Steady State Economics

Article Summary

John S Veitch
The Network Ambassador

Many of these ideas have been developed by Prof. Herman E. Daly.
We are engaged in collective suicide. The build up of toxic wastes in the air and the ocean is changing the nature of the planet.
The planet is evolving in it's own natural way. Every day we read of stress induced feedback on some part of the ecosystem.
Choose your own desirable "growth Rate". Divide the number 70 by that percentage. The result is the doubling time in years for the system you are considering.
Look for communities that today have some of the numbers you are predicting. That is a possible future.
Gross National Product, does not indicate the prosperity of a country. GDP is an unsatisfactory measure of economic activity.
Economics is closely related to biology as a concept. Governments, businesses, organizations, and households are all "living things" inside the economy.
The growth of all living things is limited by biology and by the nature of the environment. Shouldn't that also be true in economics?
We take useful energy sources like oil or coal and convert them into many kinds of waste. Waste never goes away, it accumulates unless "nature" cleans it up.
The sun fuels the natural renewable resource base, fisheries, forests, grasslands. But these systems have their own limits.
The planet is a commons. Any common where the social rules that protect it are ignored will be destroyed.
Our situation would improve if there are fewer people. Policies to stop population growth are desirable.
Our situation would improve if the output of certain wastes (CO2, methane and Nitrous Oxide for instance) are reduced.
Our situation would improve if incomes were more uniform.
Our situation would improve if in any time period we used less of some scarce resources.
Our situation would improve if we used more wind, and wave energy for electricity production.
Our situation would improve if most people understood these needs and would help in voluntary ways to achieve them.
For instance in our community what is the "proper level of poverty" below which people should never fall?
Is the difference between this level of income and the income of the richest people in our community acceptable?
In a steady state economy taxes will shift towards taxing resource use, and the production of pollution. We should try to tax what we want less of.
In a steady state economy we are going to see more tools like cap-and-trade, extraction rights, pollution permits, fishing quotas, and auction systems for scarce resources.
The present depression is a good opportunity to set many of these tools in place.

If you need the original article it's here.