Gavin Maclean
by Gavin Maclean
Thank you for your thoughtful if incomplete response to my plea for degrowth. You seemed shocked, which would explain some oversights. I did not show “disregard for economic and employment impacts,” but made them the chief topic. I did not suggest a “giant, politically-engineered global recession,” but rather a piecemeal, evolving, people-driven recession, which could be politically enabled when governments actually have the brains to consider it. I did not question the capacity of human ingenuity and technological advances to “help” address the climate crisis; only their capacity to meet it totally. I did not challenge the capitalist system as such, but its overblown form in neoclassical economics, which has of course produced accelerating degradation and inequality in recent decades.
There are major insights to which the conventional thinker needs exposure. They do not fit easily into a brief column, but here goes:
One is the concept of a gift economy, or koha economy, beautifully expounded by Charles Eisenstein in his book Sacred Economics. We need that concept to grasp the possibility of moving smoothly to a partial gift economy, which has more informal work and trade, and less formal, than the present. This liberates human creativity, mental health, community action, and much more.
Another is, in contrast, the insight of damaging formal employment, and its extent: what David Graeber called bullshit jobs, and I called waste jobs — wasteful, alienating, stressful, toxic or exploiting. Graeber’s estimate, on a narrower definition, was 50 percent; mine would exceed that.
Thirdly there is the practicality of a universal basic income, advocated by economists and commentators of all political shades, but feared by those in power partly because the public is not used to the idea and partly because they are in power. There have been many trials of it, showing no scary outcomes, but being of short duration and local extent they do not show how an entire economy could evolve. Yet the radical-looking policy is actually evidence-based: it worked for thousands of years, admittedly in a non-monetary way, when citizens were supported by their communities instead of being separated into rich, starving, and in-between, as at present.
Your response to my column was incomplete in overlooking many points: the once-respectable concept of contraction and convergence; the economy as the driver of inequality; the idea that the economy is overblown, with the implication that in proper degree it can serve well; the good lessons from the lockdowns, and the main cause of the suffering they produced, which was the continuing debts to creditors and landlords, and the compensating of businesses in proportion to unequal wages instead of all people equally (Biden has seen through that it seems); and the inadequate current strategy of the Climate Change Commission.
The gradualist strategy is precarious, depending on projections that may not be accurate and marginal targets that could at any time prove inadequate. It could lose its slight lead over atmospheric carbon content for a number of reasons. Responses to contingencies of storms, fires, earthquakes, pandemics, and breakdowns political, financial and technical, all generally involve acute energy and pollution costs. These “Black Swan” events are individually unpredictable, but we do know that some combination of them is inevitable.
By contrast, the strategy of contraction provides some leeway, by getting “ahead of the curve” and creating a crucial time interval (perhaps a decade) for social and economic adaptation, and also creates an enormous think-tank, through the increased freedom of the people who choose less formal employment, to find creative solutions of local or even general value.