Taxation is an interesting facet of our society. Economists view taxes as a disincentive in a free market, and rightly so. Taxes increase the price of a product or service, making it less desirable. Yet, when you think about what we tax in this country, it’s mostly things we desire more of – income, profits, sales, et cetera. This odd behavior should be questioned, even more so today when every budget (state, city, federal) seems to be facing seriously tenuous times.

I took the train down to Oregon this last weekend to see my sister graduate from college. While there I stayed with Rob Dietz, Executive Director of CASSE and a good friend of mine. He handed me a very modest looking magazine called Sockeye. I am sure I will be drawing material from this one issue for some time (check it out, amazing articles). For now I want to talk about tax shifting, as mentioned in the article by Alan Durning and Amy Chan, “Making Prices Tell The Truth: Shifting Taxes from Bads to Goods.” (pdf)

The Imbalance of the Free Market

Taxes have the power of acting as a means of balancing what are called “market inefficiencies,” things in the free market system that generate negative externalities. These are unwanted side effects that are not taken into account in a product, service or activity. A great example of this is any fossil fuel, let’s take Coal for instance.

Let’s imagine a coal power plant starts leeching mercury into a watershed and a city water planet down river takes it in (coal accounts for most of the mercury in our waterways). The coal power plant is not paying to filter this mercury out, nor is it paying for all the damage that could occur from the toxin leeching into the ecosystems. Because the producer does not pay for the negative externalities it is left out of the decision to pursue coal power.

If these externalities were eliminated by charging or compensating for them, then they could be factored into the decision making process. This is especially important as all too often these become costs placed upon the society instead of the producer (e.g. the city water plant in the above example has to filter out the mercury from its water source). If these prices were added into coal’s price they would eventually make coal production to costly to be worthwhile.

One of the best ways to internalize these negatives into our free market is to increase their expense with taxes to help offset costs like oil spill clean ups, health care or water treatment.

More Taxes, Less Cuts

Instead of cutting important, meaningful services like education, health care, welfare, police and fire departments we should be looking at new sources of income. No one is looking forward to more taxes, so this leads us to the need to consider something – I know when I say it, politicians everywhere will wince – out of the box. The conventional isn’t working, hasn’t worked and only seems to make things worse as we go forward into the future.

Here are some of the tax/income ideas that I think have great potential:

• Tax Pollution – We have the systems to monitor pollutants, so we should tax everything on a global warming potential basis. Carbon costs $1 per unit, so methane (which has a GWP of 12 times that of CO2) would cost $12 per unit.
• Toll Roads – If we want to be serious about transitioning to sustainable means of travel, we need to start tolling more roads here in the states. These funds should go directly into funding more transit, maintenance, et cetera and keeping state transit workers employed.
• Tax Gasoline/Propane/Diesel – Here I have the same sentiment as the last point. The “true cost” of gasoline, when you add in all the externalities that can be priced, is around $12 per gallon. Now, a $12 gallon of gasoline would take a while to work up too – but it shouldn’t be seen as ridiculous (Europeans pay over $7 per gallon), especially since it will get there eventually on its own. However, if we start now we gain a better reward and help fight climate change along the way.
• Tax Resource Extraction – If you harvest anything unsustainably, it should be taxed. This goes doubly so for non-renewable resources like oil, natural gas and coal.
• Tax Advertising – This is a blight on human psyches and generally accepted by most as a nuisance. Personally, I think we should ake São Paulo’s route and outlaw advertising in public spaces. All others should be taxed as the public nuisance they are!
• Tax Banks – Banking is screwed up. Private banks and their CEOs make exorbitant amounts of money doing something provides comparably little service to society. As the current state of economic affairs is a great example of, banking is actually more detrimental to society than we thought just a few years ago. We need a small percentage tax on all banking transactions. This “Robin Hood Tax” could raise billions to fund education, social services, climate mitigation and aid in eliminating poverty and hunger.
• Tax Corporations - If anyone is to blame for most of the worlds problems, I could surely name more large corporations than individual people. Why don’t we tax them when they get “too big to fail”?
• Fuel Efficiency “Feebates” – A feebate is a combination of fee and rebate, often proposed as a means to improve fuel efficiency in vehicles. It works rather simply: for every mpg below the average on a new car purchase you pay a fee. For every mpg above the average on a new car purchase you get a rebate. This creates an incentive for both consumer and manufacturer to purchase/make more fuel efficient vehicles, thereby increasing the average. A study done at UC Berkeley showed that a $70 per mpg feebate would increase fuel efficiency about 1 mpg per year.
• Tax the Rich – People making more than 20 times the average wage should be taxed on their income. They are promoting inequality, which have been linked to a range of social and economic problems. Take this a few steps further, increase the taxes the further away you get from the average national income and subsidize the income of those 20 times below the average. This is more Robin Hood than the bank tax even: it supports equality and actually lifts people out of poverty. Basically, this could be a feebate for wage equality.

That’s all I got for now, though I am sure we could come up with a few more ways to generate income. All of these taxes could be instituted in small levels, gradually increased as we deem appropriate, and eventually should lead to the elimination of taxes on median-level incomes, profits and sales. This levy on taxing the goods would help offset the trickle-down of price increases that would likely occur with instituting this new types of taxes. Plus, we get a double-whammy: income for our ailing budgets and discouraging bad behavior.

Related posts:

1. Externalities and Valuing Non-Market Goods
2. Ethical Banking Systems
3. Fair Distribution: Ending the Wealth Gap

In January I was privileged enough to be able to join in at the New Green Economy Conference put on in DC. There I met a number of amazing people, many heroes of mine, and joined in some great discussion about the future of our society and economy. The breakout session I attended was led by my friend Rob Dietz at The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy and Jon Erikson, Director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.

I talked briefly with Jon about possible education opportunities, and one that he mentioned was the online course available in Intro to Ecological Economics. This course can be taken to earn credits towards their distance learn program or can be taken for free online, to learn more about the topic. Whilst I have done tons of reading and writing on the topic, I have not done anything structured like this course. I also have yet to completely read, cover to cover, Daly & Farley’s landmark textbook Ecological Economics, which is one of the main texts in this online course.

So far this textbook has served as a great reference for me and I have certainly read many portions, but it has been on my list of things to completely read for some time. That being said, I am placing a goal of finishing this online course over the summer. I will be updating the blog as I go along, writing posts on topics and hopefully furthering one of my goals with this blog: teaching myself and others the concepts of the steady state economy.

The Goal

I will complete the Gund Institute’s online Introduction to Ecological Economics over the summer, the next four months, June through September. The course is split into four modules, which means I will need to finish one module a month. Each module has sub modules, around 3-4 each. This gives me an almost weekly goal of reading to complete, videos to watch, and posts to write!

Hopefully I will expand my knowledge a bit, but along the way I hope you’ll gain something as well. I would really like to encourage you to engage me via comments as I explore this course. You can also join in online and do the course yourself – you just need a couple of textbooks, the rest of the content is online.

Reader Survey Feedback & Blog Direction

Thank you to the few of you who responded to my readers survey. It seems most of you like where this blog is going and would like to see medium-sized posts on a more steady frequency. I also heard that apparently I can ramble a little and might be a bit too optimistic – I will work on the rambling, while the optimism you’ll have to live with.

I will also work on worrying less about superior arguments and content to the point of obsession, and instead focus on posting at least 1-2 times a week with good content, news, thoughts, et cetera. This will still give me time to develop the slightly longer, content driven posts. However, this blog is probably going to get a little more laid back and personal in content. Basically, I need to not stress out so much about what I’m posting, it’s starting to actually make me write less.

A few people on the recent reader’s survey thought their knowledge or clout wasn’t sufficient enough to comment on the blog. That’s just silly – I’m not an economist, I’m just another person trying to understand how to create a sustainable society. It just happens that I write about it here, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have ideas or questions that are worthy of being here either! My largest goal with this blog was to inspire discussion and learning about this topic – so please, comment!!

Thanks again for the feedback, and if you haven’t already you can still fill out that short survey here. If you’re looking for some more discussion about sustainable economics and a post growth society, check out my new side project, a collaborative blog called Post Growth.

Related posts:

1. 100 Posts & Beyond
2. Add It Up
3. Sustainable Economics Blogs

A few months ago I wrote about the myth of decoupling – how you cannot separate economic growth from environmental impact. I touched on a topic in that post that is critical to the argument against continued economic growth: the limits of efficiency and the physical constraints of thermodynamics on the economy. That post received a lot of good feedback, as well as a few requests to talk about efficiency limits in more detail.

Neoclassical Arguments Defy Natural Laws

Gravity is a basic law of our existence. To hear someone claim that gravity is a myth would be astounding. A large group of people believing such a claim would be even more ridiculous (sounds like climate change deniers, actually). Yet, anyone trumpeting infinite economic growth does just that: makes a claim that violates basic laws of nature.

You might be asking yourself how I can make such an accusation when we are obviously still growing as an economy. Well, sure we are, but this is actually uneconomic growth, false growth, and debt-driven growth. All that debt is expanding while our natural resources do not – which spells C-O-L-L-A-P-S-E, if you’re curious.

The most common argument for economic growth continuing indefinitely without undermining the environment is “technological progress.” This really means technological efficiency, or our ability to do more with less and less. Neoclassical economists, policy makers, politicians, and even the average citizen today all believe technology will save us in the end. The thought is that we’ll move to an “information economy” or to a “space economy” and produce growth by using less resources.

The basic claim is we will continue to make leaps in technological progress that will maintain economic growth at the same level of ecological impact (resource use, waste, etc). We can make more today with less material per unit and less energy per unit than we could two decades ago. However, as a pointed out in my earlier post, this relative decoupling is weak in comparison to the growth of the economy as a whole. That is besides the point. The matter at hand is efficiency.

We can get better and better at production only to a certain point. Efficiency cannot improve infinitely, therefore the economy cannot rely on it for infinite growth. Period.

Physical Laws of the Universe

The scientific community is always challenging itself. This is the very purpose of research and institution of the scientific method. When someone develops a theory it is challenged by experiments designed to support or disprove that theory. Some of these lucky ideas will be supported with such strength that they are no longer considered theories, but laws.

Laws of nature are the building blocks of scientific advancement. Future theories are based on current laws. We all (should) know the laws of gravity, of basic physics, of thermodynamics, et cetera. The last is a set of laws that govern the exchange of energy, expansion of entropy, limits of efficiency and rules regarding temperature.

Before I go forward I really want to drive home a point here: these are physical laws of the universe that cannot be altered or subverted. There is no way around physical laws and any hope for a scientific break through in that department is not a credible vision of the future (aka it’s pure fiction).

The Ultimate Crux To Growth: Thermodynamics

The laws of thermodynamics are very clear: everything wears out (creates entropy) and there cannot be a system that reaches (or exceeds) 100% efficiency. Herman Daly makes a note of this in his revolutionary book Steady State Economics, by pointing out it is important “to recognize that the entropy law is the basic physical coordinate of scarcity. Were it not for the entropy law, nothing would ever wear out; we could burn the same gallon of gasoline over and over, and our economic system could be closed with respect to the rest of the natural world.”

Not only does this sound impossible when common sense is applied, but we know it to be against the laws of the physical universe. Yet, we continue to clamor for economic growth. We cannot grow forever on a finite planet. There are not enough resources. Our technology has limits, most of which, I would argue, we have met – at least in terms of being able to have any large expansion of production, consumption, and waste absorption (the economy) on our tiny planet. We’re pushing forward on debt, running out of our savings (natural capital), and heading towards collapse.

Because we cannot improve our efficiency to combat the environmental degradation caused by economic growth (in fact, we cannot even come close, according to history), we are left with the same fact that economic growth cannot continue. It no longer matters if it is an “information economy,” which still relies on real-world, consuming people and technologies; or if it is a “space economy” that will rely on resources to get us off the surface of the planet and build ships. Everything has a limit, including economic growth. We’ve hit that limit on growth in the developed world. Now we need to think about our post growth society.

Related posts:

1. Decoupling Demystified
2. Social Business and Limits to Growth
3. Newsweek: The No-Growth Fantasy

Can We Separate GDP Growth And Ecological Limits?

Next time you run into a classically trained economist (happens all the time, right?) start talking with him/her about ecological limits. They might squirm a little, but probably respond as trained: with some zombie-like responses about “decoupling.” What is decoupling? Basically, it’s a concept of being able to continue growing economic output without a corresponding increase in environmental impact.

The overall idea is that improvements in production efficiency allow you to make more with less. Theoretically we can increase our efficiency and make more stuff using the same amount of resources and/or generating the same amount of pollution.

Applying this concept to renewable resources would be incredibly beneficial. We could use wood, for instance, in a more sustainable fashion if we decoupled the economic growth from resource use and did so under the ecological limits of forest regeneration.

As you might have already guessed, there are quite a few flaws with this concept. You might have also noticed that it seems at first glance to have a broad definition. In general, however, there are two types of economic decoupling: relative and absolute. The first type appears to have a cursory chance of working, the latter is fundamentally impossible.

Relative decoupling refers to a decrease in environmental intensity per unit of economic output. This means the impacts on resources decline relative to GDP, but they don’t decline completely – just grow slower than GDP. Absolute decouple occurs when ecological intensity declines in “absolute terms,” or an overall decrease as GDP increases.

Relative Decoupling

Inputs in production (aka, resources and natural capital) are costs to the producer. So it seems reasonable to argue that in a free market economy producers will push to reduce costs by increasing their efficiency. This leads one to believe that over time we should use less materials to produce more – relative decoupling. One example of this is found in the amount of energy needed to produce each unit of economic output, which globally has fallen over the last 50 years.

However, this tread is only apparent in some developed nations. Outside of the US and Europe this number has been less consistent, in many cases increasing. This makes it difficult to say for certain that a free-market, growth-centered economy will lead to reduced energy intensity, or relative decoupling.

As one might think, as the overall energy intensity of the global economy has decreased, so has our emission intensity (remember, this is per unit or per dollar of GDP). Unfortunately, this tread has begun to falter, and in the last decade has been slowly increasing. This is disconcerting to those fearful of continuing economic growth in a finite world. As Tim Jackson puts it in his book Prosperity Without Growth,

“For decoupling to offer a way out of the dilemma of growth, resource efficiencies must increase at least as fast as economic output does. And they must continue to improve as the economy grows, if overall burdens aren’t to increase. To achieve this more difficult task, we need to demonstrate absolute decoupling. Evidence of this is much harder to find.”

Absolute Decoupling

In the face of the overall decrease of energy intensity, we must remember that our total economic output has increased – the growth economy is the whole reason this blog exists! Taking the example of emissions we can see that in general our emission intensity per unit has decreased over the last half century, yet our total emissions have steadily increased. Even in the face of arguable relative decoupling, our growth has seriously outpaced improvements in efficiency.

Today’s global emissions are 40 percent higher than the Kyoto base year, 1990, and 80 percent higher than 1970 levels. While we claim emission cuts in some developed nations, these results are deceiving at best. The decrease in emissions is always connected to simply moving production out of the country, along with the pollution it generates. European countries that have decreased their emissions have failed to account for increased imports and the carbon emissions associated with them.

This leads us to a critical point: the important thing is the global statistic. Worldwide our resource use has increased. In the case of cement production it has doubled; structural metal extraction is increasing quicker than GDP. While some argue that developed economies make improvements in air pollutants like sulphur dioxide, they seem ambivalent to other indicators like CO2 emissions or species lost.

The overwhelming truth is that for every unit of growth we use more resources and create more waste – decoupling is not happening, nor does it appear to have any hope of ever happening.

Something Doesn’t Add Up

Economic equations can be a bit of a drag, but there are some that don’t completely suck. One in particular has been around for 40 years, developed by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren. The Ehrlich-Holdren Equation states that impact of human activity is the product of three factors: population, affluence, and a technology factor (the impact per dollar spent). It’s a simple equation: I = P*A*T.

In order to sustain a growing population and growing affluence (economy) we force ourselves to rely on decreasing T, our impact per dollar (or increasing our efficiency). This is where the “simple equation” gets tough. In order to reduce, for instance, our carbon emissions to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 450ppm (a weak target) with a growing population and economy we’d need to make some seriously unprecedented technological improvements to efficiency.

Assuming population growth slows, and the economy only grows at a low rate, we’d still need to improve efficiency some ten times faster than we have been doing in the past. That is a low-end estimate, if population and/or economic growth expand faster than expected we could need up to 21-times current efficiency improvement rates – or more. Unfortunately, the latter is more likely necessary as there is virtually no political will behind stabilizing population or economy for the most part.

Here’s another crux to the idea that we can continue to improve efficiency and save our precious growth economy: the first law of thermodynamics. We are physically constrained by the fact that efficiency cannot increase forever. We can only get so efficient. Even if you can get past the historical precedence showing efficiency can’t keep up, and you are willing put all your eggs in the basket of a miraculous technological increase, you still will have to face the  laws of nature in the end.

Absolute decoupling is not supported by the history. Even relative decoupling is founded in false statistics. Without decoupling growth from environmental impact we will be forced to face the limits of our finite planet. If we fail to adjust our course, the Earth will take care of it for us. And no one will like that outcome, so let’s try an make a peaceful, amiable transition to a stable economy and sustainable society.

The answer is to seek out a society with a stable population, a stable economy, and increasing technological efficiency (as far as we can push it) to decrease environmental impacts. This will make a better world for those living in it. We can pursue what Tim Jackson calls “a credible vision of what it means for human society to flourish in the context of ecological limits.”

A major source for this post was Tim Jackson’s amazing work Prosperity Without Growth. I highly recommend reading it. If you don’t have time for 215 pages, then download the free report. If you’re attention span is even shorter at least read the summary of the report!

Related posts:

1. The Limits of Efficiency
2. What Has Economic Growth Done For You Lately?
3. Growth Isn’t Possible

First off let me say that I have had a crazy couple of weeks between holidays and family and then getting my wisdom teeth pulled. As such, I haven’t had much time to read, let alone write, so the blog will be a little slow for the next week or so. But feat not! In just two weeks I will be on my way to the Capital City to attend the New Green Economy Conference. There I will be keeping you all up to date on the daily workshops, volunteer activities, and events!

While reading an article I was reminded of a topic I have been trying to formulate words on: measuring progress. As George Monbiot puts it,

“In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it isn’t. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions which sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

“Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and well-being… GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living.”

Read through Prosperity Without Growth and the new economics foundation‘s publications and you will find tons of information about prosperity, progress and the measuring of it. In fact, there are numerous metrics out there to choose from. I just wrote a post for new project I am working on with some fellow steady staters on the subject of measuring progress, read it here.

Related posts:

1. Points of Progress
2. Governance and Economy
3. Taxing The Bads

Here are two lists for the post-growth, steady state economy. The first list is for those of you who haven’t done much reading or are new to the topics. I would suggest reading them for an introduction into steady state concepts and then move on to the more in-depth list. The second list is what I consider (so far) to be the top books/articles – the “must haves” on your post growth reading list and is an expanded companion to the introduction list.

If you only read 5, 10, or 16 books/articles about sustainable economics and post-growth thought these are my suggestions:

Introduction to Post Growth, Steady State Economics

1. Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train, by Brian Czech
2. Thought Control in Economics, Adbusters Issue #85
3. Deep Economy, by Bill Mckibben
4. Prosperity Without Growth, report by Prof. Tim Jackson at the SDC (now a book)
5. The Great Transition, report by New Economics Foundation

Further Post Growth Reading

There you have it. There are many other books/articles/blogs out there and I would definitely recommend you read as much as you can on anything that interests you. My problem usually lies in having more books to read than I have time to devote to them. I’m sure there are worse up-hill battles to be in, though.

Related posts:

1. Newsweek: The No-Growth Fantasy
2. Uneconomic Growth
3. Gund Institute & My Summer Project

Externalities With Value

Our accepted model provides us with a free market – one that is omniscient and omnipresent – that allocates resources, goods and services. Neoclassical economists generally assume that when a consumer (that’s you – got to love that label, huh?) makes a decision, he/she does so with all the information required.

When you buy those pants, neoclassical economists assume that you take into account not only the price, but the material the pants are made from, its scarcity, environmental damage, labor associated with its creation, et cetera when you decide to purchase them. In this way the market is perfect at managing scarcity. We all know that reality is far from this picture, however; consumers make decisions with limited information and often without consideration of the far-reaching effects and “externalities.”

Externalities Are, Well, External…

An externality is a unintended by-product that occurs in a market from another process. These side effects could be negative or positive. For instance, say I am a bee-keeper and I come to your neighbor’s property to pollinate his orchard. There is a good chance that some of my bees will pollinate your plants as well. You didn’t pay for my service, but you are inadvertently receiving benefit of it. That is a positive externality.

On the flip side, say there is a city water plant and upstream a new coal power plant is built. When that coal power plant starts leeching mercury into the river the city water planet takes it in (coal accounts for most of the mercury in our waterways). The coal power plant is not paying to filter this mercury out, nor is it paying for all the damage that could occur from the toxin leeching into the ecosystems. Unchecked, this could be a very negative externality.

Unfortunately, because the producer does not pay for the negative, or receive funds for the positive, externalities these are often left out of the decision of whether or not to pursue the activity in question. If these externalities are eliminated by charging or compensating for activities, then they become factors in the decision making process. This is especially important for the negative externalities – all too often these become costs placed upon the society instead of the producer (e.g. the city water plant in the above example has to filter out the mercury from its water source). If these prices were quantified in some way they would eventually make coal production to costly to be worthwhile.

The Coase Theorem has some economists believing that externalities can be fixed by assigning property rights to either involved party. Take my previous example for instance, you could assign the right for the city to have a clean source of water or, conversely, you could assign the coal plant to have the right to pollute. According to the Coase Theorem, either would solve the problem and be balanced in the almighty market. The problem arises when trying to assign values to these properties and rights.

Making Externalities “Internalities” and Valuing Non-Market Goods and Services

The difficult job of assigning value to our forests, bees, waterways, and other natural services must be done to a certain extent. We must decide how much value to assign, whether it is an actual market price or legislation to limit the extraction, pollution, destruction, consumption, et cetera. While the latter is more feasible, the former has some merits as well in many circumstances.

There are numerical estimates to the services provide by our natural systems. To build off the previous example, the services of our pollinators is estimated to be a $57 billion dollars a year in savings. That number relates the service provided for free by nature in terms of the approximate cost of us doing it ourselves.

Of course, there are externalities even in this valuing: the cost to the food production upon the collapse of honey bee pollination and the increased cost in food world wide are not taken into account. There are values to every ecological service, from CO2 sequestration by forests to water filtration by soil. The total value of Mother Nature’s ecological services is estimated at upwards of $71 trillion (with a T) a year.

The reality is we will forever be chasing externalities and attempting to value non-market goods (natural services, value of human lives, et cetera), trying to get them to fit into a model that fundamentally doesn’t align. Similar to the diamond and water paradox, we will need to realize some values are based on use and not monetary exchange. That is to say, some things have value that cannot be quantified in terms of dollars and cents. These things (our lives, our environment, our freedoms, and so forth) should then be protected by legislation not entrusted in the almighty market.

In a Steady State Economy

A Steady State Economy will need for us to value our externalities as best we can in order to take into account every impact we have and move towards a sustainable scale. It will also require us to create policies that protect us when these externalities cannot, or should not, be factored into market forces. What do these policies look like? Well, we might decide that only human beings are endowed with unalienable rights and strip corporations of the rights of people. We might also decide that we value the ability to sustain our renewable sources like forests and mandate sustainable forestry practices.

The most important policies in the coming decade will be the ones we decide about pollution and climate. Allowing a privileged few (industrialized nations) to poison the environment of a poverty-stricken many (developing nations) is an externality the world as a whole can no longer afford to ignore.

Related posts:

1. Taxing The Bads
2. Natural vs Man-Made Capital
3. Uneconomic Growth

I'd Rather Be Here Than At Work

Leisure is the thing we so often aspire to gain more of in the US. The irony is apparent in that we have the smallest amount of leisure time in the world. Workers in the European Union have anywhere from 6 to 10 weeks of vacation a year and work about 6-8 hours less per week. Their standard of living is often considered greater than ours. Why? The Growth Economy wants more and more production and consumption.

We work in the US to fuel more and more growth. It is prevalent in other countries as well, but we are definitely the pioneers of the industry. I could rant on and on about this, but in the spirit of working less (and more efficiently) I will not re-invent the wheel. I invite you to watch this video from Workers of the World Relax. Also check out the Work Less Party, this blog post, this article, and this article.

Technology Should Mean Less Work, Not More

Increases in technology and efficiency should mean that we don’t have to work as much. Because we can achieve more in less time, greater efficiency should come with a decrease in overall work hours. The truth is that efficiency increases are put back into the production and consumption cycle – we work the same amount but now can produce and consume more. Why do we want that when we could work less and have more free, fun time?

A steady state economy is one that encourages utilizing those efficiency increases with more leisure time, not more production and consumption. This means we have the ability to work less, yet still enjoy a good quality of life. In a steady state economy we can also reduce unemployment by encouraging those that are overworked (1/3 of Americans) to decrease their work hours and allow for more jobs – without increasing the physical size of our economy, production or consumption.

Think about a better life – more time for your kids, more time for your hobbies, more time to take better care of yourself, more time to volunteer and make a better, happier world. You are still a productive member of society, but now you are also an active member of society – good for you and the community. This is key in developing our society instead of simply growing it (see Development vs Growth and Prosperity Without Growth – pdf).

A Story Sometimes Helps

Here is a great allegory about work, leisure, and growth:

An American tourist was at the pier of a small Central American coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow-fin tuna. The tourist complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, “Only a little while.”

The tourist then asked, “Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?”

The fishermansaid, “With this I have more than enough to support my family’s needs.”

The tourist then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life.”

The tourist scoffed, “I can help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats.

“Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually opening your own cannery!

“You would control the product, processing and distribution. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to the city, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you could run your ever-expanding enterprise.”

The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

The tourist replied, “15 to 20 years.”

“But what then?” asked the fisherman.

The tourist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions?…Then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…”

What’s more important? Life, liberty, and happiness or the pursuit of more money, growth, and consumption?

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1. Steady State Economy: An Overview
2. Steady State Economy: The Revolution Starts Now
3. Earth Demands Steady State Economy