Alternative Economies
Written for Transition Design, taught at Carnegie Mellon University by Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff
Prompt: What is challenging about reconceiving economic systems? What do you think will be needed to make new economic solutions like these feasible going forward?
Response:
I think the biggest challenge in designing alternative economies is that it requires the cooperation and buy-in of an entire society in order to be fully effective and lead to system-wide changes. Any type of change we can effect on a small scale will have to conform to the current systems in place. For example, Muslims generally aren’t permitted to give or take loans with interest because interest is considered a form of exploitation. However, it is nearly impossible to have financial dealings in America and not engage in interest of some kind. So one’s ability to effect change (even on a personal level, in this case) is severely limited by the current infrastructures in place. Also, there are political motivations to ensure that such changes never take place. To eliminate interest would collapse the entire banking system, and so — given the immense lobbying power of Wall Street — would be impossible to instate. There is also a very strong bias towards capitalism in the West to the extent that referring to someone as a “socialist” or “communist” is an insult meant to undermine his/her worth and credibility.
It’s exciting to envision a world of alternative economies that benefit the entire society as opposed to the 1%, but that would involve changing our entire philosophies and mindsets of wealth, finance, and economics and the meaning money brings to our lives. In one of the papers we were assigned to read for Monday, Tim Kasser writes about the difference between material affluence and time affluence, and that studies suggest that “time affluence may promote higher levels of well-being” (p 100). In “Designing Change by Living Change,” the authors refer to Manzini, saying, “every successful case of sustainable social innovation so far shares the ‘fundamental characteristic’ of ‘compensat(ing) for the reduction in consumption of products with an increase in other qualities’” (p 294). Thus, perhaps if those higher levels of well-being could be made immediately evident to people, they would be more willing to accept the material sacrifices that may come with alternative economies. It would be interesting to learn if any other societies (either in history or modern times) have been able to make a dramatic shift in their economic system to any success.
