Silver Lining to Economic Downturn

Article by Mike Nickerson, author of Life, Money, and Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay

Here are some highlights from the article:
"Among the first things societies can do, as we acknowledge our maturity, is to shift investment into education and health care. Unlike cars and expanding highway networks, which are resource and waste intensive, education and health care (particularly care at the preventative level) consist almost entirely of knowledge and good will.

Another step will be to revive local, small-scale agriculture. Food produced in this way requires less fuel and other natural resources and has been shown to produce more food per acre, of a higher nutritional quality, than industrial scale farming."

"the world is awash in so much capital that, a continuous stream of speculative bubbles is necessary to give it places to invest."

"At present, if there is a natural disaster, toxic spill or a health epidemic, the costs of dealing with the problems are added to the GDP, giving the false impression that we are better off. While more money might be flowing, life is degraded by such things. If we were to measure social and environmental factors of well-being with the same authority and enthusiasm with which we measure GDP, much of the confusion would be avoided. A Genuine Progress Index (GPI) would provide a broader spectrum of information, enabling the costs and benefits of different activities to be assessed with greater accuracy."

"By identifying resource draw-down, pollution, and disruptions to communities, with a GPI, external factors would enter the picture. Presently externalized costs are not included in the price of goods. When such costs are added to production costs, those goods that are socially and environmentally friendly would be less expensive and those that cause problems would cost more. Both consumers and producers would then be inclined toward responsible products.

Taking the additional step of shifting the skill, ingenuity and persuasive effort that is presently applied toward engineering obsolescence, and, instead, using it to design durable, easily repaired goods, and to reclaim pride in objects that have long served us, could cut up to 50% off of our material and energy consumption and consequent impacts."

"We celebrate when our children grow. If an adult continues to grow like a child, however, it is cause for serious concern. Developing a healthy steady-state economy is no more frightening than the prospect of becoming adult is for a teenager"

He makes a lot of sense. We need to figure out now what things are preventing this kind of change from happening. Who is invested in the status quo, in the need for growth? The obvious answer seems to be - BANKERS. Who else is highly dependent on the use of debt?

Apparently in the U.S. the money supply is loaned to the federal government by the federal reserve, with interest. This trickles down, so the whole monetary/economic system is predicated on loaning money and credit. That’s why the media pushes the importance of unfreezing credit in the midst of the crisis. They aren't interested in the true causes of the economic crisis.

The people, the citizens, are tied up in the current system so they are mostly concerned about their investments and jobs. This lack of interest from the media (corporations selling audiences to other businesses) and citizens allows the true causes of the crisis and the underlying, fundamental flaws with our way of life to go largely undiscussed.


More from Mike Nickerson:
Sustainable living: Things You Can Do