Jobs and growth

Text of letter submitted to Barking & Dagenham Post, for publication:

"

Like many politicians, Barking’s MP Margaret Hodge repeats the jobs and growth fable. In her MP’s column (BD Post, 23 May) she hints at jobs in defence and Aerospace. British Aerospace makes an impressive fighter jet – if we could sell more of these we could create more jobs. The best thing to do would be to sell them to all sides in any conflict as this should help extend the conflict, increase demand for the planes and create more jobs. Perhaps we could also make and sell land mines - if we don’t already - as there’s a lucrative market in devices to find and neutralise them as well, which we could expand into. The destruction wrought by war is excellent for economic growth, as it creates the need for lots of construction work, not least for hospitals to treat the wounded combatants and innocents. Our own involvement in any conflict will also increase the threat (real or perceived) of attacks on our country. This will generate lots of work for the security services and industry, armed forces and police.

This extreme example of the very serious failings of growth in GDP as a goal for our planet’s economy  may seem sarcastic, but it’s very real. “Growth” sounds positive, but lift up the bonnet and examine more closely what growth in GDP actually entails and it quickly loses its attraction.

An increasing number of people – though apparently not politicians - are realising the truth that we live on a finite planet, so growth cannot continue for ever, and advocating  as the economic goal for ‘spaceship earth’ the well-being of the creatures on this planet, especially humans. First and foremost this requires the meeting of the biological needs of people on the planet – nutrition and water, shelter and such basics that a large number of our fellow human beings want for.  I think the ‘spaceship earth’ metaphor is a good one. On a spaceship you would look to conserve resources and co-operate to ensure the success of the mission. You would mininimise the amount of work needed to fulfil the mission, especially the work done by people (by use of automation). In our homes we broadly welcome the labour saving brought by technology, yet our politicians cry out for more jobs, meaning , more work to do  except  for the public sector, where they say they want greater efficiency, which pretty much entails fewer jobs.)

The future for our species is the use of science and technology to increase human well-being directly, within the finite resources available. Jobs and growth have nothing to do with this."

http://www.collapsenet.com/

Michael Ruppert gave a very compelling speech on the tenth anniversary of "911". I agree with a great deal of what he says. Do watch and listen. His stuff on Fukushima is quite cchilling but outside my remit here.

I don't think it is necessary to regard the earth as a deity (as he does) in order to give it due respect. The earth does set the bounds of our physical existence and therefore we should look after it, but I don't think this requires any transcendent beliefs (pantheism and panentheism).His premise that money is a deity is very informative; he points out that US notes say "in God we trust" and says that as money is god this means we should trust money. People who said "money is thre root of all evil" when the proverb is "love of money is the root of all evil" used to be corrected, but perhaps they were accidentally right.

I don't think he is right about man's dominion over the earth as posited in the book of Genesis. This is not domination, but dominion, and for me it implies good management and stewardship rather than exploitation. It may sound rather feudal, but feudalism isn't necessarily environmentally unsustainable, even if it is socially undesirable.

Ruppert advocates monetary reform. Fairly radical: The abolotion of fractional reserve banking and compound interest and the cancellation of all debt that has interest applied. TZM would go further and abolish money. I think Ruppert may go this far in theory, but he's likely to argue that we should be pragmatic and stick to his key reforms as priority and see where  we go from there.

Ruppert is extremely hard line about growth. Anyone who refers to it in the economic sense is a liar and your enemy. I take his point. I also like "things break down, not up". These simple expessions and rules of thumb are very practical ways to get at the problems that face this planet and humanity. If they are unsubtle, the subtilty can wait until disaster is averted.

Jobs for the boys

Sherard Cowper-Coles (former British Ambassador in Afghanistan), in his new book Cables from Kabul, claims that "the top brass were keen to commit troops to keep the army fully employed: 'It's use them or lose them', one top general apparrently told him." [The Week, 2/7/11].

Should this surprise or shock us? I don't see why. Once again, these are jobs, and it is currently socially desirable to have a job - it doesn't especially matter what the job is. And if more troop deployment is antagonising our opponents, they will retaliate more, and so appears a vicious circle. But this is good - more jobs and more economic growth.

Economic growth

The new series of In Business on BBC Radio 4 started this week with an analysis of Economic growth, entitled "Growing Pains. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w228b I found it balanced, and was pleased that even those who defended it said that it wasn't an end in itself - something our politicians need to learn.

I think it is plausible that human ingenuity will grow infinitely, but some commentators doubt that it can grow quickly enough to tackle our planet's imminent problems by itself. it is plainly true that we have a finite limit on our physical resources - we are in a resource based economy in the general sense even if past economists have wrongly predicted when we would reach them. I think we need to start preparing for the inevitability now.

Economic growth sounds OK, or even good. That's part of the problem. It is technically an increase in Gross Domestic Product (or maybe Gross National Product - the difference isn't important in this context), yet it can include the productive value of clearing up after environmental disasters, or dealing with disease break outs. (Obviously dealing with them is a good thing to do in individual cases, but we don't want any more, just to get economic growth. What we in fact want is growth in healthiness, amongst other things).
And it's all very well scoffing at at attempts to measure happiness, but we do actually want to be happier, so why not try?

Some proponents of economic growth on the radio programme claimed that life expectancy has improved because of economic growth. Whether or not that is true, or whether its a cum ergo ergo propter hoc argument is not really the point. The increase in life expectancy is the thing being aimed for and what we should keep our sights on.

Let's get good at killing people and good at stopping ourselves too

BBC TV's technology programme 'Click' admiringly showed a new gadget that can detect the newer type of land mine that's made of plastic to avoid detection by metal detectors. Admittedly this is clever gadge, but here we have human ingenuity (and technological ingenuity, very possibly) working against itself - one working out how to kill people and the other working out how to stop them. Still, this all makes work and money and counts as GDP, so that's OK, I suppose? I wonder whether the same company manages to make and sell both the mines and the detectors

No - it's complete lunacy. It makes discussing public sector back-office staff look like a waste of energy. Let's take a serious look at ourselves as a race here. We put our finest minds and engineers to work perfecting the art of killing their fellow human beings, and call it 'economic growth' when they sell more of their pernicious weapons.

Decouple work from the need to access the necessities of life and people can immediately stop working both on weapons and the means of neutralising or countering weapons, and do something socially constructive or if not nothing.

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster

In the last 3 years US Health & Safety regulators have cited a number of companies for "egregious, wilful safety violations: Exxon - 1; Citgo - 2; Sunoco - 8; BP - 760.

BP, called "a recurring environmental criminal" by lawyer Jeanne Pascal, also was criticised in 2001 for neglecting emergency shutdown equipment in Alaska and intimidating employees who raised safety or environmental concerns [there may have been other things, I don't know]. At Prudhoe Bay in 2006  the pipe that BP had allowed to corrode through let out 200,000 gallons of oil.

But never mind - this has an upside. The Sunday Times pointed out that investors can make money through firms that specialise in cleaning up BP-style incidents. I suppose that counts as economic growth.