1. Designing the Green Economy: Beyond Scarcity, Toward Abundance
Brian Milani
GreenEconomics.net
Liefhebber Consortium of Green Development
and Bad Dutch Football

2. The Green Economy A Historical Transition: …from Quantity to Quality
A Question of Potentials
…not simply limits
Key to Sustainability:
Redefining Wealth

3. Redefining Wealth I Quantitative: Qualitative: Money & Material
Accumulation
Qualitative:
Well-being
Regeneration

4. Redefining Non-Material Wealth II: Phantom/Casino vs. Real Economy
Casino (debt-based) economy
Eco-service economy

5. Design Dimensions
Political / Financial: trade, money / currency, EPR / property /service
Energy: soft energy path
Technological: cradle-to-cradle, eco-industrialism, Carbo Economy, shearing layers, product design
Spatial: urban design / green cities, localization

6. Principles of a Green Economy
The Primacy of Human Need, Service, Use-value, Intrinsic Value & Quality
Following Natural Flows
Waste Equals Food
Elegance and Multifunctionality
Appropriate Scale / Linked Scale
Diversity
Self-Reliance, Self-Organization, Self-Design
Participation & Direct Democracy
Human Creativity and Development
The Strategic role of the Built-environment, the Landscape & Spatial Design

7. The Green Economy: Human & Eco Dimensions
“The Service Economy”
End-use: “Hot Showers and Cold Beer”
Nutrition, Illumination, Entertainment, Access, Shelter, Community, etc.
The Economy in Loops —
The “Lake Economy”
Flowing with nature, Every output an input, Closed-loop organization, Let nature do the work

8. Common Sense Economics
Increase restrictions on the flow of material goods and physical capital (to minimize transport costs, etc.)
Lessen restrictions on the flow of information and culture.
note:
Globalization does exactly the opposite: via free trade and intellectual property law.
Herman Daly
“Trade Recipes,
not Cookies.”

9. Creativity: the key to Real development
meet real needs:
Don’t use material consumption as a substitute for qualitative fulfillment
Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization
Greening: substitute human creativity for energy and resources.
--People-intensive development
--Resource productivity

10. Mass Collaboration beats competition every time
wikinomics: based in abundance not scarcity
undermines industrial markets

11. Labour & Resource Relationship
Industrial economy: resource-intensive. labour productivity: Substitutes resources for labour.
Green Economy:
people-intensive / resource-saving. Substitutes human creativity for resources

12. Industrialism: The Divided Economy
Invisible Visible
Use-value Exchange-value
“Consumption” “Production”
People Things
Unpaid Paid
Women Men
Informal Formal
Private Public

13. Invisible Economy (1) Total Productive System of an Industrial Society (layer cake with icing)2
GNP-Monetized
½ of Cake
Top two layers
Non-Monetized
Productive ½ of Cake
Lower two layers
GNP “Private” Sector
Rests on
GNP “Public” Sector
Social Cooperative
Love Economy
Nature’s Layer
“Private” Sector
“Public”Sector
“underground economy
“Love Economy”
Mother Nature
All rights reserved Copyright© 1982 Hazel Henderson

14. Invisible Economy (2)

15. The Economy in Loops

16. The Old Order: Materialism and Industrialism
markets best suited to material stuff
steel & autos; not culture and quality of life
Crisis: overproduction and "effective demand"
“Invisible Hand" doesn't work so well in cultural production
post-Depression: Waste as economic driver.

17. Scarcity, Class Power & Waste
War production, suburbanization and effective demand.
Waste of resources
Waste of human potential

18. The Post WW II Waste Economy
Permanent War Economy
The Suburb Economy:
Oil / Autos / Subdivisions

19. “The greatest misallocation of resources in human history
“The greatest misallocation of resources in human history.” …James Howard Kunstler

20. Fordism & the Reinforcement of Industrial Wealth
Matter Waste Fordism Suburbanization/ Consumer Economy War Industry
Money Debt Keynesianism Paper Economy Planned Inflation New forms of credit-money

21. 1970s: End of the Line for the Fordist Waste Solution
saturation of markets
social & environmental costs coming due: fiscal crisis of the state
limits to inflationary strategy
Vietnam war, decline of the dollar, German/Japanese competition
OPEC & the energy crisis
Petrodollars & Currency Crisis

22. Post-Fordist Casino Economy
cost of waste come due: need for new sources of “effective demand”
new technologies & Megabyte Money: money disconnected from Real economy
financial sector: times (?) larger than the material economy
Culture of Speculation: Stomp the weak / Get rich quick
Empty wealth creation: de facto redistribution of wealth.
Polarization of work and society
end of social contracts: attack on Welfare State
the growing gap between rich and poor

23. The Global Casino: Hijacking the Information Revolution
expansion of employment in speculative industry
Wall St.: more advanced technologically than the military.
Bubble Economies: last ‘frontiers’ for capitalist growth.
-stock crash of 1987
-tech stock bubble of late 90s
-housing bubble of
Housing speculation: most destructive & exploitative of the poor & average people.

24. Crisis, Waste & the Suppression of Human Potential
Creating Scarcity since WWII:
Waste production
Debt & funny-money creation
Austerity

25. The Economy & Culture of Fear
Mainstream politics and media today are mobilized for the creation of fear, based in both scarcity and personal insecurity.
Reality TV competitions, extreme fighting, Tea Parties, racist fundamentalism, cultural scapegoating, etc.
Question: should we be careful of adding more fear, however justifiable? (climate change, etc.)

26. Strategies for Abundance
Invest in social and natural regeneration
infrastructure & public goods
Material Economic Security:
meet everyone’s needs
Disable the Coercive power of Money
Community Currencies
Basic Income guarantees
Free Culture: from ownership to access; from belongings to belonging

27. Invest in Social and Natural Regeneration
(includes growing categories of “public goods” and social/eco infrastructure)
increased role for government on all levels
invest in community: the nexus for regenerative development
eliminate externalities: make polluters, extractors, incarcerators pay

28. Property & Stewardship
Ownership should be relative: designed to support stewardship and human development
property: good for earlier materialistic development.
Centralized ownership: EPR
Small-holder stewardship: good for land

29. A New Paradigm of Security
Geared as much to unleashing individual and community creativity as protecting the vulnerable. Eliminates fear on many levels. Deflates the coercive power of money—allows ethical values to factor into personal economic decisions. Supports imagination & innovation that transforms other sectors: e.g. community business.
Meet everyone’s basic needs...or else!

30. Ending the Coercive Power of Money
Community Currencies
especially account-money systems
Basic Income Guarantees
the more universal, the better

31. the appropriate goal: Gift Circulation
Money as information & energy
Brand: “Information wants to be free.”
Requires social / eco value to be embedded in everyday life : indicators
Question: transitional mechanisms