Enough is Enough - Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill - Part 3

Enough is Enough -
Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 94

  April 4, 2017 

Book 30 - Enough is Enough - Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources
Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill (2013)
 Part 3 - pages 112-155
Reading Time - 1 hour

Did you know Bhutan (tiny country squished up NE of India, above Bangladesh) doesn't measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Rather, they measure Gross National Happiness. What a concept. They measure things like education, environmental health, community health etc. Cause there's more to life than just the economy. GDP just measures money changing hands... so someone's cancer treatment increases the GDP. Pollution clean-up increases the GDP. See the problem? Just cause the GDP is increasing doesn't mean all is well in the world.

For a stead-state economy, we'd need new indicators - maybe Genuine Progress Indicator or the Happy Planet Index (Canada is #89, Costa Rica is #1 and the US is #114).  The goal is a sustainable and equitable human being. Part of that is a meaningful line of work. Today, there are a lot of people out of work, and a lot of people who are overworked. Employers generally aren't flexible when it comes to part-time work, job sharing or leaves. At the same time, jobs that really need to get done (like environmental remediation) aren't deemed profitable, so they don't get done. A steady-state economy might have guaranteed jobs, maybe reducing hours, lower retirement age, increased vacation time, job sharing. Less time at work would mean more time for creative, fulfilling things.

Of course, we'd need to look at corporations as well... especially share-holder corporations whose sole-goal is to maximize profits for share-holders. Of the world's top 100 economies, 48 are corporations. But share-holder corporations get to extract all the value from the earth, while assuming none of the costs for the ecological and social damages. It's a broken system. There are other options... cooperatives, vehicle sharing, public interest companies, privately owned companies. Given how corporations buy votes in many countries, it won't be easy to wrest power away from them. Buckminster Fuller said "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." What a neat idea for revolution.