Economics without Ecocide: The Case for Degrowth and the Challenge to Higher Education

David O’Brien Centre September 16, 2011

Peter.g.brown@mcgill.ca

Part One

The Folly of the Growth Agenda

Reasons for Growth

• Population increase• Productivity improvements • Decreasing poverty• Increased happiness through consumption• Social and political stability

Growth Mania

The Great Collision, 1750-2000

Has Growth Gone Too Far?

Source: Rockström et al., 2009

- Planetary boundaries being transgressed

- Wildlife populations declining

Has Growth Gone Too Far?

Source: WWF, UNEP-WCMC

GWP to 2100 at 2% or 3% annual growth

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Source: Garver, 2010

Are We Getting What We Are Paying SO Dearly For?

Are We Happier? - No positive correlation between wealth and happiness

Source: World Database of Happiness

Source: Victor, 2010

Are We Better Off? - Monetary wealth and wellbeing not correlated

Poverty

• Growth has not reduced poverty in most developed countries

• Redistribution is necessary

How Could We Have Made Such an Enormous Mistake?

Fundamental Mistakes Deep in European Culture

Roots

• Judeo-Christian Ideas of the Separation and Superiority of Humanity/Nature

• The Emphasis in Greek Thought on Human Uniqueness and Independence

• European Enlightenment Further Tragically Legitimates these Assumptions.

Toward an Ethical Foundation for an Ecological Political Economy

Part Two

Redefining and Redesigning Our Place in a Learning Universe:

The Challenge to the Academy and the Opportunity of Degrowth

Outline

• 1. Re-grounding our understanding of our relationship with life and the world.

• 2. Redefining who we are, (what we know,) and how we should act in light of a theory of the universe.

• 3. Redesigning economics, finance and governance. • 4. (Restoring the place of religion as a fundamental

dimension of the human relationship to the Earth/Universe.)

Re-grounding: A Universe Ever Advancing into Novelty

An Evolutionary and Systems (etc.) Theory Perspective

Re-envisioning Our Place in the Universe

• A. Vast creative processes• B. Contemporary thermodynamics • C. Mind and nature• D. We need to change our metaphysics to one

of The Commonwealth of Life

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Some features of a universe ever advancing into novelty

• Beginning 13.8 billion years ago it is evolutionary story in which biological evolution is a special case. (Chaisson)

• A principal descriptor of the process is the second law of thermodynamics.

• It describes the processes that reduce temperature and other gradients. Entropy.

• To do this the universe uses dissipative structures, and self organizing entities—wind, currents, life. It both creates and destroys complexity.

Mind and Spirit• This universe has direction but no destination. It is

an optimizing process trying to be as cool as it can be. Tropical forest.

• Human mind and spirit are emergent properties implicit from the beginning. Chardin.

• But mind is widespread. As Henry Beston says of the other animals in The Outermost House, 1928.

• (By the way--plants also learn.)

What is earth, life and ecosystems?

• An island of complexity in an entropic universe.• Life on earth are the encoded dissipative structures

which handle the massive amounts of sunlight that continuously arrive.

• What are ecosystems? Ecosystems are the biotic, physical, and chemical components of nature acting together as non-equilibrium dissipative processes. Ecosystem complexity increases energy degradation.

• Rio Declaration Principle 12!!!.

God made man in his image and gave the world to him.

But co-evolution suggests: The Commonwealth of Life

Elements Needing Redefinition

• Who we are• (What we know)• What we should do

1. Rethinking who we are

The early 20th century “person” in the 21st century world

• The operating ethic of economics is derived from the utilitarianism of the J.S. Mill.

• But Mill’s concern with the common good has been removed—or is allegedly resolved by the market. Empathy is folly.

• The neo-classical “rational” person is the deliberator seeking his/her happiness.

Who we are (Wheeler) • A complex systems view of the human self—sensitive to initial

conditions, wide variation in outcome, holistic, multiple feedback loops.

• We are the result of dissipative structures giving rise to the emergent person, entangled in brain/body/environment/culture/cosmos.

• The human self is continuous with the cosmos and perhaps best described in quantum terms.

• We are osmotic with respect to matter and energy.• We are relational and semiotically (through shared meanings)

inter-subjective.

3. What we should do and not do

Some Consequences of Complex Systems for Ethics

• We must manage ourselves, but we are not good at this. Managing nature should not be the emphasis.

• We need compassionate retreat: as in a battle that cannot be won—our pullback should be designed to limit the loss of human and nonhuman life; and to minimize damage to Earth’s life support systems.

Challenges and Opportunities for the Academy

What we teach and what we think

What is urgently needed is a reconstruction of our curricula, and our collective understanding, in terms of the evolutionary narrative.

The subjects from which we derive our norms have not systematically connected with this narrative: law, ethics, finance, economics, politics, and most theology are metaphysical orphans.

Some of what has to get redesigned

• Economics• Finance• Governance

A Strategy of Redesign by Interrogation

• How would these patterns of thought be different if we connected them with our scientific view of the world?

• How would they be different if we understood we are in the Anthropocene, not the Holocene?

Embedded Economics

Economics in an Evolutionary World (Bernanke)

• We need to confront five questions about the economy:

• 1) what is it for? • 2) how does it work? • 3) how big should it be? • 4) what is fair? • 5) how should it be governed?

Economics in Complex Systems II

• The economy should be for a flourishing Earth and maintain and enhance the complex adaptive systems that support emergence, and hence life.

• It is a system of flows of energy and matter.• It must be scaled to be supportive of those

systems of which it is a part. • Fairness requires the flourishing of life.• Governance must be grounded in a systems

perspective.

Finance for Planet Earth

Finance(Bodie and Merton)

• Financial concepts and instruments play a large role in the scale, character and direction material and energy flows. Yet, like economics, finance is NOT connected to a scientific understanding of the world.

• Does not recognize that we have entered the Anthropocene.• Money is the socially sanctioned right to intervene in the

Earth’s ability to maintain far from equilibrium systems. All life on Earth lives in the shadow of the guillotine of finance.

• Increasingly financial institutions govern the state not the other way around.

• Finance can create incentives to increase risk!

Governance in a systems perspective

Liberty Leading the PeopleDelacroix 1830

Many of the building blocks of political liberalism are destabilized

• Self-regarding acts. A null set. • The Sovereign Consumer—complete nonsense!• Property. Human ownership implausible, boundaries

are fictions, wisdom of giving power to the uninformed, etc.

• The costs of “tolerance” and “progress.” • Its material conditions (cheap energy, few people)

are expiring.

A Fundamental Transformation

Degrowth as an Opportunity for a Mutually Enhancing Earth/Human

Relationship

Overshoot and reduction paths

From the Living Planet Report 2008, www.panda.org

Redirecting the Growth Agenda

• Technology/productivity improvements increase leisure/reduce impact

• The human population must be reduced; especially in the developed world; e.g. North America.

• The aggregate level of material wealth must decline. • These steps taken in time and sufficient quantity can

lead to planetary and social stability and the well being of life’s commonwealth.

• Paris, 2008; Barcelona, 2010• North, Central, South America• Academic, activist, artist, business, political, union communities

• Keynote Speakers:– David Suzuki– Naomi Klein– Herman Daly– Edgardo Lander– Joan Martinez-Alier– Serge Mongeau– William Rees– Peter Victor

• Sponsors:– McGill School of Environment – Concordia's David O'Brien Centre

for Sustainable Enterprise – HEC Montréal – Université de Montréal – Chaire de responsabilité sociale et

développement durable, UQAM– Montreal Tourism