Posts tagged with GROWTH

14 Results

Searching for a New Economy

Given persistent debt troubles, the deep divisions between haves and have nots, and wear and tear on the planet’s living systems, there’s much talk these days of new ways to define, gauge and nurture economic progress.

In early June, Bard College hosted a weekend conference on “Strategies for a New Economy.” I joined David Brancaccio of public radio and PBS’s “Fixing the Future” project to talk about media coverage of economic innovation (or the lack thereof). There was much more. You can replay some highlights via this Storify thread on the meeting. Also, video comments from some speakers have been posted online.

As an appetizer, here’s one, from Robert Johnson, the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, who, among other things, said: Read more…

Young People Tire of Old Economic Models

At the recent United Nations conference on “gross national happiness,” a scattering of young participants looked on with a clear sense of urgency as mainly graying dignitaries, economists, scholars and others pondered ways to gauge progress that go beyond traditional monetary measures. One was Christopher Stampar, a sophomore from the University of Miami who works for the nonprofit group Nourish 9 Billion. He received one of the most enthusiastic rounds of applause when he let it slip that he was 19. Read his blog post on the experience here.

Also on hand was Michael Sandmel, who is graduating this year from New York University and involved with the organization U.S. Youth for Sustainable Development. After the one-day session, which included briefings from economic luminaries including Jeffrey Sachs and the economics Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz, he reacted this way in an e-mail message:

It’s great to see new paradigm slowly making its way into the mainstream.  I think this is demonstrated quite well by the comments made by professors Sachs and Stiglitz, neither of whom, even four years ago, I would have expected to reference the Easterlin Happiness Paradox or the Planetary Boundaries Framework.

But he added that his generation was not taking a transition for granted, pointing to the student-organized Transition to a New Economy conference that had just been held Harvard:

We had around 140 attendees from universities around the country.  Many of us study in mainstream neoclassical economics departments where interdisciplinary ecological-economics, and the questioning of G.D.P. growth as a primary (or, depending on who you ask, desirable) objective, is still very much fringe thinking.  I don’t attempt to speak for all of my peers, but I know that many of us share an enormous frustration with the way in which our supposedly leading institutions teach us about the economy in a way that is myopic, ahistorical, and devoid of nearly any critical conversation about sustainability or human well being. 

This is particularly troubling as we regularly see our schools accredit future leaders in business, finance, and government, sending them into a world of 21st century problems with a 20th century toolkit.  Many of us have been involved in our local Occupy movements, including Occupy Harvard, and have been trying to use the crisis as an opportunity to push an agenda of plausible alternatives to unsustainable and inequitable finance-dominated capitalism. Many of us will be getting together again in June for the Strategies for a New Economy conference at Bard College and will be in Brazil for the Rio+20 conference and the events surrounding it.  

He put me in touch with Rina Kuusipalo, the Harvard student who was one of the organizers of the campus economics meeting. She sent the note below: Read more…

Naomi Klein’s Inconvenient Climate Conclusions

Naomi KleinSuzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein, the author of a string of provocative and popular books including “The Shock Doctrine,” recently took on global warming policy and campaigns in “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” a much-discussed cover story for The Nation that has been mentioned by readers here more than once in the last few weeks.

The piece begins with Klein’s conclusion, reached after she spent time at a conclave on climate sponsored by the libertarian Heartland Institute, that passionate corporate and conservative foes of curbs on greenhouse gases are right in asserting that a meaningful response to global warming would be a fatal blow to free markets and capitalism.

She challenges the environmental left to embrace this reality instead of implying that modest changes in lifestyle and shopping habits and the like can decarbonize human endeavors on a crowding planet.

Please dive in. The piece is particularly relevant this week given the continued standoffs and disconnect between stated goals and behavior at the climate treaty talks in Durban, South Africa. Whether you embrace or dispute her conclusions, the article is a worthy and substantive provocation. I disagree with her in pretty profound ways, yet some of her points echo my assertion awhile back that greenhouse-driven climate change is “not the story of our time” but a symptom of much deeper issues. I contacted Klein, who kindly spent quite a bit of time engaging in an e-conversation about her argument. Here’s our chat: Read more…

Linear Resources + Exponential Demand = ?

Phil Henshaw, a frequent contributor here and one of the Dot Earthers who self organized a face-to-face meeting with me awhile back, had some interesting reactions to this weekend’s profile of Jeremy Grantham in the Times Magazine, entitled “Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem?” You can read his analysis below.

Jeremy GranthamCourtesy of Jeremy Grantham Jeremy Grantham and his wife, Hanne, near Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

Keith Kloor, a journalist and environment blogger, also has weighed in on Grantham, an investment guru (and very rich man) who claims “this time is [really] different” in assessing trends in natural resources as they affect markets and human welfare. Kloor calls him “the world’s smartest and richest Malthusian.”

While Charles Kenny lays out a cogent argument that the world is “Getting Better,” and can continue to do so, and I see many reasons for endorsing Matt Ridley’s “Rational Optimist” take on things, Grantham, as Kloor puts it, “seems equally certain that the future will be ugly.” Here’s a telling quote:

I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.

That behavioral question is the core question, and it’s why my optimism (and, in small print, Ridley’s) is guarded.

Grantham echoes Paul Krugman’s “Finite World” and focuses on themes explored here off and on, including in “ Growth on a Finite Planet – So Far so Good” and “Which Comes First – Peak Everything or Peak us?

Here’s Henshaw’s analysis of Grantham’s view, which merits highlighting as a “Your Dot” contribution to spark discussion: Read more…

A Long, Deep View of the U.S. Budget

I thought the Obama White House had brought something useful to the budget debate with its visual depiction of United States spending — which revealed the profound growth in politically untouchable programs and the almost invisible dimensions of programs on education, research, innovation, development assistance and the like.

What’s revealed vividly, of course, is that political fights over cutting those programs are not only threatening many worthy — and modest — efforts, but distracting the public completely from what economists of many stripes say is one of the core challenges attending living within our means.

But the post demonstrated, yet again, why I consider myself an unabashedly selfish blogger. It almost immediately elicited a better approach to displaying this information, which you can see below. Read more…

A Black Friday Push, From Twitter to Beijing

promoted trend on Twitter Target bought #BlackFriday as a “promoted trend” on Twitter.

Twitter can be a remarkable tool. For me, it’s kind of like having a planet-spanning two-way sensory apparatus tracking sources of information or insights ranging from Stan Lee to the Dalai Lama, NASA’s Asteroid Watch program to the hashtag #SaveSharks.

But it’s also a medium, like all others, that reflects broader societal norms, including the one requiring almost anything useful to provide a revenue stream for its creators. And so comes the dawn of a very strange concept, the Twitter “promoted trend.” Imagine if someone paid society to shift back to, say, wide polka-dot ties. Well, you can nudge a “trend” on Twitter to the top of the list for money. (Of course you can also cut the security lines at airports with money. And the yellow identifying labels, as in the image above, distinguish this from what record companies did to manufacture hits.)

The first one I noticed was the paid promotion of #BlackFriday by Target in the run-up to today’s shopping frenzy. Countering such efforts is the perennial “Buy Nothing Day” campaign of anti-consumption crusaders like Reverend Billy and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir.

There’s another alternative to both extremes, which I’ve pushed once in awhile on Dot Earth: Make Something Day. I’ll give it one more push, including a proposed (and unpromoted) Twitter hashtag: #MakeSomething. It can take time, sure. It took me more than two years to move from plans to action in turning field-sawn  boards into a kitchen table, but it sure feels gratifying to sit at that table each morning.

It is an uphill battle, of course. The marketing of consumption itself, let alone specific products to consume, has been in high gear since at least 2006, when President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to “ go shopping more” to avert a recession. That message, although tempered by the housing implosion, has grown louder in the United States of late, with the confidence of consumers a predicate for resumed prosperity.

Now the mantra has spread in a big way to China, and among economists who see more spending by Chinese consumers as a way forward for the global economy. This passage from David Leonhardt’s magazine story, “In China, Cultivating the Urge to Splurge,” says it all: Read more…

How the Gulf Spill Was Good for America

David Brancaccio, a longtime correspondent for public radio and television, has written a fascinating post on his new Economy 4.0 blog for the Marketplace radio show analyzing the economic impacts of the gulf oil spill six months after explosions killed 11 workers and unleashed the gusher in the seabed.

His bottom line? Using conventional analysis, the oil spill was a winner for the American gross domestic product. Here’s how he put it, citing a June forecast by an analyst for J.P. Morgan Chase:

Even if you factor in declines in fishing, tourism, and offshore oil production, the analysis argued the government’s key calculation of economic growth, the Gross Domestic Product, would get a push upward by the worst oil spill ever. Here is the apparent takeaway: if we want to steer the economy away from a double-dip, one strategy would be to set off a series of environmental disasters. Maybe chop a hole in the Alaska pipeline. Turn a few spigots on willy-nilly at some chemical plants. Hire a platoon of locusts to decimate the wheat crop.

Of course, he’s not endorsing this econometric approach; in fact he’s using it to emphasize the need for a reexamination of longstanding norms for how we measure progress. Such reexaminations have been underway for awhile in places as far-flung as Bhutan and Britain. I asked Brancaccio several questions about his focus on unconventional economics. Here are his replies: Read more…

Labor (Less) Day?

8:08 p.m. | Updated
It’s worth reading Robert B. Reich’s recent column in The Times exploring the roots of the enduring Great Recession and his solution and following it up with a dose of Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who proposes Americans ramp back on work as a way toward fuller employment and more fulfilled lives. Here’s her recent video statement on Big Think:

Reich lays out a predicament with a very circular feel related to what some have called the hedonic treadmill:

Now we’re left to deal with the underlying problem that we’ve avoided for decades. Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Schor’s path requires a fundamental reassessment of goals for individuals and the economy as a whole. Is it time? Is it possible?

8:08 p.m. | Updated The Very Reverend Sam Candler, dean of the Cathedral of Saint Philip in Atlanta, wrote a marvelous piece on work and vocation that is well worth reading: Read more…

Energy Needs of China’s Consumers Swamping Efficiency Gains

Keith Bradsher has filed an important story showing how the energy demands of China’s emerging consumer class are overwhelming the central government’s efforts to cut industrial energy waste and blunt growth in carbon dioxide emissions.

The article provides a closeup view of the demographic and economic forces that are destined to make Asia the dominant influence on the planetary greenhouse for decades to come, by almost every analysis.

Here’s the core of Bradsher’s piece:

Already, in the last three years, China has shut down more than a thousand older coal-fired power plants that used technology of the sort still common in the United States. China has also surpassed the rest of the world as the biggest investor in wind turbines and other clean energy technology. And it has dictated tough new energy standards for lighting and gas mileage for cars.

But even as Beijing imposes the world’s most rigorous national energy campaign, the effort is being overwhelmed by the billionfold demands of Chinese consumers.

Chinese and Western energy experts worry that China’s energy challenge could become the world’s problem — possibly dooming any international efforts to place meaningful limits on global warming.

If China cannot meet its own energy-efficiency targets, the chances of avoiding widespread environmental damage from rising temperatures “are very close to zero,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency in Paris.

Aspiring to a more Western standard of living, in many cases with the government’s encouragement, China’s population, 1.3 billion strong, is clamoring for more and bigger cars, for electricity-dependent home appliances and for more creature comforts like air-conditioned shopping malls. Read on….

Consider that India, while far down the list of greenhouse giants — with a fifth of China’s emissions, measured per-capita or gross — is poised for greatly expanded energy demand. If you dare, please track down and read the 2009 paper by Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan on projected air conditioning demand in big cities in hot places. A single finding is sufficient to make the point: “For example, the potential cooling demand in metropolitan Mumbai is about 24 percent of the demand for the entire United States.”

There is a tough road ahead for anyone seeking to cut emissions of greenhouse gases in a world of cresting populations and surging appetites.

The Coal Age Continues

One way to keep perspective amid all the Beltway cogitation over how to keep a climate component in an energy bill is to pay attention to the global coal industry. Coal is the prime factor determining the pace of growth in emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide as human populations and appetites crest in the next few decades. And regardless of what happens in the United States, the industry’s leaders see nothing but bright prospects ahead. We’re still stuck on the coal rung of Loren Eiseley’s heat ladder.

Some energy specialists will explain below why the global coal boom renders the legislative debate on climate somewhat moot from the standpoint of the shared global atmosphere, where the source of emissions is irrelevant to their ultimate heating influence.

Here’s the latest signal from the coal industry. Addressing potential investors in Manhattan on Thursday, Gregory Boyce, the chairman and chief executive officer of the world’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy, simply gushed as he described how the company is ideally positioned to take advantage of “a long-term supercycle for coal,” driven by rapidly growing demand in Asia. (The company keeps a fast-moving ticker on its Web site tracking coal sales at roughly 8 tons a second or so.) This is how his talk was described in a company news release: Read more…