A crisis for the next generation

The challenge of sustainable prosperity and establishing a sustainable model of economic development is one of the most important of our current era. It’s not an entirely new one: the concern that economic growth is not sustainable is one that dates back to the early 1970s, when economists and environmental activists first started to say that we can’t have this constant, endless expansion of economic growth. Nevertheless, economic growth has not just continued over that time, it has accelerated with the expansion of the global economy over the 1980s and 1990s. If you look at the trends in CO2 emissions over that time, it’s absolutely disastrous, and roughly half of all of the CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution have happened since the 1990s. So, this is an extremely severe existential problem.

I think that one of the ways in which it’s clearly playing out in our society, politically, is in terms of intergenerational justice and intergenerational political economy. We see this with things like the school strikes for climate led by Greta Thunberg, but we also see the way in which some political movements and political victories in the world over the last 10 years have been led, particularly by older generations, and I’m talking about things like the victory of Donald Trump and also the Brexit referendum result of 2016. We’re seeing conflict between generations of those, many of whom are under the age of 20, who have got the most to lose from the current model of economic development at a global level, and older generations. The reality of the unsustainable model that we’re living with at the moment will be felt most severely upon the younger generations, for obvious reasons.

Photo by Alexandros Michailidis

What do we need to do?

What we need is a way to mitigate some of the worst effects of that model of growth. We know that every few years that pass without a major downturn in CO2 emissions will have disastrous effects lasting hundreds of years, and thousands of years, in some cases, into the future. There’s a case for an emergency, a movement against that. That’s what we’re seeing with ideas such as the Green New Deal, climate mobilisation and these movements which adopt a kind of vision of a wartime government that could actually act in the context of an emergency.

The other aspect of it, which draws on a rich history of environmental, development and feminist economics, tries to divert attention away from monetary indicators of value and monetary indicators of prosperity and towards indicators of objective well-being. That is about trying to capture how much time people are able to spend with their friends and family or advocating for things like a four-day week, which reduces the amount of time that we work, as a sign of progress in ways that will necessarily mean that less is produced. There are all sorts of ways in which prosperity could become more sustainable, but what all of them ultimately hinge on is a shift away from a reliance on market prices as an indicator of progress, an indicator of value.

Shifting away from the market

Photo by lakshmiprasada S

There are different ways of shifting away from reliance on the market as the main basis on which to measure progress and to allocate resources. Historically, the main alternative to the market has been economic planning, which has come to the fore both during times of war and during times of shifts in political governments to the left, towards forms of social democracy and socialism. We have been seeing aspects of a return to more planned economies over the course of the Coronavirus crisis. There were particular periods during the crisis when national governments were becoming engaged in directing industrial production towards the production of ventilators. For many people, this had an echo of wartime economic planning. It echoed, for example, the early years of America’s involvement in World War Two, when through sheer instructions by the federal government, whole industrial manufacturers during the early 1940s switched huge quantities of investment away from the production of things like cars towards the production of military vehicles and weapons. So, through sheer executive decision on the part of the State, it is possible to intervene in private industry.

That still requires quite a lot of economic analysis. In fact, it requires more economic and statistical analysis than the market, because one of the great benefits of markets, from the neoliberal perspective, is that markets save governments from having to take so many decisions: the market will decide instead. The return of more economic planning means that governments will need more expertise of various kinds, of a sort that they haven’t really relied upon very much over the last 40 years or so.

Going local

Governments will need the expertise to intervene in manufacturing, to make decisions about what industrial capital to invest in, what energy to invest in, and so on. We are seeing more of that emerging at the moment, partly due to a sense that the free market is not able to solve some of the social and ecological problems that afflict the world right now, but also thanks to the experience of the pandemic. The question is whether they have to have the skills and the knowledge to actually take those decisions in an effective, rational and legitimate fashion.

Photo by Andriy Blokhin

The other way in which you see a a pushback against the dominance of a global free market economy is with the return of a more local economic model, the like of which many environmentalists have defended and argued for for decades, in which it potentially becomes possible to keep people’s money invested in their own local economy or in their own town, maybe even to use their own currencies or their own types of banking. There are various experiments, many of which operate on a small scale, but in things like time banking, where people can build up credit for doing things for other people, and then they can use those credits by getting people to do things for them, these are ideas that have long fascinated and excited environmentalists. Now, they don’t necessarily operate at a very large scale, but they do offer a way of solving social problems in ways that don’t simply always come back to either the central state or the free market.

Propelling policy change

The big question for both the viability of liberal democracies and for the capacity to solve social environmental problems is the extent to which people continue to see politics, political parties, political leaders as having any sorts of solutions to the problems that afflict them in their everyday lives. Many of the rebellions against mainstream politics that we’ve seen over the last 10, 15 years, particularly since the global financial crisis of 2008, have come from a sense that people in politics are acting only in their own interests and never in the interests of anybody outside of their own particular cultural bubble of elites and people living in particular metropolitan centres. The question is the extent to which, as some of those particular populist politicians are now losing legitimacy, it might be possible in the context of the pandemic and its aftermath to actually find simple policies that garner popular support. They can’t be forms of extremely complicated, obscure policy that only economists understand and all of the beauty of the policy is in the detail and the functioning at the back end.

Now, the pandemic has created a kind of a proximity between policy decision-makers and everyday life that hasn’t existed for a long time. That doesn’t mean that their policies are necessarily popular, but what gets decided at a central and national level has huge implications for what happens to people in their day-to-day lives. And it’s also a very shared experience. It’s not evenly shared in the sense that it doesn’t cut through all class barriers and racial barriers, but it’s something that has spread across very large populations and it’s an international experience. So, one of the questions is what a policy would look like that actually made a factual and evidenced change to some of the social, ecological crises that we are confronting right now and which also had a certain kind of democratic legitimacy and the capacity to mobilise people.

That’s what people on the green left hope that something like the Green New Deal could do, that it could be both a way of creating jobs and a way of alleviating the climate crisis. And that, therefore, kind of took some of these ecological threats out of the realm of “Oh, that’s just a green issue.” So, this is really the challenge: how to bring the realm of politics back together with the realm of policy so that policy isn’t simply something that gets developed by technocrats on the basis of statistics and economics but which is able to connect with the forms of suffering and the forms of anxiety that people feel.

Discover more about

sustainable prosperity

Davies, W. (October 2019). Green Populism?: Action and mortality in the Anthropocene, Environmental Values.

The economic challenge of sustainable prosperity