “World Database of Happiness” (Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2011), http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl (accessed November 12, 2011). GDP data are from the World Bank, “World Development Indicators, September 2011 Edition.”

  24. Anne Krueger, “Letting the Future In: India’s Continuing Reform Agenda” (keynote speech, Stanford India Conference, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., June 4, 2004), http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2004/060404.htm (accessed November 30, 2011).

  25. United Nations Millennium Project, “Fast Facts: The Faces of Poverty” (United Nations Millennium Project, U.N. Development Group, 2006), http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/resources/fastfacts_e.htm (accessed August 3, 2010).

  26. World Bank, “Macroeconomics and Growth” (2008), http://go.worldbank.org/E5RR830FI1 (accessed September 19, 2010).

  27. David Woodward and Andrew Simms, Growth Isn’t Working: The Unbalanced Distribution of Benefits and Costs from Economic Growth (London: New Economics Foundation, 2006).

  28. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 235.

  29. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2009/ (accessed November 30, 2011).

  30. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.

  31. OECD.Stat, “Key Short-Term Economic Indicators: Harmonised Unemployment Rate” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2012), http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx (accessed February 12, 2012).

  32. John Maynard Keynes, First Annual Report of the Arts Council (1945–1946) (London: U.K. Arts Council, 1946).

  CHAPTER 3: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

  1. Jackson, Prosperity without Growth, 13 (cited in chap. 1, n. 5).

  2. National Park Service, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: A Guide to Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Maryland, District of Columbia, and West Virginia (Washington, D.C.: Bernan Assoc., 1991), 24.

 
3. Joel Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 369.

  4. Ibid., 368–369.

  5. Erik Assadourian, “The Rise and Fall of Consumer Cultures,” in State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures, edited by Linda Starke and Lisa Mastny, 3–20 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 2010), 6.

  6. Richard Horan, Erwin Bulte, and Jason Shogren, “How Trade Saved Humanity from Biological Exclusion: An Economic Theory of Neanderthal Extinction,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 58, no. 1 (September 2005): 1–29.

  7. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (San Francisco: Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, 1968).

  8. Daly and Farley, Ecological Economics (cited in chap. 1, n. 3), 63.

  9. Gregg Easterbrook, “The Man Who Defused the ‘Population Bomb,’” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574411382676924044.html (accessed December 8, 2011).

  10. Paul Ehrlich, “Homage to Norman Borlaug,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 66, no. 6 (2009): 673–677.

  11. Jackson, Prosperity without Growth, 68.

  12. Material extraction data are from the Sustainable Europe Research Institute, “Global Material Flows Database” (Vienna: Sustainable Europe Research Institute, 2010), http://www.materialflows.net (accessed November 24, 2010). GDP data are from the World Bank, “World Development Indicators, September 2011 Edition” (cited in chap. 2, n. 16).

  13. Energy use data are from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “International Energy Statistics” (cited in chap. 2, n. 16). GDP data are from the World Bank, “World Development Indicators, September 2011 Edition” (cited in chap. 2, n. 16).

  14. Peter Victor, Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008), 125.