Enough is Enough - Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill - Part 2

Enough is Enough -
Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 93

  April 3, 2017 

Book 30 - Enough is Enough - Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources
Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill (2013)
 Part 2 - pages 59-111
Reading Time - 1 hour

Did you know that 1 in 10 households in the US (in 2007) rents a storage unit where they store stuff that they no longer need or want? Crazy, isn't it? We are consuming things (we are labeled consumers after all) at an ever increasing rate. The thing is, we are using things faster than the ecosystem can handle it... whether it's raw materials needed for products, or waste that is generated. What could we do instead? Well, we could create a tradeable system... for example... carbon emissions. Everyone gets a permit for so much carbon emissions and then those can be sold or traded.

But what about the whole steady-state population... that's a hot button topic if there ever was one. There's a neat rule of thumb out there that I've come across in financial blogs. If you want to know how fast something will double (money or people) do this:

70 divided by % of growth = # years to double - So 70 / 10% means my money will double in 10 years. But if we are at 7 billion people now... and the population is growing at 1% - then it will double in 100 years. Crazy. The simple facts are that the eco footprint of the global population is too large. We need a smaller footprint which means fewer feet. This is, naturally, a controversial topic. And China has tried the whole "limit people to one child" and run afoul of other issues. But one simple thing that could be done is education - cause educated girls have fewer children. We'd also need to balance immigration vs. fertility. Countries with low fertility could have increased immigration balanced by emigration. It would be tricky...

As for income inequality... well... read The Spirit Level book that I read a few blog posts ago. It's at the root of all sorts of societal issues, not just for poor people, but across the board. Egalitarian societies are simply better off and healthier. It would require taking from the obscenely rich (taxes, social programs) and redistributing the wealth so that everyone has enough...

And then there's our financial system. I read that Ben Hewitt book a few weeks back called Saved, so I had a heads up on some of this stuff. Basically financial systems and money are unhinged from real assets. We have this idea that money=wealth but it doesn't. Real wealth is land, housing, fertile soil, clean water, medical care, food - actual resources. Money is just a claim on real resources but... what if there is more money in the world than real resources? Compound interest means that money grows exponentially... but real wealth doesn't. The other interesting thing... which Hewitt noted as well is this... governments don't make money, banks make money. Banks need to have only 10% of real resources on hand. So they loan us $100,000 for a house but they only need $10,000 as a real resource. It's a shell game... they make money out of thin air. We go to work and pay them back the mortgage and that money is new money to the bank. It's a book-keeping trick and it's crazy. It is debt-based money creation and it drives economic growth. If banks stop lending... the whole system collapses - look at 2008 and the freak-outs that happened. The whole thing teetered on the edge of a cliff.

The steady state economy would require a different sort of monetary system. Maybe a debt-free national currency, along with a local currency and then an international currency. Maybe make banks 100% reserve, meaning if they want to lend $100,000, they need to have the $100,000 to lend! Thing is... banks aren't going to do this voluntarily and most citizens don't understand the system. Sooo... it'll probably be a crisis that will poke us over the edge.