Post Growth Institute » Scott Gast

What We’re Reading: July 2011 - Slowcoast, Collaboration, and Wendell Berry

Scott Gast — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:17:48 +0000

This post is part of an on-going series highlighting what our members are currently reading in the Post Growth and sustainability realms.

Slowcoast.ca is the only blog I follow religiously; I have been doing so for a couple of years now, and it just keeps getting better. Written by another Powell River, Canada local, the flavour and content of the posts always varies. He posts roughly once a week, but less in the busy food producing season it seems. A consistent thread is the notion of civic responsibility—and it’s interesting to learn how this sense of responsibility manifests in the form of concrete actions and deep philosophical musings for one very engaged citizen. It encourages me to think critically about my own life and to consider new possibilities. — Janet Newbury

I’ve been getting a lot of value from Shareable.net, a website which offers stories, anecdotes, and lessons about how a sharing culture can contribute to well being. Practical ideas for car, house, and tool-sharing, as well as growing and enjoying food—all of these collaborative approaches to shared living can make life easier and more affordable, while saving time and reducing the demand for resources. Shareable.net shows people how this is happening right now, using practical examples from communities everywhere. — Sharon Ede

Wendell Berry would probably disapprove of the fact that my first contact with him was when a friend whipped out his iPhone to play me a recording of one of his speeches. Berry is chiefly a writer, but his enjoyment of the physicality of the written word leads him to orate, as well as famously continue the practice of writing by hand. His reasons for such “Luddite” behaviour are outlined in his book of essays, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Berry grew up in a farming community in the U.S. state of Kentucky, left as an adult, and then returned. Like many people who have grown up “on the land,” Berry has spent a lot of time thinking about the value of place-based community.

The Art of the Commonplace

In The Art of the Commonplace he draws heavily on the local stories of his community to create a narrative that is globally applicable. He crosses constantly between the public and private, secular and sacred, redefining them as he goes.

Berry provides new insights into the intersection of gender and race relations, market economics, community, agriculture, and environment: Why do we celebrate the “liberation” of women from domestic drudgery when their alternative is to join men in a workforce full of bosses? What is desirable about an “equal” marriage of two careerists merely sharing the same bed and consumption pattern—rather than shared and productive work in a home economy? Why don’t we see that our weak and obese bodies and the loss of our agricultural topsoil are linked? What knowledge do we lose when we build roads that seek merely to move individuals from one economic centre to another at the quickest speed, rather than recognising, and responding to, the narratives of the land in which we pass? What is the “progress” we seek, and what do we lose to obtain it?

By weaving together seemingly disparate themes, Berry reminds us that this disparity is a cultural construct—and a relatively new one at that. We treat compartmentalised disorders at our peril, he suggests. To truly “progress” we need to see these disorders as symptoms caused by a culture of extractiveness that affects everything from the way a man and woman relate to our very ability to feed ourselves. — Jane Addison

What if the Economy Listened?

Scott Gast — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 17:07:25 +0000

Geese are arriving in my corner of the world. It takes me awhile to notice, but I hear them regularly now. They’re not quiet. They honk and flap and peck and stand in the damp fields, their necks thin, extended, alert. Spring is here, and the season has a sound: the bird’s throaty calls work away at the winter quiet, and the racket in the sky seems to seep into the ground. The dirt is spongy. The air is wet-warm and washed. Beads of rain move across my window, but the birds keep moving, keep calling. It’s exciting.

***

I wish we listened more. I wish I listened more. Wouldn’t things be better if we listened? What more could we learn about the world? What could we learn about ourselves? Of course, listening doesn’t make you any money; no great business plans come to mind. But I’m convinced that there are a bunch of other riches related to listening, and that most of them have to do with being more alive and more receptive to stories, to other people, to the utterly amazing fact that we’re even here at all. Being more aware of what’s going on in this minute of this hour of this day of our lives. I think listening makes us better humans.

I don’t think our economy makes us better humans. Our economy is more like a bad conversationalist: it talks, roars, steams, beeps, rumbles, and seethes—but it doesn’t listen. Like a drunk man in public, it doesn’t seem to be aware of anything beyond itself. It doesn’t even seem to know where it is or what planet it’s on. It doesn’t seem to know that it’s had too much (the bottle’s nearly empty and his stomach is turning); that it’s ruining things for other people (he’s loud and threatening innocent bystanders); that it’s incapable of learning much that really matters (he wouldn’t remember it anyway).

***

When she was in her 20s, the writer Sandra Steingraber was diagnosed with bladder cancer. She grew up along a stretch of the Illinois River that’s dense with industry and its effluents, not to mention the kind of agriculture that requires big machinery, big money, big debt, and big doses of chemicals. Bladder cancer, as she would discover, is considered a “quintessential environmental cancer”—meaning it’s strongly linked to toxic chemical exposure; exposure to the same chemicals that grease the wheels of our economic system.

This is stuff we produce. This is a cancer we help bring into the world.

We know it, too—the data goes back nearly a century. But we don’t listen. We use these materials anyway. We make economic arguments for them; we run cost/benefit analyses; we weigh life against money.

But what if the economy listened? What if, for a minute, the economy stopped talking to itself—to its own swirl of messages and indicators and pundits and forecasts—and actually gave an earnest ear to the world around it? Here’s Steingraber in a 2009 colum n for Orion magazine:

“Imagine that ecological metrics were as familiar to us as economic ones. Imagine ecological equivalents to the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P that reported to us every day—in newspapers, on radio, on websites, on the crawl at the bottom of TV screens, on oversized tickers in Times Square—data about the various sectors of our ecological system and how they are faring. What are the atmospheric parts per million of carbon dioxide today? Has the extinction rate become inflationary? What is the exchange rate between sea ice and fresh water? What is the national deficit of topsoil?

Suppose that ecological pundits discussed every night on cable TV the ongoing disappearance of bees, bats, and other pollinators and the possibly dire consequences for our food supply. Suppose we received daily reports on the status of our aquifers. Suppose legislators and citizens both agreed that if we don’t take immediate action to bail out our ecological system, something truly terrible will happen. Our ecology will tank.”

***

What would a listening economy look like? One thing I bet it wouldn’t look like would be a growing economy. A listening economy would be aware of the world beyond itself—that there is a world beyond itself—which means it would know that there’s no more room to grow. It would be a good conversationalist: it would listen to the world it lives in and respond accordingly. It would be less noisy, because listening requires periods of quiet and slowness and caution. It would be principled—and its highest principle might be the precautionary principle. It would know that listening is progress. It would know that listening is related to learning.

It would pause for geese. I bet it would even make us better humans.

12 Ideas for Strong Neighborhoods

Scott Gast — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:51:58 +0000

If sustainability is about one thing, I’d argue it’s connection. It’s when connections of all kinds are lost―connections with each other, with nature, with the effects of our actions on the world around us―that we run into problems of the systemic kind. Problems like an economy that ruins the air it breathes; that paves over the particulars of the world; that pushes electronic and other idols in the name of a very nebulous and weird and loosely defined “efficiency.”

Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself lately: Say you’re tired of all this disconnection. Say you’re interested in exploring whatever human things lie north of economic growth. What do you do? Get the word out about all these ideas? Write a blog? March around with a banner? Design policies of various kinds? Start a local currency?

None of this stuff is bad. But probably the first and most interesting of these things―I don’t know if it’s easy and fun or hard and terrible (probably a mixture of both)―is connecting with your neighbors. To walk outside and look around. To talk to the mailman, the woman walking her dog, the guy sitting on the front stoop. Because it’s hard to imagine viable local economies (which seem like total linchpins of a post growth paradigm) without reasonably tight and strong neighborhoods. And hey, whatever happens, at least it’ll be kind of interesting.

Like starting an exercise plan or a diet or something, it’s nice to have a set of discreet neighborhood building instructions. We are in luck. This post, in fact, was largely inspired by a back issue of a graphically impressive magazine called GOOD, whose thematic tag line is “The Neighborhoods Issue.” In there is a “Guide to Better Neighborhoods”―12 pretty good ideas and steps for connecting a neighborhood to itself. Here’s the list:

I like “neighborhood” as a lens for action. It’s small and close enough to feel real, and non-partisan enough to make politics more or less irrelevant. But other lists are good, too. Here’s YES! Magazine’s “10 Resilient Ideas,” from their “Resilient Communities” issue.

It can be hard to see how a single person or even a community of persons can make a dent in the trajectory of a global economy, and the cultural supports that hold it up. But increasingly I’m not worried about that. I think I’ll just head outside and start talking. What about you? Got any neighborhood-building tips or stories to share? (If you do, and there are enough, we’ll make a post out of them.)

The New Normal

Scott Gast — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 14:27:14 +0000

Maria Jose Silva will never ride the bus again. The trip to visit her relatives in a far away state used to take 72 hours—3 days crammed into a sweaty bus—but now, thanks to the recent arrival of a low-cost airline in her country, it takes just 3 hours. And the plane ticket, incredibly, is a few dollars cheaper than the bus fare. Maria could hardly sleep the night before her trip, she said, because she was so excited for her first flight.

This is all music to the ears of executives at Jet Blue, the American discount airline that has recently begun operation in Brazil—a country of two hundred million people with (until now) only two airlines. Without competition, the prices and services offered by those two airlines had gone unchallenged, and remained the province of the country’s elite. As a result, the vast majority of Brazilians have never flown; if they need to travel, they barrel through the night with everybody else on crowded overnight buses. But things are changing: NPR reports that twice as many Brazilians than last year will fly Azul this year, the new, modestly priced Brazilian arm of Jet Blue, and the company is expected to be “solidly profitable” near the end of 2010.

Earth’s atmosphere, of course, will take a beating. Air travel accounts for about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions annually—and in a country with a quickly growing middle class, the number of Brazilians leaving buses for the sky is likely to explode. Environmentalists in America—and maybe even in Brazil—will bemoan this news. But they’ll do it quietly. After all, what argument can stand up to the excitement Maria Jose Silva feels as she waits to fly for the very first time?

Maria’s story reflects the limits of environmentalism as a framework for dealing with the nexus of an ecologically-full world and the global struggle out of poverty. It also points to one of the systemic causes of un-sustainability: prices that don’t reflect true costs (if you factor in the environmental cost, flying should be pretty expensive).

As the world becomes simultaneously richer and poorer, we’ll have to adjust our sense of what’s normal—and that sense, whether we come to it in a planned and dignified way or not—will revolve around the twin forces of ecological limits and the struggle out of poverty. We’ll have new normals. And as places like Brazil and India and China develop, I suspect Maria’s story—trading a bus ticket for a once-in-a-long-while plane ticket—will be told more often. But meanwhile, places where Maria’s story has already been told millions of times, like the United States, will need to accept that activities like flying are expensive. Often prohibitively so. As Paul Dickinson, executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project, told Yale Environment 360: “I’m absolutely, definitely sure that people like you and me will be flying a lot less in 5 to 10 years.” And, if you live in the U.S., people like you and me will probably use the refrain “In this economy…” for a long time. Soon, though, it might be more accurate to say: “On this planet…”

Image credit: Flickr/pynomoscator. Creative Commons license.

Nature’s Overdraft Notice: Earth Overshoot Day

The Case for Connection

Scott Gast — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:23:50 +0000

Should business lead the way to social and ecological responsibility?

It’s a question that many in the greener parts of the business world have been nodding their heads to vigorously in the last few years—which is why a recent article in the Wall Street Journal condemning such leadership has kicked up so much dust. The article, by Dr. Aneel Karnani, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan’s business school, is titled “The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility,” and argues that CSR is irrelevant at best, and dangerous at worst. Here’s Dr Karnani:

Can companies do well by doing good? Yes—sometimes. But the idea that companies have a responsibility to act in the public interest and will profit from doing so is fundamentally flawed.

SocialEdge.org, an online community for social entrepreneurs, is hosting a lively debate on their forum in connection with the article, and GreenBiz.com, an increasingly important voice in this space, has posted responses here, here and here. They’re all worth reading, but the recurring nut of wisdom seems to be that 1) things are far less clear-cut than Karnani insinuates, and 2) that CSR has never been about promoting the public good—it’s always been about making smart, long-term business decisions. Also: Be wary of academics making theoretical claims about reality.

It’s important to note that Dr. Karnani is not against the notion of business promoting the public good. His argument is just that it’s not the responsibility of business—that’s up to citizens and government, who, by structuring the rules in the right way, ensure that the public good is a byproduct of business done well.

For Karnani, it’s always up to the market to lead the nose of business; leadership from corporations is backward, and will only end with companies spearheading activities that address concerns dreamed up by folks in a conference room somewhere—not real solutions proven desirable by a wider majority. For leaders of publicly-owned corporations, then, showing up everyday should be about one thing: profit-making.

Very simply, in cases where private profits and public interests are aligned, the idea of corporate social responsibility is irrelevant: Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare.

Two industries are cited in which this overlap between private and public good is working: organic food and fuel-efficient vehicles. But it’s a mistake, he says, to think that the companies involved in selling these things, like Whole Foods and Toyota, are in it out of concern for our bodies or our atmosphere. There’s significant truth here. It’s unlikely that Toyota, for example, will run ads telling us to drive the car less and ride the train more.

To Dr. Karnani, then, the efforts of anyone to get corporations to operate more respectfully out of some sort of ethical mandate are ill-founded and pointless. It’s all about making the right thing profitable—which, in turn, should make “responsibility” irrelevant.

Just Economic?

But even if he’s correct—that corporations are, and always will be, about profit and nothing else—is that right? If it’s true that all we can expect from publicly-owned corporations is the “relentless maximization of shareholder value,” does that underline the basic illegitimacy of these organizations in a world where nature and communities are quickly circling the drain? What if, for example, it will never be particularly profitable to question consumerism? To pay a really good wage? To forgo building a new store on farmland? If it’s not, then it stands to reason that these guys are part of the problem. Or, more accurately, distant shareholders paired with this set of encoded, myopic motivations is part of the problem.

So what to do?

Dr. Karnanai seems to have a small disdain for activism, particularly the kind that arises from morals and ethics rather than economics. Whether this is true—or Karnani simply feels that corporations won’t pay attention to such frivolous things—doesn’t necessarily matter. What matters is that there is a whole world of meaning out there that operates outside of and in connection with economic calculations. It’s evident in the family-owned jewelry store in my neighborhood that sponsored my Little League baseball team; in the dentist down the block whose office donates to the Boys and Girls club every year; in the startlingly authentic and deeply sad look in people’s eyes when they talk about their kids and climate change. It’s evident in my Dad’s small family sculpture and memorial business, which sustains itself financially by expressing people’s memories in stone and art. Talk about blurring boundaries.

These things are real. And, frankly, a whole lot more meaningful than racking a few more quarterly figures up on the big board.

Dr. Karnani might respond by saying sure, but those are private businesses. They don’t have the same mandate to shareholders that corporations do. Besides, Little League is good advertising. Local philanthropy drives customer goodwill. And worrying about your child’s future on a hot planet could be an extended kind of personal economic calculation.

OK. Fine. But does it matter? Family, community and culture are entwined with economics like vines on a tree. The boundaries are and always have been blurry at a certain scale. So, I suppose Karnani’s piece, while inciting the ire of corporate social responsibility consultants, really does move an important ball forward: Should business models that divorce themselves from a context of ethics and relationships—i.e. corporations— exist?

A Question of Scale

Near the start of his piece, Dr. Karnani uses a somewhat curious metaphor:

It’s not surprising that this idea [profiting by doing the socially and ecologically right thing] has won over so many people—it’s a very appealing proposition. You can have your cake and eat it too!

What is he saying? That unrestrained profit-making is cake, while being seen as a corporate saint is to “eat it too”? I guess none of this cake, then, involves any kind of human respect for the wider world in which business operates. Evidently that’s not good economics.

Speaking of good economics, we here at PostGrowth.org often call attention to the concept of “uneconomic growth.” That’s the point at which further growth in GDP, say, becomes more expensive than it’s worth—in terms of ecosystems, communities, and maybe even mental health. From where we sit, that’s the big question operating behind the scenes of any discussion of corporate social responsibility: Is there an appropriate scale at which business should operate?

We suspect there is.

Even the greenest business uses energy and produces waste. Even the greenest business, if it grows big enough, can lose connection to the community it serves. So, if there is an optimal size, how do you find it—and stay near it?

I’m not entirely sure. But I have a feeling the answer has something to do with why Karnani’s cake metaphor feels stilted—and why local, privately-owned businesses can walk the line between cold economics and something warmly human. An important question lies at the tangled heart of all this: Where do we really find meaning in our lives? In money? In relationships? In coaching your kid’s Little League team? In doing business? All of the above are important parts—but only parts.

Screeched to a Halt

Scott Gast — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 22:32:36 +0000

Illustration by Steve Brodner, for The New Yorker.

Legitimate political debate, here in the States at least, seems to have ground to an agonizing halt. Mainstream media is increasingly a platform for shouting matches between angry guys with blue ties and angry guys with red ties, and Congress—the deliberative body in charge of getting things done—is operating with the effectiveness of a gummed up, rusty bike chain. The U.S. Senate is looking particularly bad. An August feature in The New Yorker quotes Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet: “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the floor. You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”

Inching toward agreement on anything, it seems, won’t come without a ridiculous amount of foot-dragging, stalling, and excuse-making. If the stakes weren’t so high (the climate bill is officially buried), watching adults act like 5-year olds on the way to the dentist would be somewhat amusing.

What does all this mean for moving serious conversation about post-growth economic models into the mainstream? Probably quite a bit.

Currently, in the U.S., nearly every political question is framed by the perpetual push and pull between the rules of the market and the rules of government. Debate boils down to acceptable ratios of whose rules should rule: 60% government, 40% market? 70/30? 30/70?

But forests, the atmosphere, and hungry stomachs don’t have a horse in this race. Ecological limits raise raw, physical questions—ones that make the ideological “market vs. government” wrestling match seem petty. Still, this is where the country seems to be politically. Where do post-growth alternatives fit?

A recent post in the “steadystaters” Google group (which I’d encourage everyone to have a look at, if you haven’t already) raised some important and tough questions along these lines. Here’s a small excerpt:

Filibuster. Photo via U.S. Senate Historical Office.

“At some point one or more of us will be looking at a TV camera attempting to articulate the need for a SSE [steady-state economy] and answering the somewhat hostile questions of some protagonist who ardently believes that a free market can solve all, or almost all, economic issues.

Do we think/conclude/recommend that a relatively free market has an important role to play? Is it our position that central governments have done an acceptable job or have an acceptable track record in “managing” their respective economies and therefore should continue to exercise those power on the road to a SSE?

Is it our position that there are many hundreds of occupations and sectors of our economy that need to go away? Will we have the cahunas to tell perhaps hundreds of millions that their occupations need to go away or be legislated away and they need to start learning how to do something that is productive AND sustainable?

I predict we would be treated about as well as the Luddites were.”

Tough questions, but a surefire path to Luddite-ness would be not supplying compelling answers. (And, ahem, I think the term the poster was looking for was “cajones.”)

I’d love to hear reactions to the questions posed in the Google group post, especially from folks outside America. Is the political situation in your country more or less amenable to the steady state conversation? How is it different? Can post-growth economics somehow refresh the political scene in America—and get us past red/blue deadlock?

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

Public Comment Period Now Open for New EPA Strategic Plan

Scott Gast — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:02:30 +0000

In the effort to get alternatives to growth a home in the national agenda, we have to jump at every chance we can get.

Here’s an email I received today from Rob Deitz, the executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE), an organization doing some of the best work developing and promoting the concept of a steady state economy:

There is a real opportunity sitting in front of us. We all want to see the U.S. take a leadership role in recognizing the limits to economic growth and promoting the transition to a steady state economy. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a draft of its strategic plan for 2011-2015, and it is open for public review and comment until Friday, July 30th at midnight Eastern time. As of now, there are very few public remarks [see the circled bit to the right -- click to enlarge], so it will be advantageous even at this late date for as many people as possible to comment.

Find out more about the drafting process here.

It doesn’t mention economic growth at all, and it certainly doesn’t mention the steady state economy. You can submit comments on the Draft Strategic Plan (again, prior to midnight on Friday, July 30th) at:
http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#submitComment?R=0900006480b054e6

Once you have made comments on the strategic plan, you can also leave comments on the EPA blog topic “Expanding the Conversation on Environmentalism” by clicking through here:
http://blog.epa.gov/strategicplan/?p=134&preview=true

Please consider adding your comments! This is a low-cost way to slip questions about growth into the view of both policymakers and the public. Every bit counts — and on the web, you never know who might stumble across your links or comments and get engaged.

Rob and CASSE are friends of ours; we thank them for sounding the call about this opportunity. Go here to receive their newsletter, and here to join 5,430 others and sign their position statement on economic growth.

[UPDATE 7/28]

Here’s a comment from Sandwichman, an alert reader who points out that getting the EPA to consider anything other than the party line on economic growth will be a tough sell:

“The draft document does indeed mention economic growth. On page 3, point three of their five point program that ‘will inform the work of every program office in every region and help us meet the challenges we face today’ is:

‘Advancing Science, Research and Technological Innovation: We will seek to be a leader in advancing the scientific research and technological innovation that not only enhance our abilities to protect the environment, but promote new jobs and the sustainable growth of our economy.’”

Nice catch. And he sums it up best: “Sustainable growth. Outrageous.”

In Asia, New Questions About Growth Emerge

Scott Gast — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:59:54 +0000

A worker moves bags of cement at a factory in Ningxia, China. Photo by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.

You can’t talk about economic growth without talking about Asia. Major economies there — those of China and India in particular — are booming. And that boom is firmly tied to GDP growth: In 2010, the World Bank projects a growth rate of 9.5 percent in China, and 7.4 percent in India — with expectations of a rise to 8 and 9 percent in coming years.

Those seem like big numbers, especially in the context of financial recession.

But some voices within Asia are questioning their meaning — and wisdom. A fantastic piece popped up in the New York Times recently, titled, “Rethinking the Measure of Growth,” which weaves together a much-ignored oil spill off the coast of Singapore, China’s recent success and enthrallment with GDP, and its parallel attempt at putting together a “green” GDP measurement.

What’s most interesting about the article is that it isn’t really about measuring growth at all — it’s about asking whether growth is an important thing to think about in the first place. Here’s a quote:

“The problem is not G.D.P.,” said Bhanoji Rao, a visiting economics professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. “The problem is the culture of consumption.”

And it gets more interesting:

But economists like Mr. Xie and Mr. Rao warn that even with greener development, the result may still be the same if the goal remains an American-style standard of living. Asia may instead need to carve out a vastly different vision of prosperity that does not rely on ever-increasing levels of material consumption.

And in what represents a bit of strange casting, some economists say the answer may lie in drawing on Asia’s religious traditions — Shinto, Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism — with their emphasis on harmony with nature and self-denial.

“Is there any commandment from the heavens that one must have one’s own swimming pool?” Mr. Rao said. “That one must have 10 bedrooms?”

To illustrate, he cited Mahatma Gandhi’s comment about the Earth’s providing enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

To my mind, here’s why this is exciting: a) the core notion that “progress” is tied to economic indicators — green or not — is being questioned and b) a re-examination of local cultural traditions (Shinto, Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu) is being suggested as a way to recast the outlines of that progress.*

The air is bad in Beijing, and this is no mystery to the Chinese. The country seems torn between its rise as an economic powerhouse and the clear worsening of its physical environment — a threat which, eventually, will get in the way of everything. As Wang Jinnan, one of China’s leading environmental researchers, told the New York Times in 2007: “It is a very awkward situation for the country because our greatest achievement is also our biggest burden.”

Seems like these questions are emerging more and more from this part of the world (the connection between growth and India’s water crisis comes to mind). Can anyone share similar news from Asia?

*I’m not advocating for or against religion — just for a larger understanding of what it means to live a good life in a society that works. Part of that, I think, is rebuilding a rich and diverse cultural fabric that’ll get our minds off of growing economies and on to something a little more interesting…

Rethinking the Profit Motive

Scott Gast — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:58:21 +0000

Why do we work? Here’s one answer: money. Since an agricultural surplus has allowed us to trade subsistence farming for the specialization of labor, most of us rely on currency as a means of obtaining food, clothing, shelter and other essentials. Thus, shuffling out of bed in the morning and showing up at an office — exchanging our time and labor for pay — is a major part of many of our lives.

But that’s too simplistic. Money, it turns out, is just one answer to the question, “Why do we work?” Beyond a salary, jobs can provide meaning and purpose in people’s lives, social connections, status and identity — even simply a place to go and organize the day. Dan Pink, a bestselling writer who has done some deep thinking on this topic distills it down to this: We are profit maximizers, but we are also purpose maximizers. And he goes further: In this (well-done) video, he calls into question the management axiom that if you reward something, you get more of the results you want — and if you punish something you get less. But using incentives in the wrong way, he explains, can actually backfire.

He points to a study from MIT that found that straight-up incentive schemes work well for discrete mechanical tasks, but not nearly so well for tasks involving “rudimentary cognitive skill.” The study suggests, too, that monetary-type rewards for anything above the mechanical — anything involving cognitive skill — can even be counterproductive: Some of the participants actually performed worse even with a larger incentive. So, Pink says, for simple “if this, then that” tasks, “carrots and sticks are outstanding. But when a task gets more complicated, when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking — those kinds of motivators [financial incentives] demonstrably don’t work.”

You might pull two key facts from all this:

Money does motivate people — and without the right amount people won’t be motivated.
Money is not a great motivator past a certain point. After that point, people want meaning.

Here’s the take-away, in Pink’s words: “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.”

And, he contends, this actually works in the real world. On his company’s philosophy, the founder of Skype says, “Our goal is to be disruptive, but in the cause of making the world a better place.” And Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I want to put a ding in the universe.” You could name a long list of others, too, like Seventh Generation, Patagonia, TerraCycle and many small, local businesses (even without any specific reference to sustainability) I’ve interacted with over the years.

Some of the best evidence is connected to the web. The open source movement (Linux, Apache, Wikipedia, etc) is a stellar example of people working and sharing their work because, for them, it’s a) fun and b) meaningful. It’s not always financially lucrative. And then there’s Google’s famous 20 Percent policy, which allows their employees to dedicate one day of their week to projects of their choice. I benefited from that policy once myself, when a Google employee lent his expertise to a project I was working on that engaged his creativity, mastery, and sense of mission. Have a look, too, at Google’s “Top 10 Reasons to Work for Google” (The first one is “Lend a Helping Hand.”):

Some of this might be chalked up to public relations spin. But the point is that we really aren’t profit-seeking automatons, mentally converting working hours into pay checks as some economists would have us believe. As Pink explains, if profit-chasing was the only goal, we wouldn’t spend time walking in parks or playing musical instruments or doing anything that didn’t eventually translate into a buck. And of course not — human beings are far more complex than that.

Good News for a Post Growth Economy

When discussing alternatives to economic growth, there’s one statement that can seem to be a showstopper: “People and organizations are motivated by profit. Expecting otherwise is naïve.” That charge has haunted environmentalists in particular since the 1970’s, when bombarding the public with images of oil-slicked cranes and tousled polar bears was a primary method of drumming up support. But given a choice between saving a polar bear and reporting another quarter of company growth, most of us would fire up the PowerPoint, say the critics.

It’s no surprise that this thing called “The Profit Motive” — the supposedly singular goal of business — has been a stumbling block for anyone attempting to deal with economic activity’s negative effects on the wider world. (“If people just cared more…” is the oft-heard refrain.) What Pink puts his finger on, and the MIT study and life experience suggests, is that The Profit Motive doesn’t stand alone. There’s The Purpose Motive, too. “More and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose,” he says. “Partly because it makes coming to work better, partly because that’s the way to get better talent…The organizations that are flourishing are animated by this principle.”

To loop all of this back to post growth economics: What if the best companies — the companies that wind up putting their competition out of business — are heavily purpose-driven? Could those companies manage to pay their employees enough to “take the issue of money off the table,” and make up the rest through meaning, purpose and positive impact? What if those kinds of companies made up the core of the economy? Could such an economy reach a steady state?