An informative and inspiring talk by currency systems expert Bernard Lietaer at PopTech, October 2011

Related posts:

1. Freedom from money
2. Systems Thinking in a Complicated World

This is the second in a series of articles from the Post Growth Institute reporting on-the-ground impressions of Occupy events around the world. The London account includes observations by Post Growth’s Sharon Ede – who happened to be visiting her friend, documentary film maker Mike Freedman - in London on the day Occupy London commenced, and footage and reflections by Mike, including an interesting insight into Occupy from the perspective of the police. 

What was the feeling like at the Occupy you visited?

Occupy London Stock Exchange (LSX) happened to kick off right at the end of a visit I had with a friend of mine in London. Mike was keen to see what was going on too, so we both headed off to the London Stock Exchange on 15 October.

The original plan for Occupy LSX had been for people to gather in the area outside the stock exchange, however I discovered a police line blocking access and claiming that area was ‘private property’. I was pointed in the direction of St Paul’s Cathedral by a man sitting nearby the police line, who also told me that if I went inside the cordon at the cathedral, I may not be able to get out. I later discovered that this meant you could come and go as you wished, but if events did turn violent, the police would  ‘kettle’ (contain) those within the cordon - people would not be allowed leave, and could be effectively detained there for many hours.

Within the inner police cordon, several hundred people were gathered on the steps and immediate surrounds of St Paul’s Cathedral. There was a space of about ten feet between the two police lines of the inner cordon, and the outer cordon, beyond which many more hundreds of people had gathered to be part of the demonstration and to hear speeches that were made on the steps of the cathedral. There was a helicopter overhead, police dogs on hand and a large police presence – the authorities are still skittish after the London riots earlier this year.

But aside from a minor a scuffle that occurred briefly outside a Starbucks, it seemed to me there was no energy in the air that hinted at violence. The crowd was a wide cross-section of ages and appearances, banners, drums, signs and included various media crews, independent and mainstream, local and international. They were orderly and peaceful. There were a lot of people in conversation with each other.

What kinds of conversations did you have with people, or did you overhear?

The man who warned me about going inside the inner cordon told me that he would never normally have gone to a protest like this, a year or two ago. His words to me were ‘I was asleep then, I’m awake now’. I talked to him a little about what we are doing with Post Growth, and gave him a card. There were a few people who were questioning the police, asking them why they were even there, as it was a peaceful protest.

Mike’s short documentary of the day gives an interesting insight into the psyche of the police, and the conflict they bear in having to carry out their duty despite any personal views they may hold – the police force is one of many public services experiencing cuts, and such austerity measures are one thing the ‘Occupiers’ are speaking out against. Mike struck up a conversation with one senior officer who would not shake hands, but said he wanted it all over so he could go home and have his dinner. Maybe there was a sense, or hope on the part of the police on that first day, that Occupy LSX was a flash in the pan. Nearly four weeks on, it’s clearly not.

The day before the protest began, I began following the Occupy London Facebook page. There were a couple of hundred followers. 48 hours later when I left London, there were over 10,000. There are now over 30,000. Anyone who tries to tell you that social media is only keeping us isolated, or is ‘clicktivism’, doesn’t understand the power of social media for organising real-world action and conversations that can and do create momentum for change. Occupy began in Wall Street on 17 September, yet it was a good week or two before the mainstream media would report on it – but the news was being posted to Facebook and Twitter.

Did you notice anything or encounter anything that signalled post-growth thinking?

There was one hand scrawled sign that asked why we were creating money as debt, which is a key driver of growth. Since then, Positive Money (based in London, and whose Executive Director I met with earlier that week) have been down to the site to talk to people there on this issue. Other than that, nothing specifically, except a general sense that things are very broken and unfair, and need fixing.

But is it sufficient to patch up the old system so it works a little more fairly for a little longer? Or is it time for a broader conversation about reinventing not only the economy, but the social contract?

Between Two Mirrors – Urban Anthropology

A short documentary shot by Mike Freedman on the first day of Occupy London, 15 October 2011

‘It’s like being caught between two mirrors…’

Excerpts from Mike’s ‘Open Letter to the Occupiers’

On the role of the police:

The law is such that the police will enforce it as ordered regardless of its substance.  In instances when the police have used heavy-handed tactics, they have done so because they are upholding the law as it has been explained to them and along the lines by which they have been instructed to do so.  This is not a semantic point, but a very important key to our future as social beings on this beautiful planet of ours.  A change in the law will change the behaviour of the police.

The police force is exactly that – it is a force, a tool which does the bidding of the hand which wields it.  I may personally disagree with a great deal of the laws currently on the books, and I may wholeheartedly disagree with the manner in which those laws are sometimes enforced, but the police are not the enemy…

When the laws are changed to better suit the idea of justice and governance that befits us as an intelligent life form, the police will be on the front line of keeping those laws intact.  The neutrality of the police may be a most incomprehensible thing to those witnessing violence as a result of it, but that neutrality is also to our advantage.

Police men and women who will use baton and pepper spray to subdue those allegedly violating public order will steadfastly turn those weapons on whomever is designated an opponent to public order, no matter how it is defined.  If this is the case, as I believe it to be, then we have no enemy in the police.  They are human beings, just like us, and the structure which they are a part of has convinced them that we must be watched and subdued.

The police in Britain and across Europe have undergone some of the most stringent cutbacks in wages, man-hours and employment numbers.  These protests stand, among other things, for equitable wages in return for fulfilling work.  These police men and women are the people we are fighting for.  They just don’t know it yet, and if they do, they have pressures of their own to account for their silence as they wait patiently for the law to allow them to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Whether or not people should follow orders they disagree with is by the by.  It is both dishonest and unfair to expect them to behave differently to how we think we would in their place, because we are not in their place.  They are not our enemy.  There is no “they”.  There is only “us”….

On change:

True revolution begins in the mind.  If we learn the ways of the oppressors only to replicate those ways when we have replaced them, then we have achieved nothing.  The only true revolution begins with the realisation that we are all one.  Beneath political and social definitions and dynamics, there is no oppressor and oppressed.  There are only vulnerable, fearful people manipulated by deeply rooted buttons which those who wish to retain power know how to push…

Any threat to power can be very frightening.  This is why ideas are the commodity most tightly regulated in our cultures.  Our modern global system is built on piles of abstractions and unquestioned assumptions.  To maintain the structure of this ideology, built as it is on quicksand, only a superficial amount of idea variation is tolerated before the protectors of the structure crack down…

The deeply extractive, materially fixated, morally bankrupt, ecologically and socially destructive number games which are played world wide right now are simply a washed-out perversion of an underlying economic truth which has been lost over time, namely that people require access to goods and services in complex societies and the easiest manner in which to distribute those goods and services is by the use of a common means of exchange which frees the labourer from needing to find a supplier who wants the thing he produces…

It can no longer be a social norm that goods arrive before us with no provenance and no moral association other than our desire for them.  It can no longer be morally (let alone intellectually) justifiable to bang on about economic growth in the OECD nations when the major purpose of growth is to support the growing debts we accumulate through a persistence in allowing money to be created as a debt-bearing thing rather than circulated as a debt-free service.

The strict extractive system which is currently in place in the OECD nations, centred on taxing the people in order to service debt generated wilfully, will never resolve inequity either at home or abroad…

Asking for what the wealthy have is irrelevant.  We should have something far greater in our sights: a real birthright for every living thing on this planet, in balance, understanding and peace.

Related posts:

1. Occupy Eyewitness – New York
2. Occupy – A Cultural Strike
3. Asset Mapping For The Long Haul: A Strategy For Occupy Movements

Australian entrepreneur and initiator of the Wilberforce Award, Dick Smith, speaks about what Australia’s progress means to him.

One of the most important things in this debate is to challenge the growth consensus, and Smith does this well with the following ‘if not now, when? if not us, who?’ approach.

Transcript from Australian Bureau of Statistics, 5 September 2011

‘Measures of Australia’s Progress? Well if you’d asked me two years ago, I would, of course, as a businessman, be talking about Gross Domestic Product. Since the Second World War, GDP has been our religion, especially in business. You have to have growth. And in fact, our present economic system is based on perpetual growth in the use of resources and energy.

What I find fascinating is that if I tried to sell the Treasurer a perpetual motion machine, he wouldn’t buy it. But of course the addiction of everyone is towards this perpetual growth. And in studies I’ve been doing – and by the way, I am a simple car radio installer, not an intellectual – but I’ve worked out that many learned people for over a hundred years have been talking about changing the way we measure growth, so that it’s not just growth in use of resources and energy but it’s a growth in quality of life. That’s the way I see we have to go.

Already some counties are doing this. Canada and Holland for example, have a general progress indicator: a GPI, rather than a GDP. What I find fascinating is that up until about the Second World War, the productivity gains of capitalism, which were truly incredible (2 or 3 percent per year) were generally used to reduce working hours. If you don’t reduce working hours you end up with unemployment. The other thing you can do is use productivity gains to make more stuff – and  that’s what we’ve done since the Second World War.

So we’re now in this ridiculous position that if you go into a large shopping centre, I would estimate about 50 per cent of the stuff that’s for sale is not really necessary. But if we stopped buying it we would create recession and there would be absolute mass unemployment; there would be a complete disaster. So I think we have to plan a new system which is not based on the exponential growth in the use of energy and resources. I see it happening by having laws which I would call sustainability laws. Just as capitalism has coped with laws on environment (environmental controls that people 50 years ago would never believe could exist), I see we could have sustainability laws. So nothing could be marketed, nothing could be sold, unless it’s produced sustainability. That means you can’t have the type of growth we now have because it’s completely unsustainable growth. I think it’s estimated that we use something like 1.5 times the resources that we replace each year in the world. So I see it as absolutely possible.

A lot of people say to me ‘Dick you need to move to a different system, move away from our free enterprise system based on capitalism and self-interest to a system of idealism or cooperation.’ Now that would be great, but I just have the feeling that human beings have evolved by selfishly removing anything which has threatened us – and I don’t think that’s going to change greatly on its own. But I think we can have this system if we bring in laws – as long as there’s an even playing field for capitalism, which is an incredibly versatile system. And you couldn’t do it immediately. You’d need to do it over a number of decades.

And you could have a law that says you can only produce, let’s say a cell telephone, in a completely sustainable way. That is, where whatever you use to build it has to have been replaced within that year. That would mean that the product will have to be recycled. In this situation, a 2 or 3 per cent efficiency gain and an increased simplicity would come every year. In effect, this would take up the waste, because you’re always going to lose a little bit. And these gains would come from the ingeniousness of capitalism.

And I think we’ll still have growth. But it will be in things like quality of life. It will be in reduced working hours – because, of course, if we don’t make more stuff and we try and keep people working the same hours we’ll end up with unemployment and that will be a disaster. So I see that we’ll actually have to plan for still getting the same amount of money, but using productivity gains to reduce working hours. I think that’s feasible. The other thing which we’ll have growth in, of course, will be efficiencies.

Now a friend of mine is one of the senior executives at Woolworths, and he said ‘Dick you’re absolutely right’, he said ‘the growth we now have is very much population based’. Two years ago population growth was 2.1 per cent, per year. That means, in effect, we double our population every 30 years. Continuing that, we would end up with 120 million at the end of this century – when my little granddaughter will probably be alive – and over 1 billion people here in Australia in 220 years time. Now, nobody I know really thinks that would be a sensible number. Personally, I think we could have 100 million in Australia. To do that we would have to de-salinate every bit of water using every bit of uranium we have to generate nuclear power. And we would have to obviously mine every bit of coal and oil that we have.

But what I often say to people is, what would be the advantage if you had this type of growth? Certainly for wealthy people like me we’d have more customers. We’d make more money. But I have a feeling that, for the general population, it would be like dividing one cake amongst (in this case if we went to 100 million) roughly 5 times as many people. It’s interesting that a country like the United States has around about 300 million people. That is 15 times as many people living in roughly the same landmass as Australia. But their gross domestic product per head (per capita), for the first time, is less than ours. I think most people would agree that you get to a sweet point.
So I’d love to see us move, but it will be incredibly fickle because we’re so addicted to growth. Now you can understand all commercial organisations pushing growth – the Murdoch press, the Fairfax press – because everyone on senior salaries there – those salaries are based on profit sharing schemes based on growth. You can imagine the pressure that would come from Rupert Murdoch in New York back to Australia: ‘Where’s the growth, where’s the growth? Why haven’t you increased circulation, why haven’t you increased profits?’. And I don’t blame big business. I blame us, the shareholders. Because we’re the people who will sell our shares if the company isn’t growing. I just noticed today that Qantas have a new plan and, of course, one day these big public companies have got to admit that they’re not going to have growth in sales; and that one day, we will stabilise our population.

I often say to some of my pro-growth friends, well when is enough, enough? I mean, “a trillion, trillion people in Australia?” And they look at me and laugh and say “Well that’s ridiculous Dick. We’ve obviously got to stop growing before then.” And I say “well hold on, so you’re going to put it off for another generation?. Put off this limit to growth which you’ve now admitted has to happen one day?” So my belief is one day we can have a fantastic system.  I’d love to see our population stabilise at about 24-25 million.

Our population might end up dropping back purely by natural means. In Japan the population is predicted to go from 120 million to around about 90 million by the end of this century because Japanese women, despite a twenty thousand dollar baby bonus, are just not having many kids. I’d like to see the same thing happen here. I’d like to see our growth come from growth in efficiencies, removing waste and reducing the wastes in packaging, reducing the incredible waste in advertising, all of those things. And I’d like to see us having a plan for growth in quality of life, for having less working hours. Then, of course, we have to work out what we’re going to do with our leisure time – but I’m sure that’s possible!

And I see us moving away from Gross Domestic Product, which during the Queensland floods showed an increase. If you have a war, you’ll have an increase in GDP. In fact, it was a measure that came out of the Second World War. I’d like to see it move to a measure based on a general progress indicator which takes into account more than just growth in use of resources – that takes into account growth in quality of life, efficiencies, all of those things. And I reckon we can have a fantastic Australia. But it will be an enormous change, because the people who spruik growth all the time will have to be talking not about growth in the use of resources and energy in a perpetual way, but about growth in efficiencies and about saving waste and improving the quality of life. Thanks for listening to me.’

Related posts:

1. Measuring Progress

A round up of selected stories that have caught the attention of Post Growth’s eyeballs in August:

FEATURE: Who Killed Economic Growth?

Animated clip from the Post Carbon Institute on the end of growth:

30 August 2011

Economist Jeff Sachs, Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, on ‘America and the Pursuit of Happiness’ in The Huffington Post. Sachs discusses the corporatization of America, how inequality within a nation impacts on national wellbeing, and cites the example of Bhutan’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ indicator as an alternative:

America is a country of vast wealth and vast anxiety. America’s high Gross National Product per person, around $50,000, and its vast net worth, around $500,000 per household, are among the highest in the world. Yet growing numbers of Americans are unhappy, unhealthy, and increasingly pessimistic. America fought for independence to secure the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, but today happiness seems out of reach to tens of millions of Americans.

However he also still maintains the need for ‘growth’:

Yes, we should of course support economic growth and development, but in a broader context: one that promotes social trust, compassion, business honesty, the environment, and ultimately our happiness.

…yet “growth” as measured by GDP is the very thing his article says is what’s contributing to the malfunctioning of American society. The language used to convey meaning is critical for finding humanity’s way forward on this.

27 August 2011

Duane Elgin reveals Four Misconceptions About the Simple Life in the Huffington Post

Four misconceptions about the simple life are so common they deserve special attention. These are equating simplicity with: poverty, moving back to the land, living without beauty and economic stagnation.

Of course, simple living can indeed be about moving back to the land, just that it doesn’t have to be!

26 August 2011

Naked Capitalism interviews Economic Anthropologist David Graeber in ‘What is Debt?’, in which Graeber reveals that the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is ‘amargi’, a Sumerian word for debt-freedom!

Transition Voice interview with Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg on how to talk about the end of growth.

25 August 2011

Center for Economic Stability membership is now open to anyone around the world who wants to help develop a realistic alternative to neoclassical economics. The Centre’s President is Australian economist Steve Keen, who in 2010 received the Real World Economic Review’s ‘Revere Award’ for being the economist who first and most urgently warned the world of the coming Global Financial Collapse. The Center, which has been formed by members of Steve Keen’s Debtwatch blog, is about:

Reforming economic theory and policy; developing economic theory that acknowledges that capitalism is unstable, and developing policies that limit the dangerous instabilities and promote the creative ones.

The first Annual General Meeting of CfESI will be held on Wednesday September 7th 2011, 6pm-9p at The Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (1st floor), 280 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW 2000

23 August 2011

Transition Voice review of Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg’s new book, The End of Growth.

22 August 2011

UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot weighs in on the growth debate:

How much of this is real? How much of the economic growth of the past 60 years? Of the wealth and comfort, the salaries and pensions that older people accept as normal, even necessary? How much of it is an illusion, created by levels of borrowing – financial and ecological – that cannot be sustained? …To sustain the illusion, we have inflicted more damage since 1950 to the planet’s living systems than we achieved in the preceding 100,000 years.

17 August 2011

Adelaide Now on how parents are fatigued from ferrying around over-scheduled children:

10 August 2011

Shareable article on creating jobs by revitalizing local manufacturing:

In a time of layoffs and outsourcing, something surprising is happening in San Francisco and New York: manufacturing jobs are on the rise.

Just a hundred years ago, these cities were industrial epicenters; over time, factories came to be seen as relics instead of resources. Now, America’s rich manufacturing history is returning in the form of small, high-end production lines that proudly proclaim they’re locally made.

8 August 2011

Harvard Business Review suggests a Six Step Extreme Makeover for the Economy

I believe we stand on the cusp of a great turning point in human exchange: a quantum leap from opulence to eudaimonia. A shift from the pursuit of more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, to the pursuit of lives lived meaningfully well.

Shareable on how home sharing programs offer longer term housing solutions in the US – the ‘matchmaking services’ provided by a community nonprofits is helping:

• Home seekers in need of affordable home-sharing arrangements with home providers who own their home, but who require rental income, special services, or companionship in order to remain in their home
• Renters who are seeking other renters to share a home, apartment, or condominium

6 August 2011

The Big Think on the psychological and economic damage of overwork :

We live in a culture that valorizes over-busyness. In so many workplaces, the hero is the one who is putting in the long hours,” says women’s leadership coach Tara Sophia Mohr. ”Why isn’t the hero the person that actually can get amazing work done and leave at a reasonable time?”’

1 August 2011

Andrew Simms of the new economics foundation on why the relentless pursuit of productivity is socially divisive, environmentally destructive and doesn’t make us any happier:

Last week, on the same day that we learned economic growth in the UK was running at a miserly 0.2%, the Office for National Statistics launched a new programme of work on measuring human well-being.

The latter was the result of a month-long survey in which the public were asked what mattered to them. To barely disguised yawns, the answers that came back were, “family, friends, health, financial security, equality and fairness in determining well-being”, according to national statistician Jill Matheson.

So we were caught on one hand between a low-grade, generalised fear that people weren’t buying enough stuff to keep the economy going, and being told on the other hand something we already knew deep down: that a better quality of life stems not from consuming more, but from a range of mostly immaterial things. Crucially, in a society like the UK, enjoyment of these does not correlate in any positive, straightforward manner with economic growth. On the contrary, some policies used to promote growth can directly undermine a range of the factors that do contribute to well-being, such as the time we need to spend with family, health, equality and fairness.

Related posts:

1. Good News and Bad News
2. About The Post Growth Institute
3. Post Growth In Action

Most of us have it – unused or underused ‘stuff’. But what if you could earn an income from things you don’t use?

See larger/zoomable image here.

Collaborative consumption is challenging long-held ideas about ownership, creating extra income streams for people and reducing demand for materials through renting or sharing existing goods:

What’s truly important about collaborative consumption is much more world-altering than just supplementing people’s incomes. We own far too much stuff, a symptom of our aggressive consumer culture.

If you don’t need to buy a circular saw or a leaf blower just to use them once a year, but can use one when you need it, it could fundamentally impact how we consume.

So, while making money on your unused stuff sounds great, imagine not having to buy the stuff in the first place.

Source: Collaborative Fund via FastCo Design

Related posts:

1. Millennium Consumption Goals
2. Population And Consumption: Two Sides Of One Coin

R&D (Research and Degrowth/Recherche et Decroissance) invite submissions of photographs for their 2012 Calendar.

In this critical time of austerity, debt, and ecological crises we would like to call for a VISUAL illustration of the ideas, strategies, and dimensions of degrowth and thus make them understandable and known in society at large. We call for your creativity, brightness, humor and search for beauty in taking the ’degrowth’ images. Our intention is not to make another standard collection of environmentalist images from disasters and social misery. On the contrary, the idea is to inspire our creativity and give visibility to the existing degrowth transformations, practices and patterns.

The 12 best, and most artistic and expressive photographs received will be published in a degrowth calendar which will be distributed widely. We will also offer special artistic degrowth prizes to the 12 “winners”. All photos will be under the creative commons label.

Images should have a minimum resolution of 2500 pixels, and should be submitted along with your name, a title for each image and a short description of the idea behind it (in one or two lines). All languages are accepted.

Deadline for submissions is 30 September 2011

The photographs should fit with one or more of the following categories:

Category 1 “TOO MUCH”: What shall we challenge now? – submit to photo1@degrowth.net

Category 2 “TRANSFORMATION”:  the change, metamorphosis, or revolution in a post-growth society. This category includes the growth of alternatives which gradually replace existing structures and practices – submit to photo2@degrowth.net

Category 3: “THE DEGROWTH SOCIETY HERE AND NOW”: what could a real degrowth society look like? Degrowth is an evolving project and we cannot be certain about its concrete final outlook. Yet, we can be creative and try to imagine and actually see some of the elements of the degrowth society already here and now – submit to photo3@degrowth.net

Sourced from Degrowth.net

No related posts.

Sir David Attenborough presents the 2011 RSA President’s Lecture, during which he refers to ‘sustainable growth’ as an oxymoron.

Sourced from RSA Events, 16 March 2011

‘The dangers facing the earth’s ecosystems are well known and the subject of great concern at all levels. Climate change is high on the list. But argues Sir David Attenborough, there is an underlying and associated cause – population growth.’

No related posts.

A must-watch on the interplay between growth, peak oil, debt, how the harnessing of fossil fuel energy gave us economic growth – and what this now means in the face of peak oil and the end of the fossil fuel era.

Related posts:

1. Preparing for the ‘Peak Everything’ Economy
2. Imagining A Post Growth Future
3. Post Growth Reading List

Post Growth’s Donnie Maclurcan offers the following challenge – by 2050, could we evolve a not-for-profit world, where every business has as its primary objective, the fulfilment of social needs?

Envisioning Not For Profit World

Related posts:

1. Rethinking the Profit Motive
2. Book Review: Not For Profit by Martha C. Nussbaum
3. 10 Mistakes to Avoid While Creating a Better World