IN this thought-provoking book, Bill McKibben gives us a chance to re-examine our traditional views about economic growth. The title itself, “Deep Economy,” challenges the academic definition of the economy. The basic idea of this powerful manifesto is that economic growth no longer makes people wealthier and happier but instead generates inequality and insecurity.
The media’s interest with economic growth began after World War II when businessmen and economists realized that the American mobilization for war clearly showed how fast the economy could grow. In 1943, President Roosevelt received a report prepared by the National Resources Planning Board which forecast an economic growth “likely to surpass the wildest estimates of a few years back and is capable of bringing to all of our people freedom, security and adventure in richer measure than ever before in history.” From thereon, America, soon followed by the rest of the world, became obsessed with economic growth.
More than six decades later, Bill McKibben acknowledges that despite gigantic economic growth, most people around the world have relatively little to show for it. Growth is simply not enriching most of the world’s citizens. The median wage in the United States is the same as it was 30 years ago and in Latin America the real per capita income has not changed for 25 years. The author reckons that most of the growing wealth has filled very few (silk-lined) pockets and despite its long term failure, partisans of the growth theory still manage to have their say “in part because elite journalists and pundits found themselves on the happy side of the economic chasm.”
The author gives a striking example of the recent front page of the New York Times which reported the record-setting bonuses Wall Street executives had received and a few columns away a picture of a poor Mexican farmer who did not have the means to invest in greenhouses and pesticides to produce the perfectly round tomato required by global supermarket giants such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour. The reporter, Celia Dugger, concluded that the danger is that “millions of struggling small farmers... will go bust and join streams of desperate migrants to America and to the urban slums of their own countries.”
Yet, despite the growing evidence of a widening gap between the “super rich” and the rest of the world, most of us are more influenced by the people seen in the media than by the ordinary men and women living around us. America’s biggest exports are its television programs which project an idea of a good life greatly disconnected from what is happening in the rest of the world. Television programs, far too focused on the lifestyles of the rich and upper middle class, give the viewer a distorted impression of what is worth acquiring in order to be happy and wealthy. Furthermore, they create the widely believed assumption that people are judged by how they spend.
The increasing recognition in the late 1960s that the economy was loosing its link with our actual world prompted the development of a new school of ecological economics under the guidance of Bob Costanza and Herman Daly, a World Bank economist, co-founders of the society of Ecological Economics.
Ecological economists argue that natural and created capital complement each other, or, in other words, you can’t get richer, at least for long, by impoverishing the world around you.
They also claim that more is not effectively better.
One of the most interesting chapters concerns the consumption of local food. The author acknowledges that an increasing number of people all around the world are reacting against globalization and a directionless society by returning to their roots. This trend is particularly apparent where food is concerned. There are special food channels and without a doubt people everywhere are rediscovering the pleasure of eating regional cooking.
In the last decade “community supported agriculture” has grown fast. Consumers pay farmers a few hundred dollars apiece and are then supplied with a weekly basket of all kinds of vegetables and fruit throughout the growing season. Sociologists have recently reported that people who go to farmer’s markets talk 10 times more than at supermarkets. Furthermore, according to the most recent statistics, smaller farms produce far more per acre; they use land, water, and oil far more efficiently. Industrialized farming is not the most productive way of farming.
Vietnam was urged by the World Bank to stop growing rice and start growing coffee. After terrible deforestation and over-fertilization, Vietnam became the second coffee-producing country in the world at the expense of traditional coffee growing countries like Uganda who are paid a mere 200 shillings per kilo while a cup of Starbucks coffee costs the equivalent of 5,000 Ugandan shillings.
The world’s population continues to grow and the amount of farmland and water is shrinking: Five companies presently control 75 percent of the global vegetable seed market. Therefore, a system of small farms may soon have to play a central role in the feeding of the planet. Bill McKibben concludes that eating local food has given him a web of connections he was previously unaware of. “I’ve gotten to eat with my brain as well as my tongue: Every meal comes with a story. In my role as eater, I was part of something larger than myself that made sense to me: A community. I felt grounded, connected.”
In our quest for a better job, a bigger house and always more money, we give up what makes up our identity, a community and an extended family. “Our affluence isolates us more... never mind the fact that when people live near where they grew up, within reach of family and old friends, their lives are more stable and their marriages are less likely to falter. In fact, the more invidualistic a society, the higher the divorce rate... If people are highly mobile, they feel less bonded to the people among whom they live, and crime is more common,” says Bill McKibben.
To keep the economy growing and the consumers in rich countries spending on stuff they don’t really need, advertising plays an essential role. Ads project substitute images of friendship and family, which satisfy us only to a certain point. Then the advertiser has to come up with another false promise.
As we gradually realize that in a changed world security is more precious than a higher income, “comfort will come less from ownership than from membership.”
“Deep Economy” not only challenges our traditional views of the economy but it also suggests pursuing prosperity in a more local direction. The book enlightens us on the existence of local economies thriving in the shadow of globalization. Bill McKibben inspires us and fills us with hope and ideas.
