Tag Archives: economics

Towards the 21 Hour Work Week

Sustainability… it will by all accounts be a key theme of 21st century human society. Sustainable agriculture, energy use, carbon footprint, and average family size are already on the table towards informing governmental policy and economic practice. But in order to dial down in these areas we are realizing the need for a sustainable level of economic activity, which includes a finite amount of commoditized work to be divided between an increasing number of people seeking that work.

Put more simply… there may not be enough full-time jobs to go around if we hope to move towards a sustainable human society!

Growth was certainly a key theme of the previous century. The Earth’s human population tripled from under two billion in 1900 to about six billion people by 2000. During that same hundred year time period, according to Wikipedia, the GWP (gross world economic product) increased almost forty-fold (adjusted for inflation). To try and meet the rapidly growing need for food, agricultural practice moved toward monoculture with increasing use of inorganic chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers which trade short-term increases in land yield for long-term soil degradation. The massive increase in economic activity has led to comparable increases in fossil fuel use (leading to global warming), stress on other non-renewable resources, reduction in the planet’s forests and other degradations to the ecosystem.

Rates of human population growth are beginning to slow due to increasing education, government policy (particularly in China), and the growing empowerment of women to control their own bodies including the number of children they give birth to. But as more and more of the world’s population moves from subsistence to more of a “modern” industrial-consumerist economy, it is now argued that the rate of growth in economic activity needs to slow as well to prevent resource depletion and ecological disaster.

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To Build Community, an Economy of More Gifts and Less Money

For many years now I’ve been uncomfortable walking into a big crowded shopping mall and feeling the energy of the place. It generally feels like most people are there for entertainment, shopping for stuff they don’t really need. Four years ago I remember people joking about how it is very much a contemporary American cultural practice to “Shop ’til you drop” (STYD), but since the Great Recession, I rarely hear that any more.

Good riddance I think! The United States has had an economy that depended on ever increasing domestic consumer spending more so than any other major economy in the world. I’m no economist, but I suspect that one of the reasons our unemployment rate continues to be stubbornly high through our slow recovery is that many of the STYD folks have found it necessary to hang up their shopping bags and cut up their credit cards. Looks like the jobs that supported that superfluous hyper-materialism are just not coming back.

And reading the recent Yes! Magazine piece by Charles Eisenstein, “To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts”, I’m more convinced than ever its for the better. Eisenstein says we can trade that lost consumerism for community by returning to (or at least towards) a “gift economy”. He writes…

Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is “community.” What happened to community, and why don’t we have it any more? There are many reasons — the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs — and, if you trace the “whys” a few levels down, they all implicate the money system.

More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors — or indeed on any specific person — for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

Now neither Eisenstein nor I are saying to just sit back and enjoy getting poorer while the rich are getting richer. But tough economic times are as good as any to think about what is really of value in your life and spend your money more wisely on what really adds to that value. I think it’s really worth wrestling with his provocative thesis, that community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own.

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