FRESH THINKING REQUIRED
As global climate concerns underscore capitalism’s flaws, who will lead the transformation of economics?
‘A toxic combination of 15 years of low economic growth, and four decades of expanding inequalities, leaves the UK poorer and falling behind its peers’ — not my analysis but that of the highly respected Resolution Foundation. And they go further, ‘Productivity growth is weak. Public investment is low. Wages today are no higher than they were before the financial crisis.’
The view from the doorstep concurs, “We now pay far more for much less to enable wealth to be extracted by the few.” That general despondency contributed massively to the anti-Tory sentiment that yielded so many LibDem Council seats earlier this merry month of May. But few local campaigners could confidently answer the question that will be asked time and again before the General Election. What do your lot think they can do about it?
The UK’s ‘parochial’ economic despair is symptomatic of a far larger malaise — an existential climate crisis. Mass Migration is inevitable as large parts of our world are laid to waste, as nature is depleted, as societies collapse, wars rage, forests burn, and coastal habitats shrink.
On top of a self-inflicted Poverty Pandemic and global unrest, we seem stuck — fresh out of imagination. We need to tackle the climate crisis and reverse societal decline. Fortunately, there is no shortage of guidance, but there is a political vacuum where none of the main Parties dare tread — rethinking our economic foundations. There is near zero confidence that anything can be done.
Consider the significant learnings of the past 35 years — starting with the ground-breaking work of Nobel Prize-winning political economist Elinor Ostrom. Her 1990 work ‘Governing the Commons’ disproved the conventional (and convenient) ‘tragedy’ assumption that humans will always overuse any asset that is freely available. Elinor’s studies mostly carried out in the 1970’s debunked the neo-liberal ‘free-market’ script and reasserted the role of society. “Far from tragic”, a later disciple wrote, “she realised that the commons can turn out to be a triumph, outperforming both state and market in sustainably stewarding and equitably harvesting Earth’s resources.”
What started as rare but rigorous academic study has now evolved into a full flood of fresh thinking — from Ellen MacArthur’s ‘Full Circle’ to Tim Jackson’s ‘Post Growth: life after capitalism’ via Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, Mariana Mazzucato’s ‘Mission Economy’ and Jason Hickel’s ‘Less is More’.
Rebellions gather fuel in untended spaces. Despite an abundance of potent advice, signs of anyone attempting to reshape the economic landscape are not yet apparent. The dramatic news pictures of a German street clogged with wrecked cars, broken trees, and assorted flood debris, earned the alternative title — ‘The last time this road was blocked you blamed XR Climate Protesters’. The body politic is unmoved.
Why are the odds stacked so formidably against such a major rethink? The true costs of climate change (and so much more) are only just dawning on leaders, but that persistent doorstep question, ‘What do your lot think they can do about it?’, will not go away.
Largely unreported by media, and with very few UK delegates, the Global Solutions Summit in Berlin featured a paper, ‘Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Economics’ and it will feature again at an education conference in the USA in early June. These are early academic days but worth noting because the authors have respect for the apparent (but illusory) strengths of capitalism and the need to evolve a truly robust framework for transition to a solid foundation — but they also realise that tinkering within the prevailing ‘neo-classical’ religion is a hopeless cause.
This search for pro-social economics is much influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution: deeply disturbing in its time and still not accepted by fundamentalists. Close observations of nature and evolutionary biology are not a million miles away from the heap of evidence now challenging capatalist conventions. It is too early to be sure that the research will bear fruit in time to stave off global climatic collapse but we must still answer the doorstep question, “What do your lot think they can do about it?”
Amid the prevailing malaise, expanding inequalities, and climate concerns, how can any non-Right-Wing political party not address economic leadership, ask the questions, build global alliances, and work collaboratively with the brightest minds, to engender the fresh thinking now so urgently required?
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This article is archived in the Groupe Intellex Governance Library — a resource for students and social campaigners. A more extensive Reading List is available on request to info@groupe-intellex.com/
A version of this article was published in LibDemVoice.org on 27/05/24
