Author: DA (Page 4 of 4)

“Is she the chief economist, or who is she? I’m confused… After she goes and studies economics in college she can come back and explain it to us.”

Steven Mnuchin, US Treasury Secretary, about Greta Thunberg, January 2020, Davos.

Exactly a century after Arthur Pigou coined the term ‘externality’, the question our sustainability crisis poses is whether our economy is more market failure than market. What says economics, then…?

1989 was a momentous year – protests in Tiananmen Square, the falling of the Berlin Wall, ‘the end of history’, no less. All significant events, but I offer a late entrant as candidate for most important event of 1989: it was the year we started using the word network more than the word machine.

1989 wasn’t quite the ‘end of history’, but it may, very beneficially, have been the end of the Machine Age of Human Cognition (c. 1637-1989). Slowly, we are comprehending that the anchor metaphor of Western culture has changed – because we changed it.

This change in world metaphor heralds a rebalancing in our scientific investigation of the world – from a reductionist-dominated enquiry to something that blends reductionism and systemism.  Critically, this potential change in shared cognition has the power to unlock some of our most persistent social and ecological problems, if our culture can grasp its significance quickly enough…

Bad news for the environment: sustainable business isn’t succeeding. I’m frustrated, too. But we can make it succeed.

The two-decade-old sustainable business movement has reached a major crossroads that few of its participants yet recognize. While the movement can claim many early successes, it is increasingly diverting effort and resources away from the only form of change – policy change – that can now adequately address our environmental challenges.

The sustainable business movement has long confronted instances of so-called greenwash, whereby certain companies cynically promote token ‘green’ initiatives to distract attention from unsustainable core businesses.

Today, we face a new affliction of greenwish – the earnest hope that voluntary sustainability efforts are much closer to achieving the necessary change than they really are. This condition may prove every bit as harmful because it is more widespread and arises principally from good intentions.