Change Everything Now - The Google Economy  

Orion Magazine has an intersting interview with Gus Speth of Yale, which looks at the "Affluenza" and "Growth fetish" issues that Clive Hamilton has written about down here - Change Everything Now.

Jeff Goodell: In the opening chapter of your new book, you say, quite bluntly, that “something is wrong” in America. What exactly do you mean?

Gus Speth: Well, I think we have to face up to the paradox that while the environmental community has become stronger and more sophisticated over the years, the environment is going downhill so fast that we’re facing a potential calamity down the road. All we have to do to leave a ruined world to children is just keep doing what we’re doing today—the same emissions of pollutants, the same destruction of ecosystems, same toxification of the environment—and we’ll ruin the planet in the latter part of this century.

And yet, we know we’re not just going to keep doing what we’re doing. We’re going to grow phenomenally. At the current rates, the world economy will be twice as big as it is today in seventeen years. That carries the potential for enormous additional destruction. The environmental movement has a lot of wonderful things about it, and it’s accomplished a lot. But it’s not up to this challenge of dealing with this amount of environmental loss and destruction.

The fundamental thing that’s happened is that our efforts to clean up the environment are being overwhelmed by the sheer increase in the size of the economy. And there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. So we have to ask, what is it about our society that puts such an extraordinary premium on growth? Is it justified? Why is that growth so destructive? And what do we do about it?

Capitalism is a growth machine. What it really cares about is earning a profit and reinvesting a large share of that and growing continually. Profits can be enhanced if the companies are not paying for the cost of their environmental destruction—so they fight [paying it] tooth and nail. The companies themselves are now quite huge, quite powerful, quite global, and no longer just the main economic actors in our society. They are the main political actors also.

And so all of these things combine to produce a type of capitalism that really doesn’t care about the environment, and doesn’t really care about people much either. What it really cares about is profits and growth, and the rest is more or less incidental. And until we change that system, my conclusion is that it will continue to be fundamentally destructive.

JG: So our engine of progress has become the engine of our destruction?

GS: Well, it’s certainly the engine of environmental destruction. And what is also becoming apparent is that this so-called engine of progress is also not really improving people’s lives very much either. And here I’m speaking entirely of the advanced, industrial, affluent societies, not the developing world, which does need to grow.

In the West, we’re seeing that people’s own sense of subjective well-being has not been going up with all of this growth that we’ve been experiencing. Per capita income goes up, but happiness doesn’t, satisfaction with life doesn’t. It’s just flatlined, for decades now. And there are certain pathologies that have increased. A sense of loneliness in our society, bipolar disorders, other problems, stress and disintegration of communities.

This should be a time when we really can take this fabulous amount of wealth that we’ve generated and enjoy it, and yet we seem to be caught in a system where it’s either up, up, and away or down, down, and out. And we seem to careen from crisis to crisis—personal crises, national crises, economic crises.

JG: I know lots of people working on clean energy technology in places like Silicon Valley who would argue that the forces of progress need to be accelerated, not slowed down.

GS: Well, I do stress the need to ditch the old technologies that have gotten us into this trouble and bring on as fast as possible new technologies that are designed with the environment in mind. That’s all accurate, I think. And I’m delighted to see the renaissance of environmental concern in the country.

But having said that, I just don’t believe it’s enough. What you’re really describing is what can be thought of as kind of a dematerialization of the economy, of the movement toward every kind of gloriously high-tech economy with just electrons moving around—

JG: A Google economy.

GS: Yes, a Google economy. But there’s still huge impacts, even with all of that, and as these new companies grow in size, those impacts become ever larger. And right now there’s been very little dematerialization of the U.S. economy. It’s gotten more efficient, it creates less pollutant per unit of output in our economy. But still, we’re using a huge amount of stuff and releasing almost all of it back as waste into the environment in some form.

Changes of the type that would bring on this technological nirvana are just too slow and too partial. They need to be combined with other things that basically slow the current up. And that means taking the priority off of growth. It means finding a new set of laws for corporations—to change their incentive structure. It means us consumers becoming more interested in living more simply.

I think Speth is under-rating the potential of the "Google economy" to fix a lot of our problems (the first step is making all the necessary information visible, to everyone, and that isn't complete yet) - but I'll talk more about that when I get around to writing my little set of posts on Buckminster Fuller and his vision of the future.