Author: DA (Page 3 of 4)

A delightful story this month: Satish Kumar, the Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, used his invitation to speak at the renowned London School of Economics to challenge them to reconstitute as the London School of Economics and Ecology!

In Kumar’s telling, he enquired, over tea and cake, about LSE’s ecological offerings, to which he was informed there were several courses which integrated environmental issues into economic frameworks.

‘But environment and ecology are not the same,’ he replied. ‘Ecology means understanding of the entire ecosystem and how the diverse forms of life relate to each other.’ To which the response was: ‘That is too broad a concept. Our courses are much more specialized.’

I like the story for two reasons. First, I enjoy the thought of a distinguished guest speaker politely asking his hosts over refreshments whether they have considered being the opposite of what they are! It strikes me that more guest speakers at more events might usefully ask the question.

The more serious reason is that Kumar’s provocative idea, and the defensive response, catches the very essence of our ecological sustainability challenge: that economic thinking still fails to grasp the sort of thinking ecology is, particularly ecology’s focus on relation.

I believe this remains poorly understood because I, too, missed it for a long time. Twenty-five years ago, I attained one of the first ‘environmental economics’ degrees (at another London university then unique in offering such a course). With best of intentions, we all – professors and students alike – believed that environmental economics was a proper union of economic and ecological thinking, but it is now clear to me that it was no such thing. Instead, it was the appropriation of some ecological concerns into a way of thinking that remained steadfastly economic.

The real significance of this is less about improving university programs and more because it is exactly this misunderstanding that underlies our continued failure to solve major ecological problems despite considerable attention now paid to them. 

Today, we live in a market-centric society, profoundly informed by – and so daily reinforcing – an economic mindset. Economic thinking is what powers the business and investment worlds. We have become ‘consumers’ and ‘human capital’.

Consistently, we are trying to solve our sustainability problems in market-friendly or market-tolerable ways, spearheaded by an ESG (environmental, social and governance) movement within the private sector and by related ambitions for ‘green growth’ and ‘more sustainable capitalism’. Alas, these ideas are simply real-world manifestations of ‘environmental economics’ thinking. They represent a comprehension of the problems to which ecology points, but a failure to grasp the form of remedy to which an ecological perspective leads.

…

Full 35 page paper here (PDF): Can Economics Grasp What Ecology Says?

The conclusion (!):

As published by Responsible Investor, February 2021:

RI long read: Can ESG grasp what ecology says? (responsible-investor.com)

Shocking as last week’s events in Washington D.C. were, it has all been seen and said before. WB Yeats’ lines from a century ago read like a dispatch from the steps of the US Capitol:

Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

WB Yeats

Even an ‘innocent ceremony’ – the certification of the Electoral College results that in most years is a procedural non-event.

Yeats powerfully captured the two dynamics that repeatedly enable demagogues like Trump: the emptying of society’s middle ground and that: ‘all that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’

The latter is the troubling dynamic of tacit complicity. Psychologists talk of the ‘bystander’ effect in which most human beings – us? – avoid taking responsibility for problems in the hope that others will step up. So dangerous is this instinct at large scale that JFK used unusually strong language to condemn it: ‘The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’

But what if our norms make us all complicit?

The violence Trump incited last week is just one aspect of a daunting set of inter-related social and environmental problems that continue to mount in plain sight. Political chaos in the US arises from the same desertion of the middle ground and erosion of civic spirit that also thwarts efforts to address social and environmental problems of increasing scale. That such problems mount – and stubbornly defy our efforts to resolve – is because we are all effectively complicit in their propagation, in turn because our current norms, narratives and social structures make it almost impossible not to be complicit.

What connects Trump’s demagoguery with environmental and social problems is that both flow from the contemporary neglect of ‘public’ in favour of ‘private’. Societies have always grappled with the innate tension between public and private, but history shows that when cultures privilege private too much, tyrants emerge and public problems accumulate beyond the capacity of private to fix.

Today’s lurch to private has been rationalized by the ‘modern’ belief that markets ‘have it all covered’ and, hence, all the public we need is ‘minimal government’ to uphold property rights. Public is simply the sum of all private, we told ourselves, and markets can do the adding up for us to create the best of all possible worlds. The mantra of our times: ‘markets are the solution/government is the problem’.

Hence, we have felt it safe to encourage the pursuit of self-interest at large scale – as ‘consumers’, not ‘citizens’ and also, in super-sized form, as corporations duty-bound to maximize profit.

Alas, markets are failing much more than their advocates had promised. Markets seem not to add everything up, but rather to leave a growing mass of social and environmental problems in their wake. ‘Markets are the solution’ has been false advertising.

Yet, ‘government is the problem’ has proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Persistent discrediting of government has driven the best of society into the silos of private business and a vacuum has slowly formed in the public square into which ambitious men have been emboldened to venture. Tyrants emerge when everyone is lulled into thinking it is safe simply to ‘mind their own business’. 

At the same time, the ‘anti-public’ narrative leaves society increasingly forced to address mounting ‘public goods’ problems from within the private structures that have been favoured, but which may be no match for the scale and severity of those problems.

But none of this is new. It has all happened before….

Full article here in PDF: Trump Happens When Cultures Believe Private Can Cover for Public

The exquisite dilemma of quicksand is that you must escape as quickly as possible but anything you do to escape only drags you further down. Our ecological crisis is a quicksand problem, but our disconnected economic system conceals the fact.

(This article first appeared in Responsible Investor on October 12th, 2020)

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Are the pictures of Economics changing?

The gathering momentum of systems thinking since the 1970s crystallizes a sense that we have reached diminishing returns to reductionism as a perspective to comprehend the world.

At its core, systems thinking encourages us to see the world in loops, not lines.

All complex systems contain ‘positive’ or reinforcing loops, which exacerbate situations and ‘negative’ or dampening loops, which balance a system. At any time, the overall dynamic of a system depends on whether the reinforcing loops or the dampening loops have the upper hand. In the former, runaway situations develop. In the latter, a system exhibits balance.

Economics is starting to grasp this – ‘complexity economics’, no less – and it is set to change our sense of whether economics is a ‘social science’ or a ‘social story’.

Some of our ‘theories’ may be more accurately described as self-fulfilling narratives – no more so than Friedman’s Feedback Loop.

(This article first appeared in Responsible Investor on September 14th, 2020)

Fifty years ago, with Economics in the grip of reductionism, Milton Friedman wrote his famous article arguing ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’.

Placing Friedman’s statement under the modern lens of systems dynamics reveals that he initiated a feedback loop – ‘Friedman’s Feedback Loop’ – which propels the runaway corporatism that continues to destabilize our society and environment.

A systems perspective suggests the debate on ‘corporate purpose’ is off target. Instead, it is the relationship between corporations and governments – the ‘in-betweenness’ – that requires mending.

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The left brain woke up.

And it looked nice out.

And so it invented language and then maths and then physics.

And it was happy.

And so it tried to understand biology and people and it came up with economics.

And now the icecaps are melting and the sky is orange.

And the left brain doesn’t know what to do.

**

(Inspired by Iain McGilchrist).

EBITDAC! Brilliant, really. One of a million memes launched by the coronavirus pandemic. Companies will now be tempted to report earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and coronavirus costs!

The humour of EBITDAC offers a portal to recognize that companies have all along been operating in a GDPBESDA economy – Gross Domestic Product before ecological and social depreciation and amortization. Same pattern, larger scale.

We build our economies upon layers of arbitrary metrics – narrower and narrower measures of ‘wealth’ creation further and further disembedded from the underlying reality. Yet, underneath the delusion, and impossible to suppress indefinitely, human bodies and Planet Earth maintain the real score.

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On the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, a history of the environmental movement in 5 cartoons. (Because that’s about all our frazzled brains can take right now!)

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A Covid-19 explainer: written as a quick effort to help convey the ‘flatten the curve’ idea at a time when the concept was new for most people. (Not updated since original of March 10th 2020.)

The Shape of the Problem

The basic shape of the COVID-19 problem is a highly challenging one in which exponential growth in infections threatens to crash against the fixed capacity of our healthcare system.

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A working project to convey that our sustainability problems – and, alas, many of our current sustainability ‘solutions’ – reflect a preponderance of left-brain thinking over right-brain thinking. We are unlikely to solve our sustainability problems until we are clearer on the difference…

An early Illustrative Summary is available here. Many thanks to Matt Tweed for help with the illustrations.