‘Postgrowth economics’ – hmm, it can seem a bit abstract, with no obvious connection to day to day life of the average person. A bit boring even? What does it mean for me?
We’ll explore all these questions together, but in the meantime, a good story never goes astray, so enjoy the following ‘postgrowth parable’ – it perfectly illustrates what we are on about:
‘An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large, fresh fish in it.
The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them.
The fisherman replied, “Only a little while.”
The banker then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish?
The fisherman replied he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The banker then asked “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”
The banker scoffed, “I am an Ivy League MBA, and I could help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats.
“Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually opening your own cannery.
“You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would of course need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you could run your ever-expanding enterprise.”
The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
The banker replied, “15 to 20 years.”
“But what then?” asked the fisherman.
The banker laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”
“Millions?…Then what, senor?”
The American said:
“Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…”‘
There are a number of themes in this story that connect to postgrowth concepts…
Quality of life over quantity…
Slower over fast…
Being in the moment instead of being mentally in the future…
Appreciation of what you already have rather than what external forces tell you you need…
- Do you think you have a good work-life balance? What about the people around you?
- Do you find yourself thinking about what you have to do when you get home/tomorrow/next week? How can you bring yourself back to the present?
image from GraphicsHunt
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This post was written by Sharon Ede
Sharon has written 12 posts on Post Growth Institute. Contact Sharon
{ 4 comments }
I love this story! I’d lost it and have been looking for it for quite awhile. So thanks for sharing it. Nicely sums up the paradigm shift from growth-seeking to happiness and fulfillment seeking.
Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
http://www.growthbusters.com
This is not a criticism! If you look at my blog, you will see I am 100% on your side. The end of exponential growth economics must come and I believe ecological/full cost accounting will play a large part in getting us there.
About the fable. The Mexican ends up with an easy life, whichever route he chooses – whether he just carries on as before or becomes a tycoon. With the huge growth model, he probably reduces earning power and food security for the rest of the area but at the end of it he gets a different kind of security for himself – a huge amount of cash that would cushion him in the event of something going wrong.
Compare what happens if there is a disaster in the area – say, the fish all get sick or there is a tsunami.
Case 1: He stayed in the village. When the fish disappeared and the tsunami came he first starved, then his house was washed away. He didn’t feel much like playing guitar with his amigos any more.
Case 2: He got rich then came back to his village. When the fish disappeared (which was earlier than case 1) because his fishing fleets had denuded the population anyway, he called someone and they shipped in some fish from somewhere else. The whole village ate. They made him Mayor. When the tsunami came, the village was washed away. He moved somewhere else.
People in our growth based economies are insecure about life and what we characterise as greed for growth is probably rooted in a deep insecurity that forces us to go “over the top”, like an animal that collects way too many nuts for the winter.
If we are ever to get people to consider the much greater stability (aka security) of a steady state non-growth economy (which, BTW, still allows development) we need to convince the world that not only will a continued growth economy bubble eventually bankrupt us all, economically, environmentally and spiritually, but also that the alternative will make us more content, less stressed with greater well-being and, as a bonus, we get to keep our planet in good condition too…
We are open to constructive criticism, it helps strengthen all our thinking. You don’t get anywhere developing your ideas if people agree with you all the time; you learn from other perspectives and questions. So thanks for your comments, Nick
That is very perceptive of you! I agree, we are probably fighting an evolutionary precedent of being ‘hard-wired’ to acquire for lean times, and yet consumer societies since WWII have been pretty well immune from a lot of the lean times experienced elsewhere.
I think the point of the parable is to find the happy medium between subsistence economics, and the constant pursuit of more to cushion us from feared loss. Such losses are a grim reality for many people today, more so than those than can afford to source their support services and goods from around the globe.
Its also a story about enjoying life in the here and now, not putting that enjoyment on hold for some future goal that may or may not be realised.
For the frazzled souls caught up in hyper-culture, I think this story is a good metaphor to get them to frame things differently from what the dominant culture is selling them – many people are in an unconscious pursuit of more [which costs them financially, costs them time, costs them stress and even compromises their health physically, mentally and emotionally] because of a range of orchestrated social status factors, not because of any impending fear of loss of job or livelihood.
Great words! That sounds like a postgrowth/steady state mission statement if I ever heard one.
Breaking the expectation of exponential growth will not be easy – it is hard wired into the very basis of classical economic theory and even how fiat money is created by such as the US Federal Reserve. Most people who have career type employment have accepted the status quo as the way to get ahead and, no matter how they may originally have been capable of understanding the inherent drastic flaws in the system when they were still at college, life somehow clouds their minds – they end up so occupied with squirrelling away the excess amount of nuts for the winter that they lose sight of the fact that their actions may actually be generating one helluva winter that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred.
Last night I went to a presentation, by Peter Taylor, to the CIGPE (Channel Islands Group of Professional Engineers).
It was called Making sense of carbon foot printing in the built environment
Mr Taylor is a founding partner of CarbonPlan, a London based sustainability consultancy that specialises in work related to the built environment.
I’m bringing this up as an example of the difficulty we may face ahead which will be caused by the old problem of the “good being the enemy of the best”.
Early on in his talk this professional sustainability consultant from London said something along these lines “Although there are many who are criticising the idea of further economic growth, I do not share this idea”. This sort of dangerous complacency unfortunately goes down well here in Jersey, which is full of financiers etc schooled in the dogma of conventional economics. If even sustainability consultants haven’t all “got it” yet, I think there is still a lot of work left to do.
He then went on to do a population analysis by suggesting that the only way that global population will stabilise is by female education in the third world combined with economic growth. He conveniently left it for the audience to miss that he was backing economic growth generally (i.e. in the rich nations too) but was justifying it by reference to the needs of the third world – a bit of a magic trick…
I don’t think that any of us would dispute that economic growth, in areas which have very little economy to start with, is not a good idea, if we assume that it will be achieved using a different model from that which the West has used up to date – ever increasing amounts of non-renewable energy and ever increasing amounts of material resources extracted and not recycled.
The problem with the “vanilla” economic growth juggernaut is that it requires increasing amounts of energy and materials throughput to achieve ever higher levels of “stuff”, which is believes is essential to keep the whole shooting match going. Its advertisers and marketers have been brainwashing us for decades that it is our patriotic duty to use more stuff – they play on our psychological weaknesses (you gotta save more nuts!) to make us think that more stuff is the answer because they believe it!.
Economic development can achieve higher levels of sustainably desirable “stuff” for those undeveloped nations, who currently don’t have enough, without increasing demands for energy or materials – indeed it can, and must, lead to decreasing demands for energy and materials.
A cute example of growth versus development is personal music systems. In the seventies, they were carried on your shoulder – conventional economic growth principles applied to stereos would have meant that personal stereos would be the size of a house by now. Instead they “developed” and now they are incredibly “Ipod” small. I know this is not a bulletproof example, as it’s possible that the extreme technology involved in creating Ipod’s may use more energy and toxic materials than the 70′s beat box but what the hey!