Categories
economics

Scarce resources: economics and sustainability

Dan Marsh

The study of how people chose to use their scarce resources in attempting to satisfy their unlimited wants. This explains both economics and sustainability.

University of Waikato’s environmental economist Dr Dan Marsh on the potential benefits for a sustainable future from the application of economists’ focus on allocation of scarce resources in the face of unlimited human wants.

Talking points

Economics is not the bad guy in sustainability. Economics is really about people, why they do what they do, and how we can help people, societies to be better off.

A lot of people think that economics is all about money, that we’re more-or-less the same as accountants, but that’s really not the case – what economists study is how to improve human welfare.

Economics is a really great training in a way of thinking – a way of approaching the problems humans face, which is a great foundation for almost any career – how to think, how to analyse, how to take decisions.

The study of how people chose to use their scarce resources in attempting to satisfy their unlimited wants. This explains both economics and sustainability.

The economic study of scarce resources…we only have one world, we only have a finite world, a finite amount of land, biodiversity, all kinds of things, and we’re worried we’re using too much of it. Yet people always want more. No matter how much we have, we seem to want more.

Economics is saying we’ve got this scarce resource, we’ve got humans who want more and more – how can we allocate what we have in order for the greater good, the best outcomes in terms of human welfare? That is what economics is all about.

A lot of people think that economists just want growth and the expense of other things they don’t really care about – I don’t really think that is true. But economics is a very broad profession. I could say I don’t think it – and that would be true – but someone else could find an economist who does think that.

Economics is not like accounting, not a set of things that all economists should use, say and do. There is no defined body of knowledge in economics – in political terms, people who study economics go from the far left to the far right and everything in between.

Growth is not fundamental to being an economist.

Economics should be able to help people (government, policy makers) work out how to give the people what they want. Most people want to improve their incomes…if we want higher incomes then we need growth – this is simply responding to what people want – the way democracy is supposed to work. But, some people have focussed on a narrow kind of growth, and taken insufficient account of the effects of inequality, and the environment. I would agree that this has happened.

Externalities are central to economics. For me it is about setting the framework so the kind of growth we have is the kind of growth people want. And the kind of growth people want, is sustainable growth.

(Is sustainable growth a sensible term?) I believe it is. I’m somewhat of an optimist in this regard. Optimist in terms of what might be possible with technology, also an optimist in terms of how people and human societies can develop.

An important way of thinking about this is the capital approach. Capital can be divided into three main kinds: Natural capital (environment), social and human capital (people, knowledge, health, well-being) and economic (things that we make). When people say ‘growth is not sustainable’, they are assuming that in order to grow we have to have more natural capital.

The kind of growth I would like, would ensure that we don’t use more natural capital, perhaps cutting back on it, as we look after improved technology, education to grow human capital.

We can see this in natural resource per computing power. By 2020 if everyone has a ‘super computer’ in their pocket, imagine the growth in human welfare from that, a massive change and potential for improvement in human welfare that is using a remarkably small amount of resources.

I like to focus on management, and what governments should be (rather than focus just on individuals and business) for we have to have the right frameworks to give individuals and businesses the right incentives that will make it easier and reward doing the right thing.

We’re a long way from being able to bring into play all the externalities. But there are quite a few areas that we’re beginning to get the basic rules right – incentives for sustainable behaviour.

We we buy something, on average, assuming the market is working, then we are paying the market cost – because otherwise business will go out of business. But we will only be paying full cost when we pay for externalities and only when everyone along the supply chain has been forced to pay for it.

Taking account of all externalities is difficult. I’m a practical person, just taking nito account the main ones is difficult enough – it is probably an unrealistic goal.

But markets undoubtedly fail, and when government intervene in markets they sometimes make things worse. We might meddle so much in our effort to make markets take into account all externalities we might get it wrong and make it worse.

I’m not sure who said that ‘climate change is the mother of all externalities’, but it’s right.

Climate change is the biggest and most worrying externality in the world.

Economists tend to favour emissions trading or carbon tax as they would encourage people who can reduce emissions at the lowest cost to do so – and that’s a very desirable thing.

Sometimes people take the approach that “polluting is a bad thing, find the polluter, tell them what to do”. Economists take the view that we need to get the rules right, get the incentives right to find ways to encourage reduction of pollution at the cheapest cost and we’ll get more reduction – it will cost less, and we’ll have more money for other things.

Often the most expensive reduction is 10-20 times more expensive than cheaper options encouraged by trading. The Rotorua lakes, the cost per unit of nitrates leached into to the lakes, this averages hundreds of dollars per kilogram, but farmers can reduce the same for a few dollars. Why would we start with $100/kg rather than a few dollars?

For the good of the environment, we will get more improvement.

The same applies to the cap and trade around Lake Taupo, a scientifically established bottom line, then discharge allowance within that – yes they pay for the right to pollute. Does this “paying for the right to pollute” matter? Assuming that we have correctly calculated the cap – that this is the sustainable level, does it matter that someone has bought that right?

I understand that people don’t like the idea of someone buying the right to pollute, but the fact is that this mechanism allows us to get pollution reduction at the lowest cost. That person who buys the right to pollute, who sells it to them? The person who can reduce their pollution at the lowest cost.

Non market valuations – natural, spiritual, aesthetics – these things not usually measured in the markets, but environmental economists have developed methods of valuing these things. In some cases a non-market valuation can assist in difficult decisions.

Even people who say the environment shouldn’t be valued end up doing it implicitly (case study of Manukau sewerage treatment).

Quite often for some social questions, it’s not appropriate for economists to be telling people what to do.

The way I see it, it is for society to decide on how it wants to run society – what are its core values, to decide on what is ethical or not ethical – and for economists to use their skills to work within these constraints to try to help society meet what it wants to do.

People have tried to value a species (for example Costanza’s total value of ecosystems, 97, 14), but it is open to dispute. Environmental Economists would focus on changes and changes you might be considering.

Trying to value change in species and biodiversity using non-market techniques is interesting but tricky and highly contested.

Bateman‘s work in the UK to produce a national ecosystem assessment decided not to value ecosystems, so instead used a constraint approach.

We should be cautious about claims about dollar values on species and biodiversity change.

Economics can help us think about benefits and costs that happen at different points in time. The Stern Report on the economics of climate change for example.

The key driver is how much we value costs into the future.

Discounting is a reasonable approach for the next 10-20 years, but I don’t think it is reasonable for inter-generational decisions. Unless we use a discount rate of zero, it will mean we put no weight on future generations – most of us would agree, that’s not ethical.

We do struggle with longer time periods, but we’re all making decisions about how we weigh costs and benefits…all the time, to pretend we can’t do it is now very helpful, the economist’s approach is to see how people are doing it (investment decisions in schools etc).

If the discount rate you use is too high it will mean you start putting a low rate on costs (and indeed benefits) into the future and we should be cautious of that, particularly for intergenerational issues where I think that result might conflict with what we muight conclude from ethics.

(What’s the alternative?) Economists might try to contribute but we shouldn’t pretend that we’ve got the only answer, we should acknowledge that that’s about ethics and what people feel is right.

(Activist?) Yes, in the sense that I’ve always been. I always says what I think or say I disagree, I’m not too worried about putting my head above the parapet. I am actively involved in trying to use environmental economics to improve New Zealand’s environment. I’ve always argued in favour of the environment, typically trying to help decision makers better understand the value of the environment to the benefit of the environment.

(Challenges?) Too much to do.

(Miracle?) The National Government brings in changes to make NZ’s Emissions Trading Scheme really work, so people who are emitting carbon really would face a realistic cost of carbon. I believe if we could do that, over time we really would get a reduction in NZ’s carbns emissions, and we could do it in the lowest cost way. The main problem is the international linkage – the trouble is the European ETS caved in under pressure and caused the price to crash and our transferrability means our price has crashed. So we need to reduce our transferrability in order to get our incentives correct. It’s really sad the way things are at the moment, it’s not working because the price is too low.

(Advice?) Study economics.

Categories
agriculture economics

Circular economy

Dan Kristensen

The current economic system is linear and ends in a landfill. In a circular economy you design our way out of the need to dump.

Daniel Kristian Kristensen is a researcher in the Department of Agroecology – Agricultural Systems and Sustainability at Aarhus University. We talk sustainability transitions in agriculture, circular economy, and the need for radical rethinking.

Talking points

It is quite apparent that the system is not suited to continue along the same path as previously…so that’s what I see as a transition, a fundamental shift in the way that agriculture is organised.

Agriculture has to deliver…that will be a period of – maybe not conflict – but where the demands on agriculture will be quite intense.

The tension is where where interesting things are happening, agriculture is has both models (production and ecological models)

We have to drop the idea of there being one solution and embrace the complexity of having to negotiate increasingly globalised solutions for the problems that are occurring locally.

There a lot of issues around sustainability, but it’s not one issue so it’s not one solution.

Recycling is not enough, it often means you degrade the product. We need to take recycling to a radical extent – upgrade and improve.

In a circular economy things have to circulate, not just take a few more loops and still end in the landfill after all. You want to continuously upgrade the product and the services associated with the product – upcycling.

Consumption is important to keep the economy going, but it does have an element of being more reflexive, consumption needs to be rethought so it’s not just wanting new stuff all the time and discarding what you had previously. Rethinking…getting the services you want, say to use the phone, then just get the service…that will change the incentive for the manufacture…

(On growth)…the circular economy is a radical reworking of how the economy works on many levels. Growth as we normally think about it might not sit very well with the circular economy, it can be done applying principles to the continuous improvement and new services, but consumption in terms of increasing throughput and throwing more stuff away, that is definitely not compatible with circular economy.

It’s a radical transition, but it still approachable for someone that wants to treat it less radically – it’s different actors around a common agenda.

I like to think of it as negotiating where we want to go in the future.

It is as much as change of mindset as technical solutions.

We need exemplars of what is achievable.

(Motivation?) Curiosity, how we can go on having an economy and prosperous society?

(Activist?) No, would like to be one but I can’t claim to be being very activistic.

(Challenges?) Circular economy in a relationship to agriculture.

How to get people together, traction on a way forward, getting a framework for long term solutions drawn up – that’s one of the big challenges, there’s of muddling through that is short sighted. The long term vision needs to be there, we need some dialogue on that. We need a conversation about that, creative thinking and involvement in that.

(Advice?) Pursue your interests in terms of education and do that as a guide.

Categories
economics engineering systems

Strategic sustainable transport

Henrik Ny

If you come back a year later and they’ve got recycling in the office rather than looking at the main process, that’s a sign that they are not really buying it.

Dr Henrik Ny is a researcher and Sessional Instructor at Blekinge Institute of Technology. His research interests include ecological economics and sustainable product development. He has worked to integrate lifecycle assessment into the environmental management system and the waste treatment and recycling efforts of major industrial companies. Henrik’s current role is to run large research projects together with industry and public institutions. The largest so far is a regional electric vehicle project called Greencharge.

This conversation is one of a series of four recorded at Blekinge Institute of Technology Department of Strategic Sustainable Development in September 2014.

Talking points

I studied engineering as a route to sustainability.

If you did it from scratch it would be much easier…but it rarely happens that you get to do something from scratch.

My PhD was a toolbox for companies to practically integrate strategic sustainability into their products and systems.

Rather than just looking at the systems as they are, we started looking at applying the principles for sustainability.

Substances from the earth’s crust should not be allowed to increase in the system – because then we will have problems now or in the future. So this makes the process of increasing concentrations a problem – before you know what consequences they give.

Chemicals – combinations of emissions from the earth’s crust – these should also not increase.

The third is about other ways to break down natural systems.

The fourth is about social sustainability, because even if we address the ecological issues without the social people will not deal with this in a good way. We need to be happy at the same time.

We have focussed on the process conditions – the increasing concentrations, we’re working with others (Rockstrom) who have set up the boundary conditions for how far those processes can go.

Companies are beginning to understand that so long as they are acting in an unsustainable way, they are taking a risk. It sometimes takes while for them to understand that.

If you are working with someone who is trying to improve, it is sometimes counter productive to be too dogmatic. I never tone done the science or the consequences of something, but I am trying not to tell them how they should run their business.

If you come back a year later and they’ve got recycling in the office rather than looking at the main process, that’s a sign that they are not really buying it.

The nature of something that is so big – holistic – is that sometimes it is so big and blurry that you don’t know where to focus…that’s the value of the framework.

We have added a scoping phase to Life Cycle Assessment where you use the principles of sustainability, so that you can see, just by knowing that you’re looking for substances from the earths crust what you’ve up against… the idea is that you can keep track and not get lost into the detail.

If you want (your analysis) to become dynamic, then you use scenarios and tweak it, system dynamics from a strategic perspective.

The challenge is to do something complex enough to address reality, but not so complex that you don’t understand what is going on.

Putting social systems into that makes it more complex.

(Green Charge) The technology we need is more or less here – so it is more of a social- economic problem: how can you mobilise the necessary actors to act in a coordinated way to make this possible and affordable.

We could say this is how you should be sustainable, but if everyone is bankrupt before they get there then little is won. So we try divide in two steps. First a wish list of the things we want to do. Then we prioritise based on short-term economics.

So we try to find things that will give you money now, and prepare for coming steps.

(are we close to the tipping point for sustainable transport?) Not yet, but within five years.

The status quo is a big barrier.

As long as there are a few good examples of success, we will move forward quite quickly.

Those who don’t move will lose in the transition.

The strategic framework raises a few principles as a common guide for any actor. It is built at such a level that anyone acting in society could, for example identify according to principle one, how they contribute to increasing concentration of substances from the earth’s crust. That can lead to common goals, with different types of actors working together.

The strategic sustainability framework provides a common language so that people from different positions can work together.

When you put a price on externalities and internalise them into the economy, then you are making the economy better. But even with this environmental economics, we might consume them (the environment) anyway but at a higher cost. Ecological Economics attempts to limit this with quota and so on.

We need to think about growth in more nuanced way. Many times growth today is just expanding a wasteful business model where you waste a lot of resources, then you expand that and waste a even more resources. If you transition to a business model where you waste less resources, then you can have economic growth while not wasting as much. It is difficult to achieve this in practice – to have both growth without systematically eroding the environment.

There are different ways to fulfill needs that wouldn’t show up in our current economic systems.

Just enough is not enough. Restorative sustainability…systems that start to improve themselves again. I think this is necessary, because we have destroyed a lot of things.

(Motivation) Realisations when I was very young – looking a car exhausts and asking where they go. The realisation that this is not going to work. Then being able to be part of the solution and just looking at the problem. And I’m quite curious and I like solving problems, simplifying, explaining…and here is the biggest, most interesting problem we have.

(How many people do we need?) Amoeba theory…

(Activist?) Depends on what you mean by activist. I don’t generally go around telling people what they should do. And I’m not fundamentalist in that I do everything right always myself. I try to make the big things right and recognise that sometimes you need to make compromises.

(Challenges?) Run Green Charge to fruition. Develop the road map, develop a big systems model to look for transition points.

(Miracle?) We have the technology…so one, a sudden global awareness that we need to change to become sustainable, and two, this is how we should do it.

(Advice?) Don’t despair. Most of us are aware that there is something wrong with the world today, but most of us are also quite frustrated that we don’t know what to do to fix it. But there are many things you can do, use the internet, find things to do, trying to reduce your own energy bill for example will start helping the world.

Categories
business economics policy

Creating change

David Bent

A responsibility mindset – a focus on compliance – is not a strong narrative for change.

David Bent is Director of Sustainable Business at Forum for the Future. He is also a policy fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge.

Talking points

15-20 years into my career it is the right moment to to ask the big questions, and the right question after working with business for 10+ years on becoming more sustainable, it seems the right time to ask “what’s the role of business?”.

Business as political actors

The more we found better ways of representing cost on how much effort it would take for a company to move from its current position to being sustainable, the less likely they were to use that information to do anything about it – for one thing, you were telling them off, and the other, you were making the opposite of a business case…we were framing it all wrong. We were starting with a responsibility mindset, the business has a negative impact on the world, what can we do to make that impact less. The switch now, is the world has an impact on the business, what can the business do to be successful in a world dominated by sustainability. That opens up a whole new terrain of things you can do, including looking at the opportunities, and framing things as strategic risks, that if you do nothing about then your entire industry is at risk.

A responsibility mindset – a focus on compliance – is not a strong narrative for change.

How can we create change by helping leading businesses go further, faster?

Our system innovation approach is deliberately aligning all of our work to create change at a system level

How can we help individual companies play their part in the transition to a sustainable global economy?

A move away from framing things in terms of responsibility- which rather traps you in ethics and duty and you have to hope that people share your value set – to a frame based on sustainability, how will you be successful in the long term?

How can we scale up what seems to be working? What can we do to scale up innovation so there is system level change? How do you scale up impact?

Our (Forum for the Future) founders had had a long time campaigning, and post-Rio 92 they could see that campaigning by throwing mud wasn’t enough, people where saying “yeah, I get it, it’s important, now what should we do?”, so Forum was founded on the basis of partnership and long term working

One of the primary things we provide is being a critical friend

Part of what the change agents in the companies are looking for, is someone who can bring the difficult truths to a conversation. That does lead to delicate balances: “what is the most this organisation at this time can handle, with a view to them being able to handle more in a years time?”.

With the best will in the world, even with the pioneering organisations we’re working with, they are to some extent dependent on the status quo, and we’re trying to change the status quo and create disruption in the interests of people who don’t yet exist in the form of future generations, and it’s very difficult for future generations to pay current wages.

Sustainability is not a collection of individual things, but it’s a relationship between all those different things.

We meed to maintain a transdisciplinary systems view…to see the connections, and to see the dynamics, and to play out and see what the unintended consequences might be requires seeing the connected whole.

What historical examples are there in our shift of energy sources that happened at a global scale and happened quickly? The one that gives me hope, bizarrely, are the shift from coal to oil…and the abolition of slavery, a move from a seemingly free resource with negative impacts occurring on people the political elites of the time didn’t care about – in that case people who were slaves, in our case people in the future. It took a generation, but it is possible to make those massive changes…the political elite can see a viable alternative. A third parallel is the transition to the welfare state.

(Michael Jacobs four conditions for creating the Welfare State) Massive crisis – opportunity for change…business elites could see a viable path…that someone has laid the intellectual groundwork…and a popular movement.

We had the crisis – the global financial crisis – and that disproved the intellectual foundations for the previous two decades – that if you leave companies alone they won’t be so stupid as to hard themselves…it turns out the bankers are that stupid. We had a popular movement, a spasm of anger – who got us into the mess and who is paying for the mess.

…but in London there weren’t enough people who feared that they would down-grade their current and their children’s prosperity…the interesting thing about austerity, is to what extent are people giving up hope that the future is better than today. At the moment, the way people are reacting to that in the UK and across Europe, is they are turning to nationalist parties.

The facts don’t back up (nationalist) story, but nevertheless the story speaks to people being very much afraid, feeling that globalisation is taking things away from them, and losing hope for the future and turning nationalistically- turning inwardly to deal with it rather than turning outwardly.

Part of the story has to be making ourselves more resilient by distributing the risk and ability to respond across many different nodes, and acknowledging interdependence – what happens way over there affects us here. It is in our enlightened self interest to make sure that things don’t get really bad in Africa. I want the people in the tropics to have the capability to choose how to live their own lives rather than being subjected to have to respond to e vents far beyond their control.

We know a lot about the boundary conditions we have to live within…then there’s the social and political foundations – give people the capability to make choices in their own lives…that’s moderately well known: a degree of equity; interdependence; you need access to energy, health care water, sanitation … those end goals and the boundaries are like the table on which you can put your coffee cup of sustainable economy – that’s well known. What we don’t have a good grasp on, is how we make the transition from here to there. There’s a couple of things that make that really difficult. One is that it has to be economically viable at each step of the way – the current ways of making profit have to finance the things that drive us in a different direction, we have to allocate capital away from stuff that is familiar and currently turning out profit…and put that investment into things that are a bridge into the new future. The other problem is that every step along the way has to be politically viable…without knowing how that is going to happen we’re adding decimal points on the end of a universal constant, it doesn’t make any difference.

Businesses need to make a reason for change….seeing that the long term success of their businesses, their shareholders is in creating a more sustainable world.

The buy-in of a certain group of the business elite is there, we now need more unusual ambassadors.

Humans have evolved brilliantly to respond to things that are urgent that we can see and touch and feel – if you’re a monkey in a tree that’s absolutely what you have to be good at – and what we have in the crisis – the slow, grinding, unfolding crisis that we have – are things that our actions today affect the world in 25 plus years, climate change experience of the next 15-20 years was set in train by accumulative behaviour up until about 1990.

Our evolutionary heritage, and our political systems are really badly set up to deal with climate change – in many ways that’s why there is a crisis, it’s in the gaps of how we deal with things. If we could deal with it, we would have dealt with it, but we can’t deal with it and that’s why it’s ongoing.

Rational argument hasn’t carried the day, so in some ways we need something that will loosen people’s ties to the status quo. We missed the opportunity of the financial crisis…we didn’t have a strong enough intellectual alternative, equivalent to Keynes, then may be we could have replaced laissez-faire markets with something else.

A resilience narrative gives agency, it gives them stuff to do in their locale, it gives a way of thinking more into the future. But the thing I don’t like about it – its shadow side – it accepts that some sort of crisis is inevitable, that we can’t really avoid some sort of downside in order to create action, and there’s still an eternal optimist side of me that says, with enough workshops and podcasts we’ll be able to act before we’re in that situation, but that was probably five – ten years ago.

So there’s something appealing as well as appalling in the resilience narrative that could bind people together to act.

(Motivation?). Social justice and creating change for social justice.

I am annoyed when there’s persistent injustice, in particular where’s nothing the people at the end of that can do anything about it. We’re at a complicated moment in history – fairness always means different things: fairness of outcome, fairness of process, fairness of opportunity. There’s a mixture for me of fairness of outcome and fairness of opportunity, and we have to acknowledge that at the moment we’re not set up for that – and for me this makes what are seen as environmental issues are really social issues. If we take climate change – it’s been caused by the emissions of rich countries, it’s going to affect poor countries, and affect choices and take away the ability to have to have the life that people want to lead in the tropics in the first instance, and that’s not even remotely their fault, and that’s the social justice question. The environment is the means, but the real motivation for me is the social justice question. And what gets me out of bed in the morning is creating change to avoid those injustices.

(Activist?) No. For me an activist is someone who’s primary way of trying to create change is protesting outside the castle walls. For me, we need the activists at the gate, banging and causing elites to understand that there’s need for change, my role is the advisor inside the court that helps the barons do something about it. You need both parts of that movement, you need the activists and you need the ones helping those with resources and power do something about it. And that help might include getting out of the way. Inside the gates and therefore not activist.

(Challenge) How can we take advantage of the windows of opportunity that come along? To avoid the worst and get the best.

(Miracle) Smallest thing that might make the biggest difference. Extend the time horizon of decision makers – to 10-15 years planning horizon, you would have enlightened self-interest – thinking about not just your entity, but all the things your entity relies on and all the things it impacts on. Once you have that time horizon then you start thinking about who else shares those goals to create a good context for my entity.

(Advice) There is always something you can do wherever you are. It is easy to think these challenges are so enormous that there’s nothing you can in any situation it’s about what “they over there should be doing. Well they should but there’s also things that everyone can be doing

If everyone does lots of little things, they do add up.

Categories
community democracy development

Empowering communities

SteveClare_N-01

If you believe you can make a difference then you can make a difference.

Steve Clare is Deputy Chief Executive of Locality. Locality is the UK’s leading network of development trusts, community enterprises, settlements and social action centres. Steve describes how community asset ownership is a route to sustainability.

Talking points

Community organisations making a difference

Board drawn exclusively from an area of social housing runs successfully with a turn-over of £8-10M, assets of £30-40M.

Really entrepreneurial and yet they are community owned, community run, open to everybody within the community. It’s about having more say, more control about what happens, in their community.

Enterprise and community asset ownership is a route to transforming communities, and a route to sustainability.

We would argue that transferring assets to community ownership is a better long term bet in terms of the future prosperity of the community – rather than just selling them off for a quick buck.

The world is moving to a sharing economy.

The very local and the global are more than ever, two sides of the same coin.

The next door community doesn’t have to be physically next door.

We’re seeing a fundamental change in the economic paradigm

…based on a model of an ever growing economy, an ever expanding tax income, and an ever increasing spend on public services…that’s changed, the economic crisis has led Europe to austerity policies…some people think ‘oh well, eventually it will get back, get better, the economy will grow and we’ll get back to the way it was’, I think that’s a mistake – it’s never going back to the way it was.

The post-war model of ever increasing economy, ever increasing tax income, ever increasing spend on public services – it’s broken, much as we might regret it, it’s broken. That has led to fundamental questions being asked about the relationship between state and citizen, state and communities, and who does what, and who is responsible for what.

People taking control of their lives.

Local people understand local problems, local challenges and local opportunities better than some faceless bureaucrat no matter how well meaning they may be.

Dis-economies of scale

People aren’t widgets.

Local solutions are best driven, best decided upon at a local level.

A cross in a box every five years in an election is not democracy. Local ownership, local control starts to ask questions about whether there are other things we should be making decisions about locally.

The options and opportunities that digital technology brings, I think there is scope for a different sort of politics.

We have a 21st Century society, we have a 21st Century population, we have a 21st Century economy, but we still have a 19th Century political system which is no longer fit for purpose.

People will mobilise in response to closing a hospital or library, the challenge is to then get people to start asking deeper questions.

Libraries are being decimated by public spending cuts…that’s caused a lot of controversy. Some people have responded ‘we”l take over the library and run it as a volunteer service’, well meaning but personally I would query how sustainable that is. The other approach…is saying many libraries as they are at the moment, are 19th Century institutions that are no longer fit for purpose. What we need to do is reinvent the library as a 21st Century – it isn’t about a place where you store large lumps of paper ie books, it isn’t a place where you deal with ebooks either that’s a dead end… what you can make a library into is a real community hub, a store of local knowledge, a place of empowerment, a place where people can learn, share, swap ideas and skills, linking to technology, linking to the maker-hacker movement for example. The 21st Century library for me can, and should be a vibrant essential part of any community.

If nothing else changes, changing ownership is not going to work.

A service or building that isn’t working, is still not going to work if all you change is who owns it.

Getting local people involved

Government policy tends to be focussed on deprivation – what’s wrong with a community – a deficit gap model. I think we need to turn that around to asset based community development (ABCD). The starting point has got to be what are the assets within the community – the people, the skills, the networks.

In my experience, every community, no matter how challenged or deprived, always has a huge rich seam of potential and creativity. If you keep telling people that they’re a waste of space, if you keep telling people that they have nothing to offer, if you keep telling people that they’re a failure it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once people start recognising that they can do something about their lives, that they do have choices, that you always have choices, sometimes the transformation is remarkable, you can almost see someone growing like a flower bursting into bloom. I think the same thing applies to communities.

If people think don’t think can do something then they won’t try. If people think they can do something then they will.

Many of our members are extraordinary people, but they were ordinary people until they became extraordinary by doing something, by taking action. By refusing to accept no as an answer.

It’s about working together, genuine partnerships…I don’t think any one sector has the answer. But what I do think is that the paternalistic, top down, system drive, scale approach that the public sector has is no longer fit for purpose.

Creating situations where people can do things for themselves, then stepping back and letting people get on with it.

People don’t want to live in a place that’s the same as everywhere else.

(Motivation) I hate with a vengeance oppression, inequality, seeing human lives wasted. I love with a passion seeing what people can become, the changes that they can make to their own lives, their children’s lives, to their communities.

The perception that people are fundamentally selfish is completely wrong. Anyone who understands history understands the role of the commons, of sharing, the fact that as a species we’ve moved forward through cooperation.

The idea that we act as rational economic beings is demonstrably nonsense, that we’re driven by indviduals needs is demonstrably nonsense, that you get jobs growth through increased productivity is demonstrably nonsense, – much of the current science of economics belongs in Harry Potter.

The established political system is the problem not the solution.

(Activist?) Yes. My work is my life. I don’t go on demos as much nowadays, but I hope I work in different ways.

I’m much more cynical nowadays days about gesture politics. If you’re going to do something, as far as I’m concerned, you damn well do it properly, you do not give up. I’m less keen about people who say “we want this, we’ll go out and fight for this, oh, it’s hard, we’ll give up”.

The collaborative economy is a game changer.

I saw a great quote the other day: “Social entrepreneurship used to be an oxymoron, now it’s a tautology”.

(Advice) I like Ford’s quote: “If you believe you can, or you believe you can, you’re probably right”, I think that’s such a powerful thing

If you believe you can make a difference then you can make a difference.

Opening people’s eyes to the possible, to the wonderful things happening out there by people just like them.

Categories
climate change oil politics peace science

Encouraging scientists to think differently

Stuart Parkinson

We want to promote dialogue amongst scientists and engineers, particularly in areas where they don’t want to talk about things

Dr Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility.

Talking points

Our aim is to promote science, design and technology in contributing to peace, social justice and sustainability

Encourage scientists and engineers to think differently

To think differently about their role in society, prioritising environmental issues and social justice rather than a narrow economic focus

The challenge is an agenda of security through an arms industry – we argue for science and technology not based on yet another generation of highly destructive technologies

We want to promote dialogue amongst scientists and engineers, particularly in areas where they don’t want to talk about things

There’s an acceptance of the arms industry – “it keeps us safe” – we want to question that.

We try and fill gaps, ask the awkward questions.

Not just responding to problems with a technofix – another technology.

Part of the concern is that technology is often grabbed as a simple answer and it turns out not to be – it might deal with one problem but create another.

Trying to get around the techofix mentality

The term activist is so often used as a pejorative. If it’s about about questions, proposing different solutions to mainstream, challenging systems and offering something constructive, then it’s an activist organisation.

Working in the arms industry made me ask awkward questions, ones I hadn’t faced before – severely questioning what I was doing.

One of the challenges of the environment is ‘oh we don’t need to worry about that because it is too uncertain’ but on the other hand, we’re willing to believe economists, where the uncertainties are orders of magnitude bigger than the environmental ones.

We’re willing to take at face value economic models…despite being hugely unreliable and based on so many assumptions you can make them prove whatever you want according to your political viewpoint.

We’ve developed an economic system that’s not very stable (or fair or sustainable) so takes a lot of tuning – our news has become fixated on this.

(why sticking to growth narrative) because we haven’t come up with an alternative economic model that works in the way we’ve become used to.

SGR has ethical principles rather than specific polices on every subject. We encourage debate and discussion to apply principles.

(On demilitarisation) moving towards a society that solves its conflicts through dialogue and building trust and diplomacy rather than trying to build new generations of weapons

We need a to follow cautionary principle, rather than doing things just because we can

Some scientists can create a new technology, and other scientists can ask awkward questions about that technology – like what’s the impact, social implications and will it improve quality of life.

We’re being driven along by an economic imperative, not considering broader pros and cons.

We’re breaching environmental limits, some clearly, others either we don’t know or we will breach them in few decades – and that’s really scary.

We need to change norms of international behaviour that says nuclear weapons are unacceptable for anybody to have.

Challenge the assumption that there is a technofix. Technology is just one group of approaches, we need scientists and engineers to know that there are other groups of approaches

Codes of ethics (in professional bodies) are very narrow. Our organisation’s name is Global Responsibility – derived from social responsibility, corporate, environmental responsibility.

Ethics so often in professional institutions is interpreted very narrowly – professional ethics of do you job well, don’t lie, don’t plagiarise, don’t make something that’s going to blow up as soon as you’ve sold it. We think that’s far too narrow, you’ve got to think about your role in society, your place in society as an engineer, as your company, as your profession – and think are we doing the right thing?

Activist: Yes. For same reasons the organisation can be considered activist

Making things unacceptable is a very powerful idea. At the moment nuclear weapons aren’t something to be ashamed of for a lot of countries – chemical weapons are, biological weapons are – that shame that comes with breaching international law that’s built up over a couple of hundred years – its more powerful than people realise.

(What do we need to do to preload students with awkward questions?) We want to inspire students with science, give them at least sight and experience of something else.

The science and technology that is presented as exciting, especially for boys, is things like explosions, fighter planes and warships…we’re trying to present an alternative to that, still desirable, kind of nicer, this is what society is about, helping each other and using technologies that help us to help each other. And this is how is how you can live a good life – not being dazzled by the flashing lights and loud noises of the problematic technologies.

Being affected enough to make a different choice in their lives.

Note:
This conversation was recorded in the Common House at Lancaster Cohousing (see earlier conversation with Cathy and Alison).

Categories
computing design economics

Change through informal exchange

John Harvey

Informal exchange is binding, it creates ties, it creates social obligation.

John Harvey is a researcher at the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. An economic anthropologist, John is researching systems to encourage non-monetary forms of exchange such as freecycle, couch surfing and his own Neehoy. He talks with us here about prosociality and empathy as core design strategies.

Talking points

As much time, effort and inter-personal meaning goes into the informal economy

There are two fundamentally different ways people come at understanding the economy. There’s the formalist approach – the idea that we’re all rational people, and that we rationalise, economise in the presence of scarce resources, and the opposite side to that – the substantivist approach would argue that neither of those presuppositions are true the idea of rationality is not universal and the idea of scarcity is not universal – they are constructs. The formalists might say the economy is the aggregate of all individual actions, whereas the substantives may say the economy is simply the way that people provision and furnish for themselves – they not might be trying to maximise utility.

There’s always been this sense of alienation when it comes to exchange. You might consider some people you talk to the same as yourself – you might give or share with them readily, or some people you might consider as other – you might want some balanced exchange.

Alienation refers to the objects in our lives – the idea that some objects are transferable, and some objects are not transferable – we keep them within our kin, our friends, our family. Some items assume a collective ownership – the food in the fridge. That comes from a shared mutual understanding of who we are. Introducing otherness introduces the notion of debt.

New technology is changing the way we look at things – we can belong to multiple communities online that we wouldn’t necessarily interact with otherwise…this is changes the dynamics of how we procure things for our own lives.

(Couch-surfing, wikipedia, creative commons) These new forms of collective ownership are fascinating.

We should be designing economic policy that helps people to feel well-being rather than increased GDP.

I think GDP is a terrible measure of prosperity

The free market…has helped to liberate people, but potentially it imprisons them in an iron cage of consumption.

Efficiency is a good thing…the less damage we can do to the planet, the less resources we can extract the better. Efficiency as it relates to production starts to become controversial – as you put efficient tools into the hands of a few, you reduce the workforce.

Centralising production…full of conundrums…

We’re (Neehoy) expanding the ideas of free-cycle to large scale asset management.

Most of the focus in asset management has been on high value assets, but this overlooks the millions of pounds tied up in furniture. In health, much of this is dormant, sat idle, if we can reduce this by a fraction then not only is the organisation saving money, it’s also a great thing for the environment.

Prosociality means to me a voluntary intentional behaviour that results in benefits for another.

In rational economics this is explained by the utilitarian self – if you act in a way that is kind to other people, you have a warm glow – you feel good about yourself – you’ll feel good and that’s why you do it it’s selfish. Similarly they’ll say when you see somebody in distress you’ll feel negative, you’ll feel guilt. Acting kindly is helping to relieve that sense of guilt. Alternatively to that utilitarian concept of altruism, that egoistic interpretation, are ideas about empathic concern – the ability to imagine the other. What other people endure and perceive in their own lives.

We see these rational behavioural economic assumptions in design. Recently we’ve seen a lot of work that attempts to nudge behaviour, it takes an individual to be at best to be rational and at worst to be irrational but within confines – bounded rationality. …HCI is well positioned to present information, cues to try to manipulate behaviour, but it is fraught.

Activist: HCI an interventionary field, we don’t just describe the world, we try to change it – it is inescapably an activist discipline. There is a moral obligation of HCI researchers to consider impacts.

I’m naturally anarchistic – I like decentralisation, I like giving tools to people so that they can do something meaningful with their life. Unless those tools are created in participation with local cultures you run the risk of cultural imperialism.

I like the idea that technology can help people to become kinder, freer.

I celebrating differences rather than looking for universal principles.

Streetbank: a small charity, encouraging people to act more kinder to other people that doesn’t rely on reciprocity – I think that is a beautiful thought.

Pay-it-forward still has notion of money that involves debt, the moral stance of obligation, I like play, play-it-forward. Could you create an economic based on these Utopian principles? Not likely to happen but a nice thought.

We need both sides of the economy, there needs to a redress of the balance between those two sides.

Advice: Be willing to fail. Don’t take failure as end of the road – there’s so much to learn from failure it is almost virtuous.

Categories
sociology

Societal tensions

Katharine Legun

Environmental/economic tension is rising and this overlaps with questions of social equity – who is benefiting from extraction and who is suffering ills from that?

Dr Katharine Legun is an environmental sociologist in Otago University’s Department of Sociology, Gender and Social Work.    She is interested in the relationship between the economy, social organization, and the environment.

Talking points:

Stretched out commodity chains have separated the consumer from the environment.

Food is an essential resource that goes beyond nutritional aspects – food politics is concerned with social security and your place in the world.

I believe in the power of conversation and political dialogue – this enables democratic processes

Economy, environment and society are not actually separate, but separated in institutional practices.

Resources: Dunedin free university

Shane’s number of the week: 2%.  Global warming will cut crop harvests by 2% each decade (more>>>).
Sam’s joined-up-thinking:  Jon Kolko describes the empowering role of teaching entrepreneurial hustle – the idea that you can actively cause things to happen rather than passively have things happen to you (more>>>).

Categories
economics Inequality

Inequality costs

Robert Wade

It is profoundly stupid to ignore society-wide costs of inequality

Professor Robert Wade is from The London School of Economics. He has recently written Inequality and the West, published as Chapter 3 in Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis, edited by Max Rashbrooke (Bridget Williams Books 2013).

Seeing himself as an analyst rather than an activist, Prof Wade has helped shape debate on the inequality. GDP, he says is a flawed measure of performance and while not opposed to growth – we have certainly seen benefits from material progress – he says we “we need to ‘green’ GDP – we need to decouple growth from emissions”.

Policy made for the top 1% by the top 1%

Categories
computing design

Joined-up thinking

Six Silberman. Wow. This is an insight packed interview.

Currently based in New York, Six works at the intersection of art, economics, design, computing, business, sociology (this list goes on). He has come around to describing himself as a systems analyst. This extended interview traverses full cost accounting for the life cycle, our fetish for growth, the search for frameworks for thinking bigger, power relationships, working collaboratively, creating space for reflection, the role of business in society, and the probability that we are at the start of an n-dip recession as parts of a collapse (he is a co-author on an award winning paper Collapse Informatics).

Six asks how we get back to a place where we recognise the importance of managing things we fundamentally cannot measure? We discuss the importance of systems thinking and ponder whether sustainability can be considered an emergent phenomena. Finally Six tells us his plans for connecting large scale discussions of sustainability to things we can actually do.