The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Poverty, Wealth and Money In The New Green Age (Principles of the Green Age #1.1)

This is the second article in my “Principles of the New Green Age” Series. You can read the first, here.

The first principle was

Do as thou will, so long as you increase biodiversity and biomass, reduce pollution and heat, and replace any resources used.

In the real olden days of civilization, in the Fertile Crescent (which really was fertile before most of it was turned into desert) there was a dual currency system: there was grain and there was silver (and what amounted to certificates of deposit on both, along with usurious loans.)

This worked well because, to oversimplify slightly, grain was produced in Mesopotamia and silver wasn’t. If you wanted to buy something else produced in Mesopotamia, you bought with grain. But if you wanted to buy something imported, you paid in silver.

Since silver could only be gotten thru trade, this meant that import and export flows were more or less in order: there could be no massive trade deficits outside the fertile crescent, at least in principle.

Though they didn’t do it, even better would have been that certain things could only be bought with internally produced grain: property, for example. That way your country’s productive ability couldn’t be bought out from under you.

In Green Age ideology there will be more than one type of money, probably three. The first is money based on renewable resources: it will be usable only to buy and sell renewable resources. The second will be based on non-renewable resources and will be strictly controlled. There may also be as pollution based based money, or rather one based on cleaning up pollution, or people may be rewarded with the other two types of money for doing so.

Though we haven’t gotten there yet, one of the Green Age principles will have something to do with taking care of everyone, and part of that will be making sure everyone has food and shelter.

Since there is a societal effort in making renewables actually renew, part of every country’s surplus will be distributed as what amounts to basic income to individuals. That amount, in most countries, certainly all countries with a renewable food surplus, meaning they produce enough food and are not degrading the land to do so, will be sufficient to feed recipients for a year.

Likewise everyone will have a home: one that works out to be pollution neutral when taken in context of the supporting infrastructure. That home will either be given, purchased or leased, with strict controls, and probably mostly long leases, similar to how Singapore works) because it is possible to build houses with materials entirely domestically sources in many countries, though we’ll have to figure out how to electrical wiring sustainably or put it into the unsustainable bucket.

Society is made up of everyone and one of the principles must be that everyone benefits from society’s successes. Even the rich and powerful (who will be kept strictly under control, with the richest have a multiple, perhaps 4x, what the lowest have), must know that for them to do better, everyone must do better and that the environment must do better. This sort of genuine alignment of interests is necessary for any society to function well, and absolutely necessary in any purpose driven society, which Green Age societies will need to be.

So if you’re a member of a green age society created along these lines: the government will make sure you have a home and food. Either you’ll get enough renewable money to get them for yourselves, or there’ll be a non-market mechanism.

In effect, based on how many renewable resources the society produces, you’ll have an income relative to how well society is actually doing. Everyone will. This will pay for things like food, housing, water and anything the country can produce and renew. Since everyone gets this money, there will be strong incentives to create as much out of renewable resources as possible, similar to, but far more healthy than, the great middle class consumer production boom of the post-War period.

If, on the other hand, what you want requires non-renewable resources, well, you’ll need the second type of money, and that will be far harder to come by.

A Green Age society cannot afford the obscenely wealthy, because such people always tend to psychopathy and acting against the common good. It also cannot afford the poor, either, for the same reason: everyone needs to be connected to the successes and failures of society and have a stake in them.

This doesn’t mean a society where there’s no individual or group income. Limited liability companies will go, because people need to be liable for polluting and for not renewing, but there will be organizations and many of them will, at least somewhat, run on money. But somewhere between one-third and a half of your income should be based on how society as a whole is doing, and that income should be enough enough to keep you decently housed and fed, with access to medical care.

Sayings like “a rising tide lifts all boats” aren’t expressions of natural law when they come to social matters: we need to make them true.

If we want to clean up the environment and live in a sustainable society, we’ll have to make it happen, and part of that involves making sure no one can avoid either the positive or negative effects of their actions on the environment.

No obscene rich, no poor.

 

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14 Comments

  1. I have struggled to find a way to address the vast disparity in wealth in our society. One thought has been to classify money by how it is earned. If it is derived by from non tangible processes then its future use gets restricted to transactions in the same vein. This prevents this type of fortune from use as political contributions as well as purchasing property.
    What Mr. Welsh formulates is simpler. It needs further exposition. I look forward to future articles. I too hope to articulate a way forward for a more just society.

  2. John

    Regarding your last line, being too poor should be considered a societal obscenity as well as being too rich.

  3. Eric Anderson

    David Lamy:
    I think the easiest route, to which Ian alludes, is literally forcing accountability in economic theory to the laws of physics. I’ve spoken much about the fact that virtutally every economic regime in the world fails to account for negative externalities. The old saw is perfectly true: We socialize the harms, and privatize the benefits. But those socialized harms mean something — greater marginal profit. I honestly believe were someone to thoroughly run the numbers on the negative externalities of “business as usual,” and add those debits to the accounting spreadsheet, the margin pf profit would fall so precipitously as to walk and quack like a steady state economy duck.

    It’s an accounting ruse staring us all in the face for all history. But, it’s also the “conventional wisdom.,” so pervasive, that an Economics professor will stare at you and reply “But how do you make a ‘profit'”??? Completely ignorant of the illogic of the statement.

    Which, anecdotally, was exactly what occurred when I asked my Econ prof while studying for my M.S. in Bioregional Planning and Community Design.

  4. Mel

    It’s tough to work those harmful externalities into standard economic theory. There aren’t accurate prices for harms. There’s no market for harms to establish prices because nobody wants to buy harms.

  5. Curt Kastens

    A normal comment on Ianwelsh.net is worth a 1000 pictures.
    Eric plus Mel = Tums way up.

  6. no word for time

    You can’t separate money from debt to any serious degree. Economic libertarians and the like talk about a ‘debt-based society’ as if there has ever been, or could be, anything other than a society based on debt once ‘money’ (or some placeholder) is introduced. There never has been. The entire point of money in the first place was to create debtors. This is control.

    Michael Hudson talks about debt jubilees and the fact that kings of old had them and that the original meaning of the lord’s prayer was ‘forgive us our debts’ as opposed to ‘forgive us our trespasses.’ This is all fine and well but, again, why the money and debt in the first place?

    For the better part of human history, absolutely no one had to remain viable to ‘creditors’ or ‘lenders’ of any sort whatsoever.

    Today, we teach ourselves and our children that it is ‘responsible’ to take on debt and learn how to roll with it. ‘Growing up’ means both earning substantial sums in some ‘occupation’ and then taking on various substantial debt loads (education, house, etc). This wholesale societal zeitgeist creates very shallow personal identities, EVEN if the ‘job’ or ‘career’ one chooses is personally meaningful, and even socially necessary/useful.

    Money always ultimately supersedes everything else. And it does this even if a person is aware of this and consciously makes every effort to avoid falling into the money trap.

    “Money may not buy happiness, but it sure keeps the kids in touch!”

    “Why plant when there are so many mongongo nuts?”

    Why ‘work’ so hard for that matter?

  7. bruce wilder

    I am not sure why people shy from recognizing that it takes an element of psychopathy (I prefer “sociopathy” – a disease of society, not the psyche, per se, but of course one poison spreads from one to the other) to make and increase a great fortune. Predistribution policy ought to make redistribution much less necessary. We would still need confiscatory inheritance taxes in a reasonably just society to prevent random accumulation from working an injustice just as we would need cheap social insurance, “free” education and other public goods. I just think its weird so many reason as if predatory economic activity is not commonplace and deleterious on society and the environment.

  8. different clue

    @Eric Anderson,

    Some economics/economic-social-political history books findable at Acres USA point a way to the biophysical reality-based economics you would like to see.

    I would suggest Unforgiven: the American System Sold For War And Debt, by Charles Walters Jr.
    https://bookstore.acresusa.com/products/unforgiven

    and also: Raw Materials Economics, also by Charles Walters Jr.
    https://bookstore.acresusa.com/products/raw-materials-economics

    And Charles Walters Jr. himself wrote a tiny micro-article on the National Organization for Raw Materials ( NORM) about how-why he wrote that book. ( This link to that article also allows one to get to other stuff on NORM’s little homepage).
    http://www.normeconomics.com/birth.html

    A book about economics which Walters referrenced in his Unforgiven book as being very inspirational to his own efforts was written by a Nobel Prize Winning ( Twice!) nuclear chemist named Frederick Soddy. Mr. Soddy began wondering, what would economics look like if it were developed by the ground up by a reality-based nuclear chemist with biophysical energy reality in mind? His book was called Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt ( the Solution of the Economic Paradox).

    Here is a pdf of that very book its own self which lets you read the whole book page by page.
    https://archive.org/details/soddy-f.-wealth-virtual-wealth-and-debt-1925/mode/2up

    If you were to read and internalize these books, and rethink whatever parts of them conflicted with reality-based reality as you yourself have experienced it, you might be in a position to create your own ( with or maybe even without some neighbors) reality-based biophysical survival micro-economic Fortress of Subsistence and Survival, if you were to decide it made sense to do that.

  9. StewartM

    Also why for ‘no poor’—what any new ‘green age’ would have to do is to balance any short-term gains against long-term liabilities. The cultures of hunter-gatherers pass this kind of knowledge on, as someone who applies the Protestant work ethic to their lifestyle ends up collecting more food than can be eaten while depleting the resources around them, leading to hunger and privation. Ergo, ‘take only what you need for today’.

    I mention ‘no poor’ because extreme poverty usually forces bad choices on people–driving them to eat their seed corn of tomorrow today to hold off starvation, thus sacrificing tomorrow for today. A certain degree of sufficiency and stability today is required before one can have the luxury of thinking of the future. Everyone makes better long-term plans and can sacrifice for the future when today is not something one needs to worry about.

  10. capelin

    I used to read about “Triple Bottom Line Accounting” – fin, enviro, social – as promoted by the Genuine Progress Index folks.

    Assigning numeric values to non-numeric things is always a bit of a kludge, but it (can) be better than being not counted at all.

  11. Ian Welsh

    David Lamy — I think we need bottoms and caps, on both wealth and income, along with solid guarantees.

    John — agreed

    Eric Anderson — well, it requires more than that, but yes, we cannot tolerate unaddressed negative externalities, especially any related to the environment.

    Bruce Wilder — yes, although I wonder if it’s a chicken/egg problem. It seems to me we select for sociopaths/pyshcopaths. “The Corporation” made the case fairly well and I’ve written about it in the past.

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/how-the-structure-of-everyday-life-creates-sociopathic-corporate-leaders/

    Different clue — interesting book recs.

    Mel — yes. The liabilities will have to be forced, much the way taxes are or regulations.

    Curt Kastens — 🙂

    no word for time — it is probably true that we need to end debt based money.

    Capelin -one needs to specific: what environmental harm are they causing. Is it renewable, no renewable, health pollution, biodiversity reduction, etc, etc…

    StewartM — yes, both poor and rich tend towards pathologies at the social level.

  12. Willy

    The need to build a just and green society seems so obvious that it barely needs mentioning. The problem has always been our (the good guys) weaknesses in the persuasions and implementations which would be needed to achieve such goals. The way things are now, it seems the general population needs to hit bottom first before it’s persuaded to implement.

    Psychopaths are born and are thus incorrigible. Sociopaths are made and are thus redeemable. I’m sure the same thing exists at the other end of that spectrum, the empath end. Not sure what the “made” kind of empaths are called. Ethicals?

    To me it seems that in some societies and under certain conditions the empathic pole is more successful (however that society defines success), and thus many “ethicals” are inspired to be made. In other societies psychopathy is more successful and thus many “sociopaths” are inspired to be made.

    Does hobnobbing about ethical societies help to rebalance society in a more empathic direction? I dunno. I do know that psychopaths/sociopaths will do whatever it takes to unbalance things in their favor, to gain control over the all-important societal persuasions and solutions implementations parts. Should that be a focus instead?

  13. Eric Anderson

    Different clue:

    Sweeeeeeeet. Thanks for the recs my friend. I’ll throw one back at ya that set by brain into over drive:

    More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics and Nature’s Economics by Philip Mirowski:

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/more-heat-than-light/4CD2ADE8D5DE8665E43E2922D7E360B3

    There’s a Chapter that totally exceeds my innumerate brain, but generally it’s totally accessible to the layperson.

    Guess I have some reading to do.

    Oh, also, Steve Keen has a new book coming: “Rebuilding Economics from the Top Down.” He’s releasing the Chapters on Substack: https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/the-anything-goes-market-demand-curve-015

  14. different clue

    @Eric Anderson,

    Thank you for the kind words. And thank you for the book recommendations. Now I have 2 new books which deserve to be read.

    I am thinking of some other books and things to possibly recommend. If I can think of some that I think are worthy of this space, I will name them in case they really are.

    Tony Wikrent of the Sunday Wrap Up also has his own blog on economics and stuff. Here is the link.
    https://www.economicpopulist.org/blogs/tony-wikrent

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