Populating the Steady State Economy (SSE)

The Steady State Economy (SSE) as proposed by Herman Daly is a great and essential idea. He defines a SSE as: "an economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance throughput, that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption."

The above definition is taken from the website of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) whose webpage may be found here.

PR encourages everyone to become familiar with the SSE because it is quite simply the only way mankind can survive! Elementary arithmetic plus a recognition of physical reality reveals that we cannot continue indefinitely taking resources from our planet. We are already witnessing this overconsumption right now and it is causing social stress and deprivation worldwide… imagine what problems there will be if we pursue economic growth for another hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred years! The kind of economics that now dominates our thinking has no future.

But what if economics thinking itself is the root cause of our present problems? If economics is a cause then presumably more economics, albeit of a different kind, is not the solution.

After all, economics is a Modern invention having been created from the end of the 19^th up to present day. Foucault (1970) reveals how this invention came about. But what could take the place of economics? It is so widespread from the transnational global to everyday local levels.

But perhaps our inability to see an alternative to the dominance of economics is no more than a measure of the depth of the problem we have made for ourselves.  It is a measure of how we have refined and extended economics until it dominates every corner of our lives. For example in economic thinking, we live in a world not populated by people but by consumers; we do not buy and sell simply according to our judgement and frugal common sense but in accordance with Free Market ideology; we are not allowed to buy just what we need for a balanced, happy and good life but must be constantly assailed by marketing messages that reveal, in one way or another, our inferiority if we do not want and buy this or that product; and our governments (except for Bhutan) do not possess enough humanity and compassion to lead us to a stable and meaningful future beyond having more stuff!

PR observes that the alternative to the dominance of economics is not more economics. PR goes further to observe that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the way we organise knowledge: we are in transition from a knowledge derived from the abstract, logical belief systems of neo-classical economics to the kind of empirically grounded knowledge that science provides by observing and trying to understand the world and ourselves. This statement sounds truly remote and abstract in itself and this is the same meaning expressed another way: we recognise ourselves and life not as rationalised, independent, predicable economic entities but as real, uncertain, creative, interdependent, living beings whose individual well-being is inextricably linked to the rest of life both human and non-human. So PRs observation involves a shift in attitudes during which we lose an economic identity and gain a, ecological or natural identity (Birkin and Polesie 2011). This kind of change is theoretically simple to make but so hard in practice that most people who live within a economics-dominated world will never leave it.

This kind of change would invert our relationship with economics. Instead of the experience we now have of the dominance of neoclassical economics rationality we would find that more human values, attitudes and knowledge would dominate: we would go from maximising our economic gains to having enough stuff, a sufficiency; from wanting more to being more, and this would in effect provide the people with the right attitudes and values to populate Daly’s SSE.

By courtesy of Conservationbytes.

References

Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: an archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, Routledge.

Birkin, F.K. and Polesie (2011). Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability. Singapore, World Scientific Press.