Power to Which People?

After years of claiming that resources were plentiful and that human ingenuity would find a way to replace those that were becoming exhausted, the capitalist elites have changed their tune. The McKinsey report Resource Revolution, which has already been discussed on this blog, was a clue to the shift in focus away from finance and towards resources, and today's ReSource conference in Oxford is part of the trend. The rich and powerful are lining up to ensure that they protect the unfair share of the earth's resources that they enjoy. Now that the finance scam has fallen apart they are adopting more direct strategies.

The clue is really in the doublethink of the conference title: 'Food Energy Water (for all)', just as the clue to the failure of Rio was in the deceptive title 'The future we want' rather than 'The future we want you to have'. The breathless publicity tells us that 'great thinkers and leaders' will converge on Oxford (where else?) and 'From politics to philanthropy, from the arts to the military, from business to academia, ReSource brings together the best in their fields'. Whether these people are representative of the world's population or representing anything other than their own self-interest is not questioned. These are global power players making decisions, economic decisions, about how resources will be allocated.

The conference is hosted by the university's Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and, in case you were sceptical about my claim about the link between resource control and finance, funded by the Rothschild Foundation. As nature proves to us daily that the scale of our economic activities threatens our future, those whose power depends on the existing economic model are using their considerable resources to manouevre themselves into a dominant position within the new paradigm. Having lately accepted that there are limits to resources, they now move to suggest that private interests are best placed to make decision about how those limited resources should be shared. This will ensure efficiency, we are told, while equity concerns are sidelined and the question of the appropriate forum for decision-making is entirely off the agenda.

On the green wing of the economics profession it has been an assumption for several decades that limits to growth must be taken seriously, the the earth's resources are limited, and that once we acknowledge this then we must move straight along to raise the question of how we decide a just and inclusive mechanism for deciding the allocation. This is at the heart of my proposal for a Bioregional Economy, which includes the suggestion that a participatory process of decision-making is vital to decide how we share the resources within the planetary boundary. The ReSource conference has entirely the opposite motivation: its very structure makes clear that the future sharing of the wealth of the earth is being decided by unelected elites in closed session.
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A Budget for Growth or a Balanced Budget?

The voices of capital have been flooding the airwaves for some time with their demands for the budget. We already know that this will be 'a budget for growth' aka a budget that refuses to accept the planet's limits and permits a tiny elite to profit at the expenses of other species human and otherwise. So what can we expect to see from this 'budget for growth'? As Simon Jenkins points out, it will be the bankers, corporate bosses and corporate investors who will decide. His mockery of the so-called Project Merlin, headed up by Barclays boss John Varley is right on target. From spivs to wizards in a few short months.

A 'budget for growth' can be interpreted as a 'budget for business'. Vince Cable weakness was made clear by the secret recordings of his boasting to constituents: vanity. His speech at the Mansion House on 3rd March demonstrates a similar tone, together with an unpleasant attempt to cosy up and laugh off his former critical line with both bankers and business.

Cable identifies his central task as finding a way 'to strengthen a framework in which the private sector can grow the economy out of its current problems', which neatly addresses the deficit problem while ignoring the more fundamental environmental problems. The 'animal spirits' of our entrepreneurs are to be unleashed, while capital is to be encouraged to be more mobile than ever, a clear demonstration of the highly pro-capitalist nature of liberal economic policy. This also applies to its policy towards exercising social control over business. Far from the tyrannical opponent of corrupt business we have been led to expect, Cable undertakes to 'fight damaging regulatory impositions from the EU like the Working Time Directive'.

Perhaps most damaging of all, the speech contained a clear suggestion that the countryside would be thrown open to heedless profit-driven development in a desperate attempt to restore economic growth without regard to the environmental cost. We can expect to see Osborne's Economic Enterprise Zones being given special dispensations, since the underlying logic is one of growth at any cost.

For the first budget from the greenest ever government one would expect a genuinely balanced budget, that is to say a budget that prioritised the need to balance our demands with the planet's limits. This is the real balancing that is required, alongside a rapid shift away from the emphasis on finance and towards encouraging real production in the sectors required for the transition to a low-carbon future.

A policy to bring about this balance would be one that matched the money banks take out of the economy through bonuses with money invested in the sustainable economy. New legislation to equate annual windfall taxes with the amount banks allocated to bonus and other incentive payments could free two birds from one cage: putting a downward pressure on excessive salaries while generating revenue for investments in the public good.
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The Human Firm

The fanfare of publicity surrounding the announcement that the UK had experienced - hold your breath! - 0.1% of growth during the last three months of 2009 was embarrassingly inappropriate in several ways. First, and most obvious, was the awkwardness of statisticians behaving like media tarts. The explanation can only be their fear of facing the Osborne axe if the Tories get elected.

Second was the celebration over such a paltry increase - and in the quarter when all economists and statisticians know that the bulk of retail activity takes place every year. This time the Christmas effect will have been exaggerated because of what used to be January sales taking place before Christmas. The data are seasonally adjusted to attempt to eliminate these effects, but given the unpredictability of both business and consumers in these extremely unusual times, 0.1% growth is really no news at all. The dismal 'growth' trend in the figure from ONS illustrates this.

The most intelligent commentators extrapolated from this 0.1% to tell us how much smaller our economy is now than it would have been if we had followed 'a normal growth path': around 6%. I wonder how many people will think about that and realise what it teaches us about the rapid nature of expansion when we are following 'the normal growth path'. Growth on growth, exponentially in this manner, is what is driving us to the planetary abyss. As the authors of Limits to Growth identified, humans have a problem grasping the abstract reality of exponential growth. To help explain they included this story in their report:

'French children are told a story in which they imagine having a pond with water lily leaves floating on the surface. The lily population doubles in size every day and if left unchecked will smother the pond in 30 days, killing all the other living things in the water. Day after day the plant seems small and so it is decided to leave it to grow until it half-covers the pond, before cutting it back. They are then asked, on what day that will occur. This is revealed to be the 29th day, and then there will be just one day to save the pond.'

So we can learn lessons about the weakness of statistics and the crisis of economic growth, but I think I have detected a more encouraging sign: that people are not behaving like rational economic men. The statistics on which economic planning is based are monetary figures, so they include all the pointless shuffling around of money that a financial economy indulges in. If you are interesting in the real economy of stuff, then the second figure is more illuminating: manufacturing industry in the UK has fallen off a cliff.

And yet unemployment has not risen anything like as rapidly as predicted. In economic theory, a recession results in firms automatically reducing output and cutting prices and wages. They do this in a competitive process and without regard to the human costs. Yet in this recession we have seen firms negotiating with workers to share the available work and the income that is available to be paid out in wages.

Is this merely an adaptation of capitalism, where we willingly cut our own wages? I would prefer to interpret it as humanity rather than flexibility in the workplace. Since the steady-state economy implies a level of economic activity considerably lower than that which prevailed before the recession, this bargaining over the value of production is something that should be facilitated and extended. Tweet