Speaker 1: Today, we're going to be speaking with Tim Jackson, who's an ecological economist,
professor and also author of the book Post Growth Life After Capitalism.
It's so great to have you on.
I appreciate it.
Speaker 3: It's a pleasure to be here, David.
Speaker 1: So let's start with something that to a social Democrat like me is still something
that is in the back of my mind, which is that we are on a planet that has some maximum capacity
in terms of resources, in terms of population carrying capacity, etc.
Our economies are based on a little bit of inflation is good.
And where that inflation comes from is the expectation that there will be more productivity
in the future than there is today.
And GDP has to continue going up or we consider that we're in a recession structurally at
some point that becomes a problem.
Right.
Is that a sound place to start the conversation?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it is a sound place to start the conversation, David, and it's
definitely where I start as well.
And it's surprising.
It's surprisingly easy to kind of make that argument, you know, to to ordinary people
in the streets.
In a way, we're living on a finite planet.
The economy is supposed to expand forever, we're told by economists.
Surely at some point in a expanding economy into finite planet doesn't go so.
So what on earth is going on?
And and what's surprising, I think, is that that's a difficult proposition for politicians
of any color, I would say, to really take seriously or to know what to do anything about.
And economists typically, I would have to say, tend to think that the the economy is
is about money.
It's not necessarily about stuff.
And so if we're clever enough with our technology, we can sort of get ourselves off the hook
and work our way round all of these resource limits.
And I suppose, you know, that's an argument.
Speaker 1: Right.
And so one of the arguments that's frequently made is while what you're saying is true at
this point, it's basically theoretical in the sense that it's very far out.
And, you know, 100 years ago, nobody could have predicted exactly the way things are
today.
If we're talking thousands or tens of thousands of years from now, things will be so structurally
different that this is at minimum going to act.
In the best case, it will resolve itself in the worst case, will have the tools with which
to deal with it by the time it's really a problem.
But that doesn't really seem satisfying as an ecological answer.
Speaker 3: Well, I think I think where it falls down to is that that might be true for
some kinds of resources that we might run out of.
But actually, we're already running out of what you could call ecological space.
You know, we're running out of climate stability.
We're running out of the other species on the planet that are being decimated because
of human activity.
We're running out of clean water and clean air and clean oceans and and that running
out is actually something that's happening right now.
I mean, the evidence on that is alarming.
Just simply the climate change evidence, what was faced by the West Coast in terms of heat
and the East Coast in terms of flooding and Europe in terms of flooding and Australia
in terms of heat.
Almost everywhere you look on the planet, you know, we're seeing these extreme weather
conditions which suggest that, you know, somehow that far out scenario, that expanding economy
meets the limits of the planet actually isn't that far out after all.
That's kind of right here on our doorstep.
Speaker 1: One of the issues, I guess, that economists are confronted with within this
kind of conversation, within this paradigm is there are certain aspects of how we think
about an economy that are kind of taken for granted.
I mentioned already if GDP isn't growing, this is a country that is stagnating or in
a recession in a decline.
That's one aspect of this debt and deficit.
And how that relates to how our country is doing is is a big piece of this.
How would those metrics have to be completely rethought under the umbrella and framework
that you propose?
Speaker 3: Well, I think I think in a way, you know, GDP was never a very good metric.
I mean, one of the things I do in the book is go back to the words of of of Robert Kennedy
speaking in 1968 of fifty three years ago, where actually he was a prominent politician
prepared to acknowledge the limits of this measure of the GDP and say, look, it measures
everything except that which makes life worthwhile, he said.
But it also it misses out the damage to according to the planet.
It doesn't include the positive things that people do for free in their own.
It's just not a very good measure of our well-being and and so so in a sense, you know the answer
to a question.
Well, let's start with some better measures of what really matters and some of those measures,
you know, like our sense of well-being and our sense of purpose and so on, could be could
be measures which are very unfamiliar to politicians.
And that's a little bit of a challenge.
But others of them are really quite simple, like, you know, not measuring, for example,
how much we are degrading our capital assets in the economy itself is something that the
GDP is is notorious for for failing to do and not putting any sort of sense of cost
on the damage that are causing to the environment and not putting any sort of value on the work
that people do in their own homes.
All of these things, actually, and there are very, very good attempts to to improve that
measure of the GDP.
But you could almost say at this point in time, almost any distance towards measuring
something more meaningful than the GDP would be a step forwards, because it's just not
a very good measure of progress.
It's not a very good measure of human progress in society.
Speaker 1: So in terms of some of those things, the universal basic income movement, which
has different names, proposes itself as a way to put value to that which is done in
the home, for example, or that which an economy may not currently value.
Carbon carbon taxes would be a way in which we might put a monetary value on the degradation
of the environment or the pollution that gets released, et cetera.
Is that thinking too small still or are those good ideas, good steps?
Speaker 3: No, they are very good ideas in some, you know, in some ways something like
universal basic income.
And I think when, you know, one of the architects of the universal basic income, Andre Gorz,
talking about it first or talking about it seriously in the 1960s, he wasn't the first
person to talk about it.
But but what he sort of said was it's a sort of stealth concept because by changing our
relationship to the way that we earn money and by changing our relationship to the way
that we work, it enables us to think in massively creative ways about all the valuable things
that are happening in society, like, you know, kind of volunteering in our community and
the free work that happens in the home and looking after our elderly and looking after
our kids.
And it allows us to put a value on those things, which in the purely capitalist system, in
the system of the markets, if you like, just don't have that value on them.
So I you know, I'm in favor of those.
But I still think I mean, to answer your question, I would say they are tools in a toolbox.
And the the difficulty sometimes in implementing those tools, using those tools, is that the
architects of the system don't allow them to be used.
So they have ecological taxation, for example, we talked about for decades.
And yet it's really hard to implement because of the politics of the growth based economy.
Speaker 1: Well, that that's where I was going to go next, which is when we talk about, you
know, convincing people, getting people on board, et cetera.
It seems that two, four and six year political terms in in you know, a variety of different
countries are completely mismatched with the timeline and priorities that are required
to deal with these issues where a lot of these things are longer term projects.
And if your next election is in two years or four or six, it just seems to be fundamentally
at odds with the timescales that we're talking about to actually make some of these structural
changes.
Speaker 3: It's it is at odds in many ways.
And I think, you know, that's not the only thing that's wrong with the political system,
because the other thing that's wrong is it becomes in some sense, because of the way
in which political parties become funded, they end up being sort of apologists for the
status quo, defending vested interests.
And that sometimes stands in the way of them representing the interests of the poorest
in society, the most vulnerable in society, including, of course, the other species we
share the planet with.
So we do have to think much more seriously.
I think about, you know, the role of of governance and the role of power within government.
And think about that, as you're suggesting, with a much longer term view.
And again, there are some interesting initiatives there that in Hungary there's something called
the ombudsman for future generations, a kind of representative of people who are coming
way down the line from the future and are not represented by the democracy of the day.
And that's been taken up in Wales, in the UK, where the future generations act.
And so this initiative.
If, in fact, to change the way the government works to bring the future into our decision
making in the present is a really important part of of thinking about how we address those
long term issues.
Speaker 1: Certainly part of this would also be more citizens demanding these things of
elected officials.
And there are a lot of sort of bullet points that are often repeated by those who don't
want to take these issues more seriously about how such structural change would impact our
day to day lives.
Things about, you know, you might only be able to have small cars in the United States
or gas might be 20 dollars a gallon, or you might not be able to use your air conditioning
whenever you want.
A lot of this day to day stuff at the personal level, what would a paradigm shift, the likes
of which you propose really mean for individuals?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really good question.
I mean, my work over over more than three decades now has been really working in policy.
And it's been about, you know, suggesting the kinds of economic policies that would
that would address some of these issues.
And in fact, just over 10 years, 12 years ago, the previous books that that I wrote
was called Prosperity Without Growth.
It was written for policymakers.
It had all of these wonderful ideas, you know, like ecological tax reform, universal basic
income, different ways of valuing the environment, different ways of measuring well-being and
all that stuff in it.
Almost like a kind of shopping list for what politicians could do on Monday if they really
cared about this issue.
Right.
And it's been fascinating to see that not happen.
And, you know, it doesn't happen for all sorts of reasons, vested interests, short political
timescales that we talked about, but also that fear within politics that the electorate
will not stand for this kind of change.
You know, it's it's a hard, tough place to be in which our lives will become less comfortable,
more arduous and so on and so forth.
And so the kind of language of fear that populates this debate and in a way, what I was trying
to do in Postgres was to say that's a mistake.
You know, the fear that we should have actually is of an economy that doesn't respect the
environment, that doesn't respect the value of human labor in our lives, that doesn't
value these things properly at all, and that is driving us towards a divided world in which
our environmental resources are being degraded at a rate we can't we can't cope with anymore.
That's where dystopia lies.
And so Postgres is really about looking for where an escape route from dystopia might
exist.
And I you know, I think that that's led me across philosophy.
It's led me across psychology.
It's led me across politics.
And and and indeed, you know, moral thinking, thinking about about the ethics of our world.
And the thing that leaps out at me, I think most clearly from that is that this the potential
for for human development, for human progress outside of this very materialistic, consumer
based, growth driven economy that we've inherited is huge.
It's massive because at the end of the day, you know, the kind of world in which I think
we thrive is one in which our relationships are strong, in which our community feels secure,
a world in which our work is not just good in terms of income and keeping us going, but
is meaningful as it has purpose for us.
And that and that sense, actually, of living in a world in which there is hope for the
future because we're taking those environmental limits seriously is a tremendously creative
place.
And I've been fascinated in particular by ideas from within psychology, which sort of
suggest that actually somehow materialism and the comfort of consumerism stand in the
way of us making real human progress.
They stand in the way of us developing skills because we come to become too lazy.
They stand in the way of us developing active, active lives because we can't become too comfortable
and sit around eating too much and being comfortable and being comfortable is wonderful.
You know, don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking being comfortable, but there's a sense in
which being outside of that comfort zone takes us to our true potential as human beings,
where we learn those skills, where we engage in activities that give us satisfaction, where
we feel as though we're embodied in a world in which we have meaning and purpose and in
which there is hope for the future.
And to me, therefore, where I came out of that exploration is really that this post
growth world is a is a richer place to be, not necessarily in terms of money, definitely
not necessarily in terms of material possessions.
In terms of our capabilities to live truly fulfilling lives as human beings and to return
to ourselves that sense of hope in the future Speaker 1: and of course, the challenges in
the midst of consumer culture that bombards people, it's getting people to even be open
to the idea that that may actually be be richer and more fulfilling.
Certainly an uphill battle.
The book is, I think, Speaker 3: the go ahead.
Yeah, just on that point, David, I mean, I think that's true.
And yet there are a million places to start with that.
Right.
You know, how how we how we educate our kids, how we think about our own progression through
life, what decisions we make about where we invest our money and our time.
All of those are places to start.
Although, you know, there are there are a lot as you say, there are lots of obstacles
to that, to making those kinds of choices.
There are also there's a myriad of opportunities for making them as well.
Speaker 1: Well said.
Well said.
The book is Post Growth Life After Capitalism.
We've been speaking with Tim Jackson.
I so appreciate your time today.
Speaker 3: It's been a pleasure.
David.