Four Years.Go. Economics (Steady State) Video

Jon Erickson on Ecological Economics
Economics principles seek the allocation of scarce resources to the most appropriate end uses.
Mainstream Economics is built on this idea. There are houses and firms, and economic activity creates a circular flow of goods and services, which are paid for with money.
Ecological Economics has a different starting point. The ecosystem is the master set, and the economy is a subset within that system.
That change of viewpoint causes you to focus on quite different principles and on a new set of objectives.

Economic Growth has two meanings.
We and have both economic growth and uneconomic growth. We should try to separate costs and benefits. Dr Herman Daly argues for a more sensible way of doing things than measuring GDP as an indicator of progress.

More from Dr Herman Daly here.

Life After Growth - Economics for Everyone
This film is part of an ongoing project to document the rise of a new movement – calling not for more economic growth, but LESS. The degrowth movement, or "movement por le decroissance", argues that through a voluntary reduction of the economy we can work less, consume less and live better, fuller lives.

Many have been pointing out that our current economic system is leading us to an environmental and social catastrophe. "Life After Growth" begins to point to the people and communities who are looking for ways out. These are the pioneers who are rethinking the role of economics in our lives, and are engaging in different types of economic activity, right now.

The economic crash of 2008 revealed not only the frailty and vulnerability of the economic system, it also showed the false basis that the growth economy is built on – the financial bubble grows bigger and crashes bigger, but we don't seem to be getting any happier. To the contrary, we suffer from greater job insecurity and environmental chaos threatens.

The prescription from the mainstream economists is more growth – but is this just taking more of what ails us?

More from The Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economics here.

Fixing our Unsustainable World.
Dr Dana Meadows in 1994 looks forward at the need for policy change in an unsustainable world. She argues that we need a new VISION. Our markets and technology are failing us, but the economic theory we have, the models we understand, tell us to make markets more free and less regulated. "I fell into that trap when first preparing this lecture," she says.

To build a sustainable future, we need a different vision. Environmentalists typically talk about needing to make a great sacrifice, of having less or being more restricted. There's a lot of resistance to that.

More from Dr Dana Meadows here.

New Projects in Development

Robert Costanza, Josh Farley, and Jon Erickson answer the question: "What are some policy tools you've seen that are based on the ecological economic principles?"

Dr. Jon Erickson Biological economics creates a platform to inform policy makers. Too often economists rely on "growth" to solve economic problems. Take water as an example. Traditional Economics identifies water as an input resource for future "growth". Biological economics sees water as an agent of the ecology providing services to the environment.

Dr Robert Costanza
We need to change our goals; to create an new vision. We can address the income distribution gap by improving social capital. We can create legal entities like the "Earth Atmosphere Trust" to hold for the "public" the rights over the property asset of the Earth's atmosphere. There are new tools we can use to give scarce public resources sensible prices.

Dr Joshua Farley More regulation is essential. The new regulations need to be both sustainable and fair in the way they are applied. Cap's on resource use will become normal, "cap and auction" rather than "cap and trade". Fair distribution of the "cap" to everyone, removes the ability of special interest groups to plead for higher caps or exemptions from the cap.

More from the Gund Institute here.

Limits to Growth Is growth progress? Is growth wonderful and something that we should be striving for? Do you support such a position?

"No. I wouldn't be an ecologist if I did. The ecologist says basically that growth presents terrible problems, and we've had 400 years of a drunken brawl, you might say, in which we have turned more and more of the earth's wealth, accumulated over millions of years - oil, gas, things like that, into our usage, but we can only spend that material - that quantity of wealth - once. It turns out that atomic energy is no escape, and solar energy is definitely limited. So we have not gotten rid of all limits; we merely have pushed many of them back. We're getting closer and closer to the point where we can't go much farther."

More from Dr Garett Hardin here.