Transcriber: Isabel Kong Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Who of you went to school and had economics while at school?
Yeah, a lot of you.
Another question.
Who of you had teachers that told you honestly
that the economics that you were being taught
was creating crisis after crisis after crisis?
(laughter)
Well, this basically summarizes my talk today.
My name is Chris Klump.
I’m a professor of applied science
at the Rotterdam University of Applied Science
and I’m researching economic system change.
And I am helping to change the curriculum of the business school.
And that pretty much starts and boils down to debunking economy.
We spend a lot of time unlearning economics as we know it,
and I'm going to share a couple of insights with you in this talk.
So what you might not know or be aware of
is that most of us spend most of our time
in a self-created prison of commodity called the economy.
So most of us are all living in the blue bubble in the middle,
the economy.
Market world, you could say.
And let me take you through a couple of characteristics of that bubble.
So let me start with us as human beings.
So, without you maybe being aware,
most of our time, we spend our time as material beings.
So I certainly hope I don’t offend anyone with this,
but all I can see from up here are wallets.
You are sitting wallets.
This country, the Netherlands, is, like any other country in the world,
governed on the basis of GDP, gross domestic product.
And gross domestic product means
the total sum of all economic activities in this country,
which basically means that you only exist if something enters or leaves your wallet.
You’re not human beings, you are material beings.
Quite inconvenient!
And let’s look at the way that we perceive society.
So the Netherlands, like, again,
almost every country in the world is a welfare nation.
So our society, our civilization is based upon welfare, on wealth.
So the basic idea is if wealth goes up, if living standard goes up,
our well-being goes up,
which is not the case.
Did you know that, in the Netherlands,
our economy has grown 300% since the 1960s?
Can you imagine? We are three times richer
But at the same time,
our well-being and our happiness didn’t increase one bit.
And to make it even worse,
it is even showing a decrease in the last couple of years.
And so what’s the use of making more money and more money and more money
if it doesn’t make us more happy, more happy, more happy?
We don't think about these questions.
And then last but not least there is probably no better way
to show our distorted relationship with nature that we take for granted.
So the only way that we, humans,
we, material human beings,
can have a relationship with nature is based upon capital.
We treat nature as capital.
If we can put a price tag on nature,
if we can use nature for our human purposes in the economy,
if we can turn nature into a commodity and use it for the economy,
we value nature.
It’s instrumental.
Whereas of course nature has an intrinsic value.
We are only one of the millions and millions and millions of species
on this living planet.
We don’t own nature.
We are nature.
So when you hear a couple of examples like this,
you might understand that this crisis that we’re in
didn’t come as a surprise.
We’ve caused it ourselves.
So the economy is the root cause
of almost all the big societal problems that we are facing at this moment.
So it’s the economy that is creating climate change.
It's the economy that is creating biodiversity collapse.
It’s the economy that’s creating deforestation
and ocean acidification.
It’s the economy that is creating perverse wealth inequality.
It's the economy that creates political polarization,
and it's the economy that creates depression and burnout.
It’s all based upon the idea
that our economy constantly needs to grow
and we constantly have to feed the beast that is creating this crisis.
And now this crisis is getting way out of control.
And the science is crystal clear:
we are on a death path.
Our existence is at risk.
And even more, this crisis is becoming existential.
And this is really, really, really important.
So the societal is becoming personal.
So a lot of people suffer from a collapse of worldview and self-image.
We are hitting rock bottom, and that is great news.
And that is great news because no pain, no gain.
We will only change if the pain is hard enough.
And we’re reaching that point with each other.
And we can already see it.
There is a growing group of people, especially young people,
Generation Y and Generation Z,
and I can see a lot of them here in the hall,
the millennials and the centennials
that actually stand up and demand system change.
And you’re absolutely right.
We see a lot of new students also in our university
that are transforming societal urgency into personal agency.
We see a lot of young people that turn or transform
their awareness of the alarming state of the world into activism.
And this is the engine that drives system change.
This is the engine that is creating this thing, this new phenomenon,
this new economic theory that I call existential economics.
So if you look at economics, in almost all cases,
economics is nothing more than human behavior.
So what sort of behavior is existential economics about?
What we see, and this is part of my research,
is a process that is about merging a sense of belonging
with a sense of becoming.
So we see more and more young people, especially young people,
that experience a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves.
And so I interviewed literally hundreds of social entrepreneurs
in the last couple of years, and changemakers,
and what they all have in common, without any exception,
is that in their stories, they had this moment of of calling.
They were being called.
So they all have a story
wherein a certain societal problem became personal for them.
They embodied this societal issue and it became personal.
And this is what people describe as experiencing purpose.
So purpose is sometimes treated as a noun, which it’s not, it’s a verb.
It's a sensory experience.
So people experience purpose when they feel connected to other people
and to the planet.
And once people start to behave in relationship to that intention,
to that cause, that they have embodied,
that is what people describe as experiencing a sense of meaning.
So that is the economic flow that is happening.
And if you turn it into the macro economic perspective
of existential economics,
you could say it’s based upon the Ubuntu principle.
And I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Ubuntu,
I am because we are,
and we are because the planet is.
So what existential economics is doing
is introducing ecology to economics.
So what we have learned or what we can learn from ecologists
is the acknowledgement that species and living beings
don’t only compete, but also cooperate in ecosystems.
So ecosystems, thriving ecosystems are about symbiosis and mutualism,
about species joining forces to create situations that are conducive
to each and every species within that ecosystem.
And this is basically what we are now learning
also in economics, so it’s not money that makes the world go round.
It is life and it is life that we need to service in the economy.
So my take on things
is that I think we should stop calling economics, economics.
I think we should call it applied ecology,
economically applied ecology.
If you take the Earth and you zoom out in outer space, can you see it?
The blue dot in the black void?
There is no economy anymore.
But ecology remains. Life remains.
So we have to align economics to the principles of ecology.
And ecology shows us, life shows us
processes and patterns for billions of years.
And the only thing that we have to do is take these processes serious
and align to them.
So that means
that the basis of existential economics is that it is life-centered.
So what you can see up here is the evolution of economics as we know it.
So if we start at the bottom there,
you can see our current way of looking at economics.
So the Dutch economics, like any other country in the world,
is based upon the neoclassical premise.
So the economy is there to fulfil our material needs,
because the idea is if we can fulfil our material needs, we’re happy.
So that’s why an economy can never be big enough or grow enough.
The bigger the better,
because the bigger, the more goods and services we can consume.
And now, for the first time in history, because of climate change,
we are evolving into this second phase
where we have world-centric or humanity-centric goals.
We will never ever be able to tackle climate change
if all the countries in the world only pursue the national interests
and the individual interests of the people living in that national economy.
So for the first time, we have agreements like Paris or Glasgow.
We have to come together to transcend our national interest
to reach global goals.
But it’s not enough.
It is not enough.
Because what ecology is teaching us
is that we can’t just look after our own species.
We have to look after other species as well.
As Einstein has taught us many years ago, that if the bee goes extinct,
humans will go extinct a couple of years later.
Humans and bees co-exist.
We can’t live without the bees.
So we have to take care of all life on this planet.
That is what we need to do in the next couple of years.
We have to put life in the centre of everything we do, also in business.
And what does that mean?
What does it mean for business?
It means that business is not anymore about maximizing profits,
but about maximizing life.
And the way we do it is to stop focusing on shareholders and even stakeholders
and start focusing on what is called rights holders.
So “rights holdership” is about taking
every living thing on this planet into account.
In our current economy, we have externalized almost everything.
And in existential economics, we internalize as much as possible.
We try to get as much information we can into the company
so we can look after the whole ecosystem
rather than only looking after the financial results
for a very selected bunch of shareholders.
So existential economic business is about creating integral value.
Or, as my friend Ralph Tourm, from the International Think Tank R3.0 calls it
realizing return on inter-being.
Return on inter-being.
It's based upon that old wisdom of Plato,
who already said that the one can only be well
unless the whole is well.
That is our task.
That is what we need to pursue.
Put life in the center of each and every business.
And what I want you to understand and take home
is that if we want to save the planet, we have to save the economy.
We have to start at the economy.
And the good news is that an economy is nothing more
than a bunch of agreements made by people about how to run
the human material household.
Don’t believe the hype that it is a natural law
or a mathematical rocket science.
It’s none of that.
It is 100% man-made.
It is created.
So we can recreate it.
So I want to leave you with a simple question.
Are we going to recreate the economy?
Audience: Yes.
Are we going to recreate the economy?
Audience: Yes!
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)