Slow Politics and Economics 101
I've been away at a family wedding in Scotland, so the blog shifted into Slow gear for a bit there...Anyway, lots of food for thought in the comments to my last post. The consensus seems to be that formally plunging into conventional politics is not the right move for the Slow Movement at the moment. I agree. That image from Mikko of my sitting alone at the back of a parliament said it all. And who would have thought that Marx would hit the nail on the head in that rousing quote (thanks, Tom) about the need to avoid being dogmatic and doctrinaire? But the comments here raise a deeper question that we will all need to address the coming months and years: how will our economic system have to change to create a truly Slow world? Thomas fingers modern capitalism as the main cause of our hyper-accelerated culture. I agree that it is a key part of the equation but is it the root cause? I wonder if maybe the real driver of our fast-forward culture is our dysfunctional relationship with time itself. We are so neurotic about getting the most out of our time, both at work and at leisure, that we turn every moment of the day into a race against the clock. Maybe modern capitalism evolved in order to indulge and quench that desire. In other words, it is the product of our manic yearning to do more and more in less and less time. But then again consumer capitalism clearly stokes our desire to do it all and have it all. So maybe our current economic system is both the result and the cause of our speedaholic culture. Either way, this is a debate we should develop in the new Slow Work forum....
Working with music at home, I got used to handling my old and slow PC, achieving very interesting results with it. I learned a lot from it, specially on how to make my creative process more dynamic. I surely can record a song much quicker today than 3 years ago, not because I became obsessed with it, but because I had the time to develop my craft.
Now I took a job at a professional audio production company and all equipment is extremely high tech and everybody is always worried on sending and receiving data as fast as possible.
I'm learning much more now, but always being careful not to become a "techhead" obsessed with speed.
Having been an economics blogger for six years, I'm starting to see encouraging signs of change in unlikely places. Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley is the quintessential pro-growth "Keynesian" economist. He wrote a column the other day calling (predictably) for "more aggregate demand", which is to say tax cuts to stimulate spending to keep the economy speeding along! But the comments in response were surprisingly unimpressed with DeLong's message:
"More debt! Let's party!" "Maybe we should stop looking for ways to keep moving at locomotive speeds. Take a walk for a while." "So, the levees have failed and flooding has ensued. Your plan is to pump like mad then rebuild in the same place." "But what is really appalling and scary is that the best answer you and others can come up with is 'go out and spend' until we find the next locomotive." "The commodities price run up is far more than the effect of speculation, but rather an indication that the world economy is straining against fundamental physical limits." "New times ahead, not more of the same with variations."
Meanwhile, over at Scientific American, Robert Nadeau has an article about the "unscientific assumptions in economic theory [that] undermine efforts to solve environmental problems". And in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Palley outlines the unsustainability of the growth paradigm that has fueled economic expansion over the past 30 years.
New times ahead, indeed, and slow times at that!
And you have the welcome the news from Tom that the growth-at-all-costs paradigm is coming under siege.
1) DeLong's call is, in fact, a call for supporting employment in times of recession -- and involuntary unemployment (as anyone who has ever been on the dole knows) is as far from leisure and "slow living" as being imprisoned is from sitting quietly in one's room reading a book. Most recessions, especially in North America, mean that a massive portion of the population is suddenly thrust into a darwinistic struggle to prevail against one's fellow workers in holding down one of the few jobs available, and therefore typically results in workers working longer hours for reduced pay (not one of the goals of the "slow movement", I hazzard). Unions are sometimes able to bargain for concessions on working hours and conditions, and higher wages, in boom times. When such demands become 'too strident', however, policy makers have been known to engineer unemployment and downturns to 'discipline' workers;
2) Recessions are not the same as slow growth but rather the downside of a boom-bust business cycle in which there is INSUFFICIENT management of aggregate demand, in both the upturn and downturn of the cycle. (Which is, in fact, in the image of the overworked citizen, working himself to exhaustion and then collapsing.) Keynesian economists, by contrast, strive to even growth across the cycle. For instance, the great Canadian economist, Clarence Barber, whose analysis prefigured Mundell, pointed out, in the early 1980s, that not modernizing one's stock of (public and private) capital (i.e. not supporting aggregate demand) in a downturn makes it far more likely that the inflation rate will be higher when business firms begin to rebuild their capital stock in good times (see Clarence L. Barber, ?Monetary and Fiscal Policy in the 1980s,? in False Promises: The Failure of Conservative Economics, ed. R.C. Allen and G. Rosenbluth (Vancouver: New Star, 1992) 101.) This, of course, has potentially huge effects on the environment, as public construction of the environmental infrastructure, such as good public transport and green housing, required for slower and healthier living may be deferred in good times, for fear of inflation.
3) The other aspect of supporting aggregate demand in a downturn (especially through investment in capital and fixed assets) is that, over the longer term, such investment increases labour productivity. Improvements in labour productivity lead to higher real wages that allow people to reduce the number of hours they work (provided that unemployment is sufficiently low, and the social safety net sufficiently developed, that labour has the bargaining power required to fight employers' demands for longer working hours).
4) Finally, the developed world, if we are to survive as a species, has to reduce its energy consumption far more than even experts such as Monbiot and Jaccard suggest, not because their analysis is wrong technically, but because the world is in a situation of energy competition with the developing world. Rosenbluth argues that developed countries will have to move to a low- or no-growth model in order to leave the 'space' necessary for developing nations to work their ways out of poverty, as it is useless to demand that developing nations conserve energy and reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions if their populations are on the verge of starving. Paradoxically, the only way to leave space for such 'development' is in a Keynesian environment, with low unemployment, high levels of income and wealth redistribution, and strong public sector involvement in the economy. In the absence of that model, labour, like the developing countries themselves, will be put back on the neo-liberal treadmill, trying to run/work/labour constantly at the limit of the production possibility frontier (over the long term) and perhaps actually (over the short term only, of course) operating beyond the PPF -- for instance, in drawing down catastrophically on our natural capital over the short to such an extent that it actually moves the PPF inwards over the long term (e.g. think of the collapse and non-replacement of the cod stocks on Canada's east coast, a formerly self-replenishing natural resource that has been utterly destroyed by Canadian and, especially, European overfishing.
An interesting article on this, which I cannot attach or link you to here, for copyright reasons is: Rosenbluth, G. and Victor, P. (2004) ?The Canadian economy with full employment, no growth, no poverty, and no government deficit: a Keynesian exercise?, Int. J. Environment, Workplace, and Employment, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.107-119. Biographical notes: Gideon Rosenbluth is a former President of the Canadian Economics Association, while Peter Victor is a Professor in Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto. He was the first economist to apply the physical law of the conservation of matter to the empirical analysis of a national economy and he has contributed to the literature on capital theory and sustainable development. Peter is also a member of numerous Boards and Committees relating to environment, science and public policy. There is also a very good companion article by an Australian economist (forget his name) in the same edition of the Journal