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Emissions don’t make Europe happy
BBC
Europe’s carbon emissions have risen markedly over the last 40 years, but the extra fuel use has brought little increase in happiness, a report says.
Written by the New Economics Foundation (Nef), it says that reducing social inequality and energy consumption are key drivers of improved wellbeing.
Iceland has the highest ratio of wellbeing to emissions, with the UK 21st out of 30 countries assessed.
A Nef report last year rated Vanuatu as the happiest nation on Earth.
The ratings are based on its Happy Planet Index (HPI). Countries score points for how happy citizens rate themselves to be and how long they live, and lose points for their per-capita carbon output.
“Countries like Iceland… demonstrate that living within our environmental means doesn’t mean sacrificing human wellbeing,” said Nic Marks, founder of Nef’s Centre for Wellbeing.
“By learning from the differences between European countries and copying best practices, we believe it will be possible to both greatly reduce our carbon footprint and increase our wellbeing.”
… Across the continent, our per-capita carbon footprint has risen by 70% since 1961, Nef calculates, while life expectancy has increased by about 8% and self-reported happiness hardly at all.
(15 July 2007)
The Sins of Affluence
James K. Galbraith, Washington Monthly
Two prominent liberal thinkers offer impassioned critiques of modern capitalism-and solutions that are the policy equivalents of bake sales.
Review of:
Consumed by Benjamin Barber
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
Overwritten does not begin to describe Consumed, in which Benjamin Barber takes aim at kid culture, mass market juvenilia, and the infantilization of just about everything in American life. A political theorist, Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, and author of sixteen books, including the best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld.
…And there are pleasures to be found in this relentless, one-message book. On occasion, Barber can be witty and withering: he describes fast food as the “grease and starch, sugar and salt” business…One gets the picture very quickly: Standards have fallen. Yes! We know!
The question is, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to do anything about it? Almost fifty years ago, in The Affluent Society, my father wrote about this problem, which he defined as “private affluence and public squalor.” His solution was “social balance”: public goods, including schools and parks and libraries and higher culture. Liberalism stood for its own values. It stood against corporate dominance, business thinking, and commercial culture. And it was backed by the power of trade unions, of churches, and of the educational and scientific estate.
Barber offers no similar recourse. Everything he would do, he would do through markets, not against them or by bringing them under control. He speaks mainly of the “slow food” movement, of Hernando de Soto’s property-rights-for-the-poor and of the Grameen Bank’s micro-lending programs, each of these the projects of enlightened voluntarism, presupposing that markets can be as much a force for good in principle as they are presently a force for ill in practice. The democracy he would like to build lacks social or political organization; it isn’t about parties and agendas and laws and new government agencies tasked with meeting national needs. The New Deal and the Great Society are not Barber’s antecedents. He seeks merely the willed capacity to conduct one’s own life beyond the reach of mass culture, and offers the wishful thought that sensible people, each acting alone, will somehow manage to do just that. Good luck. Barber speaks of “capitalism triumphant,” and he proposes to leave it that way.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben is a better, shorter writer, and in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future he shows himself to be an adept critic of capitalism writ large. That is because McKibben, unlike Barber, drills into the fundamental question of the planet’s physical limits.
…McKibben points out, the carbon blanket-a “mirror image in the sky” of every drop of oil, every ton of coal ever burned-will change everything, and quite soon.
So what comes next? Climate change and peak oil (the eventual start of decline in world oil production) are inevitable; we will have to scale back. But McKibben has hope, founded improbably on an emerging field within-of all subjects-economics: happiness studies. Here researchers have found (and McKibben accepts) that happiness does not depend on economic growth, after the first $10,000 per capita in GDP.
So McKibben sets out to find happiness in simpler, less eco-destructive lives. His investigative technique is to travel the world and report what he sees, from factory life in northeast China (surprisingly humanized in his account) to organic farming in urban Havana, and as far afield as the Bengali river deltas. He is an elegant travel writer. But most of all, he writes from close to home, in northern Vermont, and most of what he is concerned with, here and there, is food.
…. From this follows a larger lesson: when the oil-and-coal economy ends, some of us will get along fine, eating local potatoes and cheese. Incomes will diminish, but happiness need not.
It’s a beautiful tale, but it can’t be altogether right. The climate collapse-which may bring the flooding of New York, Boston, London, Calcutta, and Shanghai-will be a calamity next to which the end of the Soviet Union will seem very small. Long industrial chains, for jet aircraft, automobiles, telecommunications, electricity, and much else, will crumble, as they did in the USSR and Yugoslavia, particularly if new interior boundaries form and countries break up. And interior boundaries will form, as those on the high ground seek to defend it. The demographic effects will be similarly dire: Older, urban males (like me) with no survival skills will die. Rural New England will turn into a deforested exurban slum.
This brings us back to the sphere that both McKibben and Barber largely ignore: public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.
This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today.
…Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards-against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture-will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel, and the long food production chains McKibben warns against will, indeed, have to be shortened. At the same time, a new project of physical, technological, and urban social engineering will have to get under way.
James K. Galbraith is the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and professor of government at the University of Texas. His new book is Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan, and the Economics of Empire.
(July/August 2007)
Surprisingly grim forecast to appear in the Washington Monthly.
The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age
Louis Uchitelle, New York Times.
… These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era – the Gilded Age before World War I – when powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialization of the United States. The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.
“People can look at the last 25 years and say this is an incredibly unique period of time,” Mr. Weill said. “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs.”
Those earlier barons disappeared by the 1920s and, constrained by the Depression and by the greater government oversight and high income tax rates that followed, no one really took their place. Then, starting in the late 1970s, as the constraints receded, new tycoons gradually emerged, and now their concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age.
Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution – currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.
Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back…
(15 July 2007)
A New Populism Spurs Democrats on the Economy
Robin Toner, New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 15 – On Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail, Democrats are increasingly moving toward a full-throated populist critique of the current economy.
Clearly influenced by some of their most successful candidates in last year’s Congressional elections, Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities. They deplore what they call a growing gap between the middle class, which is struggling to adjust to a changing job market, and the affluent elites who have prospered in the new economy. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, calls it “trickle-down economics without the trickle.”
Populism is hardly new in the Democratic Party. Al Gore vowed to fight for “the people versus the powerful” in his presidential campaign seven years ago, and Republicans have long accused the Democrats of practicing “class warfare.”
But the latest populist resurgence is deeply rooted in a view that current economic conditions are difficult and deteriorating for many people, analysts say, and it is now framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care.
(16 July 2007)
A dress rehearsal for the final collapse of liberal capitalist ideology
Hector Dauphin-Gloire, VHeadline
…while the exact form that post-capitalist social order takes may differ from country to country, I believe that late capitalist society must inevitably fade away, probably within the next 50-100 years. I have been coming to this conclusion gradually for years, but especially recently since I read two thought-provoking works: “The Long Emergency” by the scholar of peak oil, James Kunstler, and ‘Monopoly Capital,” published in the late 1960s by the Harvard economist Paul Sweezy (and dedicated to Che Guevara). This has strengthened my belief that liberal capitalism, as strong as it appears today, is a doomed system.
…Global shortages of energy, fibers, grains, fish, meat, fresh water, power, metals, and petrochemicals will all lead to generalized suffering that, as usual, will hit the poor hardest, and will radicalize them. For the promise of capitalism — a Devil’s bargain if there ever was one — was that the working classes in the developed countries gave up striving for a better society, for more control over their working lives, for a society based on motivations of love and self-sacrifice rather than pride and greed, in exchange for a higher standard of living- the ‘goods’ promised by capitalism.
People in the socialist countries lost faith in their systems not because those systems failed to provide them with food, housing, useful work or other basic necessities but because they had fallen behind the West in their ability to provide consumer goods — luxury goods.
…The strength of capitalist society was always its ability to manage and produce wealth- perhaps this was not inherently good, and perhaps the cost was much too high, but in any case, this was the task that capitalism promised to accomplish, and did. Socialism’s strength lay in its ability to manage poverty and scarcity. But if scarcity becomes the generalized state of the world, won’t capitalism have lost its greatest selling point?
…People of all classes, but especially the poor and middle classes, will by necessity cut their consumption of luxury goods and everything except basic necessities: they will produce more things for themselves, reuse old appliances instead of replacing them, adjust to a lower standard of living. But this will create a serious problem for the capitalist firms that depend on encouraging as much profligacy and spending on luxury goods as possible. Capitalism is notoriously bad at rational management of non-renewable and commonly owned resources. But most natural resources like metals, oil, fish stocks, timber, etc. are by their nature commonly owned, and renewable only if allowed to regenerate themselves (i.e. harvested below a certain rate).
…Let me make it clear that my beliefs about the future owe little to any dogmatically Marxist conception. The fact that capitalism tends towards under-consumption was noted not just by socialists and communists but by many liberal economists including Keynes and Sismondi.
(16 July 2007)
The piece starts out as a paean to Venezuela’s Chavez, sprinkled with left-wing jargon. However, it gets more interesting. -BA
