Feb

8

Sustainability and the new world order (operators standing by)

February 8, 2008 |

So, let me see … where was I?

Ah, yes … a sustainable economy. Possibly you’re wondering exactly what that means or what I’m imagining one of those would look like.

Fair enough.

In a growth economy, it’s all about … well … growth. And that works for awhile. But, in order for an economy to continue to grow, after awhile, consumers have to be trained to do things that don’t make much objective sense.

At first, having consumers run out and buy a bunch of stuff was great — made for lots of jobs, better standards of living, and lots of growth. But eventually, with the exception of perishable items like food, the market for everything was going to be saturated. In order to keep the jobs there and keep the growth happening, consumers had to then be persuaded not just to buy things but to buy them, use them, throw them away and buy them again.

In fact, products began to be designed to fall apart or break or become unfashionable or otherwise useless after a certain amount of time, just to force people to throw them away and run out to buy a new one.

But if you look at it from a slightly different point of view, it’s kind of nuts. Because it is an economic system that is all about waste.

Throughout all that lovely growth, we Americans have generated mountains of trash and burned our way through a small continent’s worth of the planet’s natural resources. In a way, it is indicative of our love affair with economic growth that food prices have gone through the roof and become unaffordable to some people because corn, that staple of the American diet, also happens to be the stuff that most people want to use to make ethanol.

Yes, that’s right. We are so in love with growing the economy that we are poised to sacrifice our ability to feed ourselves to the prospect of making a ton of money in renewable energy. It would be really funny if it weren’t so stupid.

Here’s the thing, though. It has become increasingly apparent that we can’t afford to keep burning our way through our planet’s resources, in both senses of the word. Those resources are finite; if we keep using the stuff faster than the planet can produce it (oil sort of leaps to mind), eventually we’re going to run out of it.

And, as resources become more scarce, they’ll become more expensive and then nobody but seriously wealthy people will be able to afford them anyway. And that will, in turn, do some things to our collective standards of living that most of us would prefer not to contemplate.

Enter sustainability.

The growth economy sort of made sense when manufacturing was a huge chunk of the nation’s economy. But that’s not the way it is anymore. If we keep on doing what we’re doing, the only thing we’ll accomplish is to contribute to making the trade deficit even more gigantic than it already is, since so much of the stuff we seem to want isn’t made here anymore.

Now that we’re transitioning to a service economy, it would make a lot more sense (if we want to think about creating and retaining jobs) to re-train consumers to buy something and keep it in working order for … well, forever. That is, to service it regularly so we don’t have to throw it out.

The retraining is very much necessary, of course. And, also of course, the corporate giants that depend on the status quo will fight tooth and nail to preserve it, largely because it’s just cheaper for them to keep things the way they are than it would be to employ a bit of vision and change with the times.

But the sustainable economy is very much suited to another trend, and that is the explosion in the number of microbusinesses in the country. For one thing, productivity increases and technological advances have meant that it is possible for a business to achieve scale at a much smaller size than was formerly the case. And, when a company does not have to continually grow the size of its operation in order to achieve profitability, what is the point of continued growth other than an insane desire to increase your costs?

Add to that the fact that most microbusiness owners are really not interested in building empires, and you have the bedrock business entity for a sustainable service economy that is more local, more community oriented, greener, less wasteful and more equitably profitable than the one we’ve got.

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