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Death to 'austerity'. Long live sustainable abundance!
The ‘austerity’ issue is very much in the news. In last weekend’s Observer, for example, it popped up in several articles. On the front page a number of economists are quoted as supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity politics. Inside there is an opinion piece by economics correspondent William Keegan who credits Corbyn for foregrounding the issue and challenging orthodox arguments for government spending cutbacks. On another page, a young Labour supporter explains why she supports Corbyn because of his stance on Tory austerity. Elsewhere in the paper, a feature reports on the growing unpopularity of the President of Brazil, the Workers’ Party’s Dilma Rouseff, partly due to her acceptance of ‘austerity’…
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Corbyn is great – but the Greens are different!
Like many Greens, I’m a huge fan of Jeremy Corbyn. I’m hoping that he wins the Labour Leadership election – and the latest polling suggests that he will. At the same time, I’m a Green, and without one shred of doubt I’m going to stay a Green. For Corbyn – for all his many virtues – is no Green. For he does not have an ecologistic approach. What the Green Party should do, in the face of the ‘Corbyn surge’, is very simple. It should stay Green. It should make clear how the case of the Green Party is as strong as ever, even in the face of a Labour…
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Economist-kings?
Spring 2007: the high-water mark of self-confidence for economic neo-liberalism. In March, both Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke publicly stated that they saw no danger of recession, and that the subprime fiasco had been ‘contained’. As late as mid-May, with the sub-prime crisis in full throe, still Bernanke felt able to say this: Importantly, we see no serious broader spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market. In July, Paulson claimed: This is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime; and on August 1st, I see the underlying economy as being very healthy. Neo-liberalism remained a movement triumphal around…
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Constant growth can only make most of us poorer
George Monbiot is correct (The rich want us to believe their wealth is good for us all, 30 July) in his praise of Thomas Piketty’s proposal for a wealth tax to counteract the insane levels of inequality now generated in our world, and in pointing out that only the Green party is prepared to back this obvious idea. However, we should be careful not to let Piketty’s helpful intervention in the debate blind us to the severe limits of his own stance in political economy. I refer principally to Piketty’s utter failure to take seriously the ecological limits to growth. A central component of Piketty’s answer to the crisis is:…
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Let's build a post-growth economy that works for the 99%
What would a post-growth world look like? Some would argue that it is not difficult to imagine a world without growth, as many countries are already living in it. Japan stagnated for a decade and its economy has been left hollowed-out. Much of Europe is in negative or near-zero growth in the wake of the global economic crisis, and in none of these countries can a lack of growth be viewed as a good thing. We see before our eyes the human cost of economic systems that are dependent on constant growth to function. We currently rely on growth for all kinds of purposes. As a substitute for the redistribution…
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Progress: beyond the growth fetish
The UK has just experienced its annual budget announcement from the Government. It contained an extraordinary attack on the eco-agenda, including cuts to energy costs for manufacturers. On the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, Ed Balls, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, backed this policy to the hilt. The budget celebrated instead ‘economic growth’ that has been achieved in the last year or so: Balls’s only cavil was that there could have been even more of it. This GDP growth that is being celebrated by the Chancellor, George Osborne, and seemingly by nearly everyone else, is another unsustainable boom in consumption that is leaving behind those dependent on food banks and…
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Re-nationalise our railways!
My day started at 6 am, while it was of course still dark. Dressed smart for the cameras, I cycled off to Norwich station for a series of interviews – with BBC Radio Norfolk about why the railways should be renationalised, the local paper, ITV ‘Anglia’, BBC ‘Look East’. No less important, I spoke to dozens of passengers to get the mood of what they were thinking. And here is something unusual. While we were giving out leaflets directly outside the doors to the station, every single person took a leaflet. Any Ecologist reader who has any experience giving out leaflets will know how rare that is. Why such strong…
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A burning issue: embodied emissions
I recently submitted evidence to a key Parliamentary Select Committee on a key issue of our time: the huge increase in carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels relatively inefficiently in parts of the world which have low levels of state regulation (e.g. China). This ‘outsourcing’ or ‘offshoring’ of emissions completely undermines Britain’s supposed reduction in carbon emissions since 1990. We share one world. It doesn’t benefit us or our common world at all if we reduce carbon emissions in one place, only to increase them more in another… Memorandum submitted by Dr. Rupert Read (CON 09) Dr. Rupert Read, University of East Anglia and Co-ordinator of Eastern England…
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Are we a consumerist society – or a 'producerist' society?
We are thoroughly used now to thinking of our society as a ‘consumerist’ society, and of ourselves as, above all, ‘consumers’. This seems to many of us now quite simply an obvious truth, and in some ways a good truth: think of ‘consumer protection’ and ‘consumer rights’ organisations, from Ralph Nader to Which? Think of ‘ethical consumerism’. But: what if this self-image were in fact both misleading and disastrous? The term ‘consumer’ summons up images of endlessly-open mouths, waiting to be filled with more and more stuff. It evokes ideas of us consuming the resources of the Earth. It figures us as the problem. But what if thinking of ourselves…
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Corporate money, the deformation of politics, and a values alternative
There is a deep need for a deep reframing of politics. Politics needs to be understood as about making the world a better place, about saving our common future. But there is in fact widespread cynicism about politics at present. Why is this? Because: such cynicism is largely justified… In other words: the bind that we are in as a culture is that, because of the state of our politics, which frequently and in many respects justifies cynicism, there is insufficient drive towards creating a non-cynical alternative politics that would work. Moreover, in order to succeed in creating that politics, we have first to understand properly just how bad the…
