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Changing Paradigms

Kendra Pierre-Louis | Thursday 29th October 2009

Full disclosure: I have not watched Michael Moore's recent opus on the evils of our economic system, Capitalism: A Love Story. What I have seen, however, is how much scorn and derision, sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit, Mr. Moore received as he made the rounds of the mainstream press while promoting his movie. Sure, you expect that kind of reaction from certain less progressive news outlets, but watching Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America, and Bill Maher on his show Real Time dismiss Michael Moore was a bit of a surprise.

Some of it is because Mr. Moore incorrectly argues that the replacement for capitalism is democracy; capitalism is an economic system, democracy is a system of governance. His general premise, however, is correct: people with more money wield more influence within our system - capitalism has eroded the foundational basis of our democracy as a 2006 Mother Jones does an excellent job of explaining.

What I found uniquely interesting from a Sustainable Development perspective is how many people feel that his efforts are a bit like whistling in the wind. Apparently an economic paradigm other than the flavor of capitalism we're currently practicing cannot exist.

If this is true, we're in trouble. Our current economic system is based on perpetual economic growth . That is to say, we need to consume more this year than we did last year, and more next year than we do this year. If we don't consume in ever increasing amounts, the system collapses. Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet. And, as we're becoming increasingly aware, our current methods of production and consumption are literally consuming the planet. At the same time, however, billions of the world's people exist in a constant state of hunger and without basic sanitation. In short we have both a resource and an allocation problem, and in many ways our current economic system (in which wars are profitable and peace is not) is the root cause of this problem.

Whenever one says that, however, it's stated as fact that Capitalism is the best system we've developed and then communism and socialism are trotted out as examples of far worse systems. Putting aside that few people bother to ask "For whom is capitalism the best system?", the real question is are our only choices really Communism/Socialism on the one hand and unfettered Market Capitalism on the other?

No, say a rising number of voices that argue that our form of capitalism is not sustainable and needs to change. At least that's what Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) a nonprofit which advocates for a steady state economy, argues. A steady state economy is one in which population and amount of consumption are stabilized, allowing for qualitative instead of quantitative growth. The Steady State Economy is not the only possible economic paradigm. Bhutan for example, has chosen to forgo use of Gross Domestic Profit (GDP) the economic indicator which supposedly tells us how well a country is functioning for Gross National Happiness instead.

Whether these other lesser known systems have merit is debatable, but it's something that we should at least have the cultural space to debate. And what Michael Moore's movie illustrates is we don't yet have that space.

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Kendra Pierre-Louis 10 November 2009

My only concern is that by making things people centric we're ignoring ecosystems. A people centric approach runs the risk of not valuing ecosystems which in our accounting systems don't seem to benefit us, i.e. some things (and species) are of intrinsic value not just of what value that they may potentially contribute to humanity. In some ways, one could argue that a lot of the wetland destruction we've done in the past few decades has come out of a people centric approach: wetlands were wet and filled with mosquitoes, the land was unusable. By draining them we made the land habitable by humans, but the larger ecosystem cost ( the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast for example would have been mitigated if at least some of their natural wetlands had been preserved ) indicates that it was actually bad for people.

Jeff Mowatt 10 November 2009

Here's the conclusion of that manifesto:

"Economics, and indeed human civilization, can only be measured and calibrated in terms of human beings. Everything in economics has to be adjusted for people, first, and abandoning the illusory numerical analyses that inevitably put numbers ahead of people, capitalism ahead of democracy, and degradation ahead of compassion."

http://jm.ly/6wn0wk

Jeff Mowatt 10 November 2009

Moore is perhaps mistaken to describe democracy as the alternative to capitalism but then on the other hand, there are those who'll have us believe that capitalism and democracy are inseparable and indistinguishable. I refer to capitalism.org, for example.

Our work on a more inclusive economic paradigm launched in 1996 with a white paper for the Commitee to Re-Elect the President describing People-Centered Economic Development.

http://jm.ly/DVK096

The fundamental predicate, that people are not disposable was explained in the original paper and published last year as the credit crisis loomed.

http://jm.ly/6wn0wk

A Google search for People-Centered Economics will today reveal some surprsing results.

Jefff Mowatt