Economics

“America does not need jobs that depend on the extractive economy. We need a way to arrest consumerism. We need a different form of accounting so that both sufficiency and efficiency have standing in our minds.” Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to this Place

America’s economy is seemingly on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days. Talk of recession and possibly depression fill hours each day in the twenty-four hour news cycle. Thousands of jobs were lost just last week and Washington is scrambling to provide and answer. I believe our new president will do his very best to promote healthier solutions to the problem but from everything I’ve read and seen so far indicate that some fundamentals of our economy will not be challenged or changed.
A real healthy and lasting change must begin at the local level. Communities must begin to practice sustainable economic development. In the quote from Wes Jackson above, he mentions the possibility of a community considering sufficiency and efficiency as equal concerns rather than competing ideologies. A sustainable economy must be concerned with both.

In an essay entitled Sustainable Economic Development Henry E. Daly explains that two answers have been given to answer the question, “what is it that is supposed to be sustained in ‘sustainable’ economic development?” The first answer is that our quality of life should be sustained. The economic term for this is utility. This is the idea that the next generation should at the very least have the same economic advantages the current generation experiences. According to this belief, happiness should be sustained or broadened and transferred from one generation to the next.
Physical throughput is the alternate answer to utility. Throughput is, “the entropic physical flow from nature’s sources through the economy and back to nature’s sinks.” If we are to sustain our sources of food and energy we must not use more than nature’s ability to replenish itself. The goal here is to transfer a healthy natural environment from one generation to the next.

Utility has been the driving force in our country and likely the developed world for so long that we are beginning to see how such an unbalanced system can damage our environment. In this generation we must begin to redefine happiness and quality of life. Instead of unchecked recreation we need to begin to find joy in good work. Convenience must be questioned without reservation and as Wes Jackson says, “chemicals that have not evolved with us must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.” A redefining of utility and a strong examination of our physical throughput will at the very least put us on a path to transferring a more healthy world to the next generation.