The Pursuit of Liberty: Building Sustainable Cities with Circular Economies
Steven Liaros www.polisplan.com.au
[email protected]
‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ is perhaps the defining social vision for Libertarians. This paper will explore how this same vision might enable the development of socially resilient and environmentally sustainable cities. A vision alone, though, is not sufficient. Nor are the countless critiques of the current economic system. A new economic paradigm that addresses the various critiques is required, as is a strategy for achieving that vision. This paper will argue that the Circular Economy—which presently relates to the production of goods, striving by design to produce no waste—could be broadened to describe a new economic paradigm. By addressing the critiques expressed in other heterodox economic theories, the Circular Economy would take the first strategic step towards achieving a new vision, concurrently becoming an umbrella term that fully embraces the Gift, Regenerative, Steady State and Sufficiency Economy ideas, as well as the critiques of Feminist Economics.
Introduction Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. (emphasis added) ~Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968:1244) Critiques of the present economic orthodoxy abound. Few are as eloquent and persuasive as Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. Perhaps fewer still have generated so much debate and counter-critiques or had the policy impact of Hardin’s work. Yet nearly fifty years have passed and we are still locked in the same economic system. Why is it that we do not more directly challenge Hardin’s assertion that “each man is locked into a system…”1? Are we not free to create a new economic system? Are we a free society or are we trapped by the economy that we have inherited? Trapped, therefore, by the endless activity needed to grow the only thing we collectively value— the economy. Inevitably, this pressure for more activity precludes the freedom to 1
ibid Hardin
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pause, re-evaluate and create a new system. The constant activity is a reflection of the value we attribute to work. This paper will argue for a more nuanced distinction between labor and work as proposed by Hannah Arendt (1958), where work relates to the creation of new things, while labor relates to the ongoing maintenance of those things as well as the activity needed to sustain our physical lives. This approach allows us to ask whether the products of our work are labor-saving devices or labor-creating devices. Is the sum of our work plus labor precluding freedom? Rather than perpetually increasing economic activity—striving for more jobs and growth—perhaps we could redefine prosperity as a striving to increase our ‘freedom from labor’? Escaping the trap of economic orthodoxy is only half the problem. Creating a new economic paradigm is the other half. Stilwell (2016a:146) argues that “any program to drive political economic change requires critique, vision, strategy and organisation.” This paper will follow the path beyond critique set out by Stilwell, fleshing out potential ideas for vision, strategy and organisation; although I propose a slight modification of his use of the latter term. Whilst it is essential to have “organisational vehicles with clear goals and adequate resources” (Stilwell 2016a:146), we must also imagine how our physical environment might be organised in an alternative economic paradigm. Economics must be examined not in abstract terms but by reference to the real world so as to address the disconnect between it and the laws of physics (Daly, 2009:252) because economic ideas influence the development of the human habitat— the city—within the natural environment in which it is located. In developing a strategy to achieve the vision I will discuss how various heterodox economic systems such as the Gift Economy2, the Regenerative Economy3, the Steady State Economy4, the Sufficiency Economy5 as well as critiques from Feminist6 Economics might contribute to the organisation of a new paradigm. It is argued that each of these has merit and could contribute to vision, strategy or organisation but the future economic system must embrace and address the issues raised by all of them. A second aspect of the strategy would require that diverse critiques inform a clear and simple narrative. The concept of the Circular Economy—which presently relates only to the production of goods and strives by design to produce no waste—offers significant potential. Mainstream economists and major banks7 are exploring the idea of the Circular Economy and the European Union8,9 advocates for a strategic shift 2
Refer Cheal (1988) Refer Fullerton (2015) 4 Refer Daly (2008) 5 Refer Alexander (2015) 6 Critiques by Nelson (1995) 7 The European Investment Bank (EIB), ING, Rabobank have all prepared reports on the basis—as stated by the EIB—that “The circular economy is an imperative for the Member States of the European Union in order to tackle material scarcity and price volatility as well as the degradation of the natural environment.” 8 Briefing to European Parliament (2016) reads: “Unlike the traditional linear economic model based on a 'take-make-consume-throw away pattern, a circular economy is based on sharing, leasing, reuse, repair, refurbishment and recycling, in an (almost) closed loop, where products and the materials they contain are highly valued. In practice, it implies reducing waste to a minimum.” 3
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‘From a Linear to a Circular Economy’. Heterodox economists could hook onto this narrative but then expand the concept of the Circular Economy to incorporate other systemic concerns. That is to say, the Circular Economy could become an umbrella term that fully embraces many other critiques. This expanded idea of the Circular Economy proposes to use the term ‘circular’ not just in the sense of ‘cycles’ but also to infer ‘holistic’ or ‘systems thinking’. To integrate heterodox ideas, the aim will be to examine how these contribute to, and fit within, a more holistic imaginary of a human society nested within the natural environment and consisting of more than just ‘economy’. By thinking in terms of cities as systems that provide for their citizens, the Circular Economy can be conceptualised as a model for planning in both space and time not just for growth but also for decay. This would embrace both the Steady-State and Regenerative economic ideas. City planning would include water cycle and the carbon cycle management, planning for product life cycles as well as designing for generational change and human life cycles. The cities focus also addresses feminist economics through the relationship between the household and the city. The approach in this paper is to ask what is ‘economics’ and what should the project of economics be about? I will define ‘freedom’ and ‘economics’ so as to explore the relationship between work within the economy and freedom from the economy. Liberty being the space and time to pursue art, sport, rest and other ‘uneconomic’ activities. The Problem of Orthodoxy In setting out to build a new story—a vision for the future and a strategy for getting there—we must acknowledge the Problem of Orthodoxy. Simply put, ‘orthodox’ literally means ‘correct opinion’, which is an oxymoron—there can be no ‘correct’ opinion or belief. An orthodoxy is a politically imposed order. Our current political belief system advocates ‘jobs and growth’ in the economy, which is believed to take us to a prosperous future. Interestingly. the word ‘pro-sper’ literally means ‘according to our hopes’. We therefore must describe what we are hoping for and what a prosperous future looks like? Western societies rest on the heritage of the philosophical debates that underpinned the French and American Revolutions. These left us with clear visions of a prosperous future, framing much of our subsequent political discourse around the ideals of liberty and equality. In the same period, the Scientific Revolution triggered a great leap in our understanding of the physical world, enhancing our economic systems through the advancement of technologies.
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European Commission Press Release, Brussels, 2 December 2015. Closing the loop: Commission adopts ambitious new Circular Economy Package to boost competitiveness, create jobs and generate sustainable growth. For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/circulareconomy/index_en.htm
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Any political economy must straddle these two fundamentally different ways of thinking. It must connect our daily, real-world actions with an imagined ideal future. The climate change debate epitomises the clash between the politically imposed order and our scientific understanding of the natural order. To resolve this the political order must align with the natural order. In our relationship to nature we must accept that we are subordinate to natural laws, including the laws of physics. That is, insofar as our economic system is concerned with managing the natural world to provide water, food, shelter and other ‘goods’, we must obey physical laws and work within the physical constraints of our geography and climate. It is argued that as we work with—and not against—natural systems, enhancing them with technology and collaborating as equals, we can in fact, achieve the ideal of liberty. The greater the efficiency with which we can satisfy our economic needs and wants, the greater will be our collective freedom from economy. Liberty as the Gift of Society through Freedom from Economy Much discussion in political and social philosophy is devoted to the ideas of liberty and freedom—terms that tend to be used interchangeably. Carter (2016) provides10 a most useful characterisation of freedom: MacCallum defines the basic concept of freedom … as … a triadic relation — that is, a relation between three things… Any statement about freedom or unfreedom can be translated into a statement … specifying what is free or unfree, from what it is free or unfree, and what it is free or unfree to do or become. Using this characterisation, we can say that the agent is each individual in a society constrained by our natural animal condition. We therefore need to work to provide certain natural needs—principally, food, water, energy (fire) and shelter. These represent the physiological needs at the bottom level of the ‘hierarchy of needs’ proposed by Maslow (1943:370). To reach the highest level of ‘self-actualization’ a person must be liberated from the need to work for the provision of the lower level needs. Maslow (1943:382) describes the need for self-actualization in this way: Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still … expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. Liberty, therefore, is the gift a society offers to each individual. It represents the freedom from the work needed to satisfy basic needs. It is the gift offered in return for the work the individual has given at other times. The pursuit of liberty is therefore the pursuit of an organisational structure for the society such that everyone’s basic needs 10
in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy definitions of liberty (First published Thu Feb 27, 2003; substantive revision Tue Aug 2, 2016) refer to 4. One Concept of Liberty: Freedom as a Triadic Relation
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are satisfied and everyone also has the freedom to be what they must be and to create what we call ‘culture’. We may therefore potentially distinguish liberty from freedom in this way: the ‘economy’ and the ‘liberty to pursue happiness’ are two realms within the society. In order for the cultural realm to develop, individuals must be gifted freedom from the economy. Economics in the City This view—that there exists a realm outside of economics—is not a new idea. Aristotle opens his discourse11 on economics as follows: The sciences of politics and economics differ not only as widely as a household and a city (the subject-matter with which they severally deal), but also in the fact that the science of politics involves a number of rulers, whereas the sphere of economics is a monarchy… Now a city is an aggregate made up of households … possessing in itself the means to a happy life. The compound Greek word ‘eco-nomia’ literally means ‘household-management’, allowing us to locate economics in a physical place. It aligns also with our current dichotomy of private domain and public domain representing the separation of individual interests from collective interests. Yet these processes—the economic and the political—are clearly interdependent. To ensure that the household work domain did not encroach on the free cultural domain, the Greeks deliberately divided the society into two groups as shown in Figure 1—the free men would be in the political domain to pursue culture (art, theatre) and manage the collective interests of the city (politics, philosophy), while the women and slaves would be located in the household to do the (mostly agricultural) work. That the city excluded the household domain can be interpreted from the original Greek and Latin definitions of ‘city’, which referred to the ‘citizen collective’, that is, the collective of free men. Figure 1. Greek idea of ‘city’
Figure 2. A holistic city
11
Aristotle, ‘Economics’, Book 1 section 1343a, translation by Forster E.S.
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We have inherited this ancient Greek perception of the household as separate from the city or political realm12, insofar as we view the private domain as separate from the public and also the agricultural work as somehow outside the city. As a consequence, city planning invariably excludes the planning of food systems to ensure adequate supply for the citizens. Surely we ought to consider the most basic of the citizens’ needs when we are planning the organisation of an economic system or city? A better approach would be to explicitly acknowledge that private domains are a subset of the public city as in Figure 2 and not separate from it or even a separate ‘sector’. The choices and decisions made in households, when aggregated, define the character of the city as a whole. For example, if most households choose to build large detached houses with private vehicles for transport then this influences the scale and character of public infrastructure required to support them and therefore determines the structure of the city. By contrast, if most choose high density living then the buildings in the city will be different as will the transport infrastructure, simply because public transport becomes more feasible in a denser city. This is not to say one option is better than the other but to illustrate that private and public choices are interdependent. Public decisions influence private life as private decisions influence public life. Economics should be viewed as part of a political economy that influences, and can be influenced by, the physical spaces and infrastructure we create. The design of the economy therefore is crucial in the design of a city-society. The design must include a way of putting a fence around the economy so that there are spaces and times for freedom from the economy in which individuals can pursue whatever ultimately makes them happy. Defining the Household To begin designing the economy we must examine the concept—suggested by Aristotle—that the household (or the family) is the basic unit of a city. How, though, should we define household when this has changed so dramatically in recent decades? In the (ABS 2011) Census, over 24 percent of Australian households were occupied by a single person. By contrast, in Aristotle’s time the household was much larger even than our nuclear family and usually consisted of three generations as well as slaves. It was therefore a small community in itself. This leads us to ask what is the most appropriate scale for the basic unit of society? Is it the individual, the nuclear family or some larger grouping? Gerber (2016:902) also refers to Aristotle to distinguish between the wise management of the household from the activity of making money. Using this distinction, we could broadly characterise exchanges outside the household as requiring money while within they do not. A deliberate and definable separation here is useful and the basic unit of society could then be viewed as a gift economy, while the part of the city outside these basic units is the money economy. To be clear this 12
The comparison of these perspectives; that the private domain is separate from public city rather than a subset of the whole city is discussed at length in Liaros, S. Rethinking the City, chapters 1 and 2.
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conception of the gift economy is quite distinct from the anarchist utopian ideal envisaged by Leahy (2011) but aligns instead with Cheal (1988) who argues that two economies already exist in our society—the large-scale market economy of short term profits and the small-scale moral or gift economy of long-term interests. This also aligns with Wright (2016:14) who describes the household as the “noncompetitive social space of reciprocity and caring in which one can find refuge from the heartless competitive world of capitalism”. This, of course, takes us into the territory of feminist economics where, for example, Power (2004:4) argues that starting places matter “caring labor and domestic labor are vital parts of any economic system and should be incorporated into the analysis from the beginning, not shoehorned in as an afterthought.” If we valued caring and domestic labor in monetary terms, then we would be attempting to shoehorn it into the money economy. Our ‘starting place’ therefore, should be to acknowledge that our economy consists of two domains, the domain of monetary exchanges and the domain of free exchanges. In order to free ourselves from money we should be expanding the range of activities we offer and accept as free gifts. As we expand the non-competitive domain of reciprocity and caring we necessarily diminish the competitive domain, releasing us from the system that compels us to increase our herd without limit. The organisation of a possible new paradigm is starting to take shape. Figure 3 shows a city with a notional eight basic units, with the money economy operating only in the spaces outside these basic units. By increasing the scale of the basic unit we can reduce the extent to which we must rely on the competitive, money economy. The degree of influence that the money economy exercises over individual lives depends directly on the scale of the gift economy within which we live. Figure 3. Money and Money-free economies
This highlights a significant contradiction. In Figure 2, the basic unit is the domain of work and the political domain offers freedom, while Figure 3 appears to suggest that the basic unit offers freedom and the money economy is the space of work. We will return to this apparent contradiction later. Nevertheless, at this point we can at least argue that a larger basic unit increases free gifts and with it the opportunity for a happy life.
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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness From a strategic perspective, it would be very useful to adopt existing visions that resonate within our society and that we believe we are already collectively pursuing. The pursuit of happiness in the United States’ Declaration of Independence aligns with both Aristotle’s argument that this is the purpose of politics and Maslow’s argument that this is the highest need for all individuals. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.13 This Declaration identifies equality and the right to liberty as being ‘self-evident’ truths. That our society is presently characterised by increasing inequality (Stiglitz, 2012) does not imply that the vision or ideal is inappropriate but rather that our strategy for achieving it is flawed. Clearly our current approach to equality is taking us in the wrong direction and our strategy may possibly require that we do the very opposite of what we are currently doing! Liberty and equality have been used in countless different ways to justify often opposing objectives, but rarely is their relationship explored. We currently have a divided and competitive public conversation where the libertarian right prioritises freedom over equality and the socialist left does the opposite. As we are pursuing both liberty and equality, the relationship between these concepts must be explored. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958:31) offers a useful starting place: What all Greek philosophers … took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and [so] to become free. … This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity [ie. The state of being happy, intense happiness, bliss] In other words, the Ancient Greeks imagined that the political domain is the realm of freedom, and the household (or basic unit) is the domain of necessity, that is, the domain in which we maintain and sustain life through the provision of basic needs. To be free is to master your natural needs and to master the body. This framing of freedom gave rise to such ideas as ‘man conquering nature’ and also justified slavery and the oppression of women in the household. If freedom is achieved through force and violence, which the Greeks believed was “the only means”14 to master necessity then a few free men reached that goal through deliberately creating and enforcing inequality. We can agree that sustenance of life and liberty are inalienable rights. Yet if liberty is achieved by intentionally preventing 13 14
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence Arendt op. cit. p.31
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others from achieving that same liberty, then our economic system delivers neither freedom nor equality. The Greek polis offered freedom for some through inequality; by shifting onto others the work needed to sustain life. Although we have notionally eliminated slavery in the Western world our economic system creates money through debt. Consequently, for some citizens to be wealthy—and hence free—many others must carry significant debt. Our critique of the current system is that it achieves freedom through inequality, while our vision and our desired city organisation must achieve freedom through equality. If all men—or rather all people—are created equal, then we need a strategy for achieving liberty and equality concurrently for all. If the household is a domain of violence and inequality, the head of the household will enter the public domain with these characteristics. The basic unit of society must be a ‘non-competitive social space of reciprocity and caring’, that is, a space characterised by equality. This will shape the character of the city when these basic units are aggregated. We therefore need an alternative strategy for satisfying our basic, natural needs. How can we master necessity without conquering either other people or nature? Can we imagine and design the basic unit of the city so as to provide our basic needs through non-competitive means? Perhaps we could think in terms of stewardship rather than mastery? To satisfy our basic needs within the basic unit, requires that it be larger than both the individual and the nuclear family as it might take a hamlet or village-scale community to efficiently manage food, water and energy systems, and also provide shelter for all the residents. Given that we wish to maximise the scale of the gift economy so as to minimise the money economy, a larger scale basic unit would be useful in satisfying both objectives. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar (1993:691) argues “that there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships … and that this in turn limits group size”. The number should be thought of as a range from 150 – 200 individuals but 150 is now known as the Dunbar Number. A village scale community about this size might be the upper limit for the basic unit of society. The basic unit is the domain of ‘work’ in accordance with the Greek construction but as it includes a significant number of people this also becomes a political realm. We are planning for equality and not for a monarchy as per Aristotle and so we encounter the earlier contradiction between Figures 2 and 3. Can the basic unit be a domain of work and of freedom? Where is the opportunity for freedom if both the private and public realms are infiltrated by work? This raises a serious problem with respect to our understanding of ‘work’ and the simple dichotomy of private and public domains created by the Greeks. Labor, Work and Action City planning is about people and the human habitat. It is imperative therefore, that we understand the human condition. Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) provides a useful basis for understanding economic and political activities of people and how these influence economies and cities. Rather than our inherited public/private dichotomy, Arendt (1958:7) starts with a distinction between labor, work and action:
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Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. … Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in… the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. … Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality…[and is] the condition… of all political life. The deliberate distinction between labor and work acknowledges the critiques of feminist economists that identify caring labor and domestic labor as vital but unvalued parts of the economic system. According to Greek thinking, the political domain was the domain of action, while the household domain was the domain of labor and work. To be fully human, in the Greek sense was to be ‘amongst men’. The Latin word ‘civilised’ and its Greek equivalent originate from the idea of ‘living amongst men’ in a political environment. Yet work is both private and public. Lopes (2016:25) argues “contra mainstream economists and also contra Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas, that work goes beyond instrumentality and has a political and public dimension.” Arendt, though, did not argue that work belongs in the private domain but that that is the way the Greeks perceived it. She simply describes how our words and ideas have developed from, and continue to be influenced by, Greek and Roman ideas from more than 2,500 years ago. The activity of work can be viewed as public when it relates to the development of a creative idea that is then converted into a thing (a work), which is utilised as a laborsaving device. Work undertaken in this way has the capacity to liberate us from necessity. How much Work is enough? So how much work is enough? What is the point of making tools, machines, buildings and cities if they simply generate more labor in their maintenance? Surely the purpose of making things is to liberate us from labor. If the things we create generate more labor—or cost us more time in money-generating activities—then work is increasing our labor and decreasing our liberty. The best lens through which to view this is through the concept of efficiency. Efficiency in physics is the ratio of work input to work output. There are two ways of maximising efficiency. Either we can maximise the outputs for any given inputs OR we could minimise the inputs needed to deliver the desired outputs. The approach of economists and governments today is to maximise outputs for the available input of natural resources and human labor. An alternative approach is to determine how much is sufficient or desirable and then minimise the energy, resources and human labor needed to deliver this.
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Alexander (2015:66) recognises the need to identify a sufficient level of consumption in what he calls a Sufficiency Economy, which: … is shaped by an acceptance that ‘just enough is plenty’. ... Rather than progress being seen as a movement toward ever-increasing material affluence, the sufficiency economy aims for a world in which everyone’s basic needs are modestly but sufficiently met, … human beings would [then] realise that they were free from the demands of continuous economic activity and could therefore dedicate more of their energies to non-materialistic pursuits, such as enjoying social relationships, connecting with nature, exploring the mysteries of the universe, or engaging in peaceful, creative activity of various sorts. The one issue not accounted for in the sufficiency economy (also known as Simplicity) Is who determines how much is sufficient? This is a question of politics relating to the plurality of opinions and although Alexander advocates voluntary simplicity or frugality, advocacy alone does not amount to a political system that strives towards an unclear goal. Viewed through the lens of efficiency rather than frugality and applicable solely to the basic unit and not the whole of the city, a very effective political system can develop. The focus on the basic unit allows us to address only certain basic needs and not all needs and wants in an economy. If we plan to provide, say, water, food, energy and housing for the people within the basic unit, this will account for a very substantial proportion of current overall economic activity. Planning can then be undertaken for a discrete number of people and the starting point can be the Dunbar number of 150 people. The demand for these basic needs is generally inelastic, that is, demand does not vary significantly with price. This suggests that providing them through a market is perhaps not the most efficient approach anyway. The demand for basics is also less subject to variability. Figures for water usage per person per day are widely available. Many studies have been carried out to determine what and how much people eat. Energy usage is a known quantity and we all can only occupy one home at any one time. It is not necessary to stipulate specific numbers as these vary in different societies and current usage is only a starting point in our planning process. If we plan for an abundance of these basic needs for our pre-determined population then supply will exceed demand and the price tends toward zero. All of these things could be free. Planning for a discrete number of people and for a discrete range of needs makes the design much more straightforward. The climatic and geographic conditions in each place will differ so each basic unit will be different and unique but nevertheless able to be designed. At the time of writing the author is developing a project which aims “to design and implement integrated closed-cycle systems that provide a pre-determined population with efficient living and working spaces and an abundance of water, food and energy.” The intention is to demonstrate that by matching supply with demand and providing in abundance for a given population, the economic problem is solved without the need for a market for these basics. The total energy—whether this is fossil fuels, renewables or human labor—required to produce these basic needs will also be significantly lower because of the proximity of - 11 -
the producer to the final consumer. We can know this because it is a law of physics. The formula for ‘work’, which is a form of energy is: Work (W) = Force (F) needed to displace an object a distance (s) Therefore, the smaller the transport distance ‘s’, the smaller will be the total work needed. Also, as the force (F) needed is proportional15 to the mass (m) of the object being transported, far less energy is needed to send information (with negligible mass) over the internet for local production, say with a 3D printer, than is needed in the current mass production and distribution process. Production ‘on-demand’ is also more energy efficient than mass production. This approach therefore is not planning for frugality but for an abundance of basic needs delivered at the lowest cost and with the least energy, focusing on distributive efficiency rather than solely on productive efficiency. Figure 4 illustrates how a larger scale basic unit could be designed to efficiently provide basic needs and then offer liberty. Imagine the basic unit as the domain of labor, or more accurately the domain of collaboration (ie. co-laboring). By working together and providing basic needs locally we can minimise the total labor needed. Freedom from labor would be available both within the private spaces and also outside the basic unit. Figure 4. Collaboration within the basic unit and Freedom from Collaboration
How much Growth is enough? Just as Alexander (2015) objects to limitless economic growth, so too do proponents of De-Growth, Steady State and Regenerative Economics. Kerschner (2010:549) describes how de-growth and steady-state are complementary arguing that economic ‘growth’ and ‘de-growth’ are phases within a “quasi steady-state” or “dynamic equilibrium”. Adding regeneration after the de-growth phase before a new phase of growth, precisely aligns with the growth, decay, death and regeneration phases in the life cycles of all life species. Describing these as phases in a Circular Economy is the logical next step. Fullerton (2015:13) describes how the development of a regenerative 15
Force (F) = Mass (m) x Acceleration (a)
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economy requires a shift from a mechanistic (linear logic) to a holistic worldview, which is consistent with the proposed narrative: ‘From a Linear to Circular Economy’. Daly (2008:40) argues that there should be no further growth beyond what is described as an ‘optimal’ level because “so called ‘economic’ growth already has become uneconomic, increasing environmental costs faster than any production benefits, making us poorer not richer.” The environmental limits to growth has been well established, at least since Boulding (1966) and through comprehensive modelling by Meadows et al (1972). Yet is it possible to define ‘optimal’ any more than defining what is ‘sufficient’? Whereas defining ‘sufficient’ requires a political process, defining ‘optimal’ requires that we collectively understand the natural environment and its capacity to support a given population in a particular place. It is essential therefore that we determine the ‘optimal’ level locally—at the location of each basic unit—and not attempt to determine this at a national or global scale. Design of a basic unit requires planning for a discrete range of basic physiological needs and for a discrete population. Conclusion It might be useful to conclude by revising some of the attempts to describe sustainable development, which originated with the idea that Ecology, Society and Economy were separate fields and that sustainable development occurred somewhere and somehow at their intersection. Giddings (2002) reviews the literature and notes that the material reality locates the economy within society, which in turn is nested within the environment (Figure 5). Yet ‘society’ does not exist in material reality but the ‘city’, if defined as the human habitat, does. Defining the city limits requires that we define the city as the citizen population to be located in a particular place. Matching the population to the capacity of the land in a particular location is the best way to define sustainability. This uses the idea of one planet living but applied to each locality. Figure 6 shows that by defining the city limits we can then describe and value the wilderness that lies beyond. Figure 5. Material Reality
Figure 6. City (not society) exists in Material Reality
At a global scale, Figure 6 would translate into Figure 7 in which we would see the world as a global network of cities, each constituted of a network of basic units. - 13 -
Essentially all economic activity (both work and labor) would be contained within the city limits, so as not to affect the wilderness. Maximising liberty and wilderness requires that we minimise economic activity, while providing an abundance of basic needs. This is possible only if efficiency is viewed as the minimisation of energy inputs needed to deliver the desired outputs, so creating freedom from labor for the pursuit of happiness (Figure 8). The most energy efficient approach—balancing both productive and distributive efficiency—for satisfying our needs and wants requires that local production be maximised and trade minimised. This is a reversal of the current economic strategies for maximising trade and ignoring or discouraging local production of free goods. Recent suggestions that robots and other technologies will likely take a large proportion of jobs in the near future can then be viewed with excitement rather than concern. If cities and their basic units are designed as suggested above—for the sustenance of life and liberty—then the jobs taken by technology offers liberty; and rather than pursuing a Universal Basic Income, the basic unit so designed will provide our basic needs. Figure 7. Global network of basic units
Figure 8. Wild and Free
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