Very clear presentation, thank you. Honestly, steady state economics seems to be the *only* school of economics that has addressed all the hard questions, in a non-contradictory way. I remember as a student at UC Berkeley, when questions about conventional economics became a little too probing and skeptical, that was the moment that professors would wave their hands and change the subject. That simply won't do in the 21st century, now that problems with "growth as usual" are beginning to really manifest themselves.
A steady state was largely the status quo up until the industrial revolution. Also prior to the invention of agriculture for tens of thousands of years. We will reach steady state, but now is not yet the time. 2 things need to happen first. We need a stabilizing population, that is happening in the West and increasingly so in developing countries too. And we also need technological saturation. For the past 150 years technology has evolved at insane speeds because we kept inventing new things and rapidly improving existing things. Inevitably that will stabilize though, but not before soms really awesome and emvironmentally friendly technologies mature during this century. They will trigger a lot of growth too.
This is one step before what the zeitgeist movement is pushing for (a resource based economy) and I think a logical step. Global equity within ecological boundaries, sadly i fear it's too late in the face of ecological collapse.. But I will try and communicate these ideas anyway. To be an agent of the word you want to live in is the least we can do.
Much resonates. The issue is where do we find these angles to determine “fair” and “efficient” allocation of resources? Everyone thinks they would do what is right and just if they only had the ring of gyges
I Realy love this Vlog. Dan O´Neil presents the cornerstones of a new Economy system in very brief very clear words. I am in research and learning progress in this since i learned about Peak Oil, Limits to growth, and finaly through the talkes o the great William E. Rees also an advokat for Ecological Economics, about so much so important stuff. Finaly i Wrote on this a very smal book. rather graphs and images and not that much text that condensed all this, rather for me but for others.. I never brought my book to the bookstores. because i was still not convinced i am right. and ... i hadnt the money for this. and.. becaus reactions in my surrounding and company .. well.. would say where difficult in some cases. But now i will make a secound aproach. My architectural Company has got 500 Employees.. We build the most unsustainable ... still very beautiful things to imagine.. for example airports.. Yesss.. but a group of architects interisted in sustainability has evolved, and my aim is to convince this very rich company to .. spend mony for real sustainable researches, understanding that degrowth will come whether they like it or not. ... what would the bioregional City of Hamburg realy look like. Well... keep on dreaming Tom... (me) ... But i have to try. Now one thing left for me.. what is missing in all sustainability Vlogs is the research and Question of how we can come from a growing and growthdependend Economy to a much much smaler steady state Economy, whithout triggering a gigantic and catastrophic implosion of our current system.. He mentioned here like it is caled in germany, Vollgeld.. Money spent from the society, like he told.. just forgot the english name.. But there seems to be a lack of research in this topic. Or can anyone point me to ideas? Who could i contact to get more sophisticated material about this.. would be nice from germany. and anywhere else.. Mr O´Neil.. I love your work.. its important we have people who bring it to the public
I appreciate the concept of population control as well or better than most, but demographic challenges presented by population decline in industrialized countries (or any country, for that matter) can't be so easily ignored. Financial incentives for reproduction exist for powerful, multifaceted reasons and are thus difficult to untangle and/or erase. I am very much on board with what you're doing here, but I do think we have to drill down a lot deeper on questions like these to provide workable solutions for global governments. Like it or not (and I don't like it, ha), these solutions have to be politically palatable to be actionable in the absence of authoritarian regimes...which I suspect most of us can agree that we'd prefer to avoid. That said, this is a great foundation for a lot of people looking for answers (or at least the right questions) on the subject. Thanks for your work.
I think of it like this. You get in a car and start down a long straight road. Classical economics says put your foot flat to the floor and you will continue gathering speed indefinably. We know this isnt true and you will reach the max speed of the car and you will always want to go faster Steady state economics says take your foot off the gas when reaching a reasonable speed. Your speed wont be maximum but its a reasonable speed and sustainable without the car falling apart. The analogy isn't perfect as it doesn't take care of overshoot but you get the idea.
John Stuart Mill also came closer than did Smith and most of their contemporaries in an understanding of the problems created by the private appropriation of the rent of land. Unfortunately, Mill did not live to consider the analysis of political economy provided by Henry George. I agree with George that the public capture of rents would lead to the most efficient use of nature, of locations in our towns and cities and of natural resources, generally. As for population growth challenges, there is a direct correlation between educational and career opportunities for women and the age at which women begin to have children and the number of children to which they give birth.
Thank you for the presentation! The question of population is really tricky. You argue that we need to stabilize global population in order to stay within planetary boundaries. You mention that it is a touchy topic as it touches on a lot of uncomfortable moral questions, and it's a highly complex topic linked to women's right or immigration, among others. Should the question of population become mainstream in the climate change question, there is definitely a risk that it is instrumentalized to push authoritarian and colonialist policies in the global South to restrict natality or even to sterilize by force people, as it happened in China and India. So it might be a wise approach to stay uncomfortable with the population question, as the risks of focusing too much the debate on it are great.
We’ve been keeping quiet about it for the last 40 years. How’s that working out for us? Population absolutely needs more attention and discussion. Given the solution is to give women a say over how many children they have and to improve peoples wealth + education, I’m curious where you see the controversy?
I agree - this is more of a political consideration than a system theory one, but it's true if this was a common feature in environmental discourse we might see environmentalists tarred as advocating genocide, and see the movement co-opted by fascists with ulterior motives, both of which would have negative consequences for the movement as a whole.
We have to question ourselves about our lifestyle, what we really need and what we don't. But a world where everyone takes a plane to cross the planet, or where we find any kind of fruit from the other side, or a world where everyone has a holiday house is not fisically posible, and internally we know it. It is necessary to change radically our understanding to adapt to these new circumstances in order to avoid the worst scenarios, such us totalitarianisms. It is going to be really hard to keep our democracies in a context of severe shortages
Who said the statistics are shaky? It's well-established that greater inequality causes more social dysfunctions, and this relationship is inevitable because it pushes more people into poverty that the number of wealthy people it makes richer, and the individual and social losses at the bottom end of the income curve are much worse than the gains achieved by moving someone from $150K a year to $160K a year.
@@karlwheatley1244 My statistics professor said so. We read the book in our multivariate course as an example of what not to do when interpreting statistics. It went way too far in using data to justify their moral goals, without robust proof of a relationship between the two.
@@visicircle Thanks for your reply. The book was really for a general audience, so I don't expect it to provide the detail that would make your statistics professor happy. I'm a senior university professor too, and I would agree they could have explained the underlying causal mechanisms better, but there's actually a solid list of mechanisms (more poverty, more unequal [and less adequate] services, expenditure cascades, social status pressures, various psychological mechanisms, power differentials and political corruption) that guarantee that societies with higher income and wealth inequality will be more dysfunctional. Some of these are proven through experimental research--you can create social dysfunction with depressing speed in groups just by increasing wealth and power inequalities. Others are simply built into the relationships between the income distribution and human well-being--greater inequality pushes more people into poverty, and the decline in well-being for $5K less income for a person making $20,000 a year is far greater than the gain in wellbeing for someone making $100K a year getting $5K more a year. Specifically, the income-wellbeing slopes steeply upward for people under and around the poverty line, but above $75K a year, incremental gains in income yield very little (and diminishing) gains in well being. Moreover, in very unequal societies, the super-rich are better able to use their wealth and political power to their advantage (but in ways that leave most others worse off--cuts in food benefits, low-income housing, education). Their newer book, The Inner Level, is supposed to have strengthened their arguments, but whether it does or not, there's lots of research to back their main conclusion. I'm actually writing a book in which a pivotal conclusion of the book is that it's impossible to have healthy and just (or sustainable) societies with high levels of income/wealth inequality. Take care.
Steady state of economy seems unnatural to human kind nature, too much idealistic, but growth push us to the disaster and degrowth will be inevitable, as thermodynamics and physiscs are saying
I think you're confusing human nature with behaviours that are encouraged under our current system - any anthropologist will tell you there's a multitude of examples of cultures operating under completely different conceptions of what is natural.
imagine always having the same number of followers, likes, or even clicks hits, saves, shares ... it would not exist - it would collapse. The internet should definitely collapse one day because that itself was and never will be a steady state..
the internet was originally conceived as precisely this - a digital world not bound by scarcity and therefore no obsessive private ownership and growth - only after the botched sale of the physical infrastructure of ARPANET did we see the slow development of our modern, privatised internet; but it is by no means an inevitability. There's a good book on this called 'internet for the people'.
The last time a steady state economy existed was when our ancestors were Hunter-Gatherers and lived in clan social groups and in a balanced relationship with the rest of nature. This academic BS not withstanding. Stress R Us
I disagree. Population growth was definitely a thing back then too. Got to get bigger than the other tribes so we can defeat them in war! This mindset, unfortunately, seems to still hold. Our hunter-gatherer predecessors weren't perfect either.
@@stab74 Human population numbers when we lived in clan social groups (not tribes, which are temporary gathering of clans for a specific purpose), we numbered approx. 2.6M worldwide and our low tech lifestyles made us ecologically balanced, as well as spaced out in separate territories. Read the work on the Kung San by Lee, etc. No group could get bigger than their territory could support and they were migratory, so the female could only have one child at a time and had to carry him/her. There were no wars as we see them today. There was no need and with only 100-150 members, losing members was too costly. Read "Stress R Us" along with Lee and, then, you'll have a better educated opinion to share. Stress R Us
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Very clear presentation, thank you. Honestly, steady state economics seems to be the *only* school of economics that has addressed all the hard questions, in a non-contradictory way.
I remember as a student at UC Berkeley, when questions about conventional economics became a little too probing and skeptical, that was the moment that professors would wave their hands and change the subject. That simply won't do in the 21st century, now that problems with "growth as usual" are beginning to really manifest themselves.
Going to listen again, this time with a note pad. Some good information here. Well worth watching.
A Steady State is not only possible- it is inevitable- the only question is "What we will it take for humanity to realise?"
A steady state was largely the status quo up until the industrial revolution. Also prior to the invention of agriculture for tens of thousands of years.
We will reach steady state, but now is not yet the time. 2 things need to happen first. We need a stabilizing population, that is happening in the West and increasingly so in developing countries too. And we also need technological saturation.
For the past 150 years technology has evolved at insane speeds because we kept inventing new things and rapidly improving existing things. Inevitably that will stabilize though, but not before soms really awesome and emvironmentally friendly technologies mature during this century. They will trigger a lot of growth too.
We will probably have to engage in technology transfers to the developing world so that they don’t engage in wasteful growth that the West engaged in
Wow I absolutely love this! The world needs this.
Thanks for creating this video 😊
Excellent presentation - thanks very much for your efforts
Excellent and succinct presentation!
I've been hearing what we need to do since the 1970s and I've watched the world not do it.
It's good to be old.
Thanks for carrying Herman's and John's baton...
Very useful vids to prepare for my economics class:)
This is one step before what the zeitgeist movement is pushing for (a resource based economy) and I think a logical step. Global equity within ecological boundaries, sadly i fear it's too late in the face of ecological collapse.. But I will try and communicate these ideas anyway. To be an agent of the word you want to live in is the least we can do.
It's not too late. If the world could recover from the The Permian-Triassic extinction event, then it can recover from "current events".
Much resonates. The issue is where do we find these angles to determine “fair” and “efficient” allocation of resources? Everyone thinks they would do what is right and just if they only had the ring of gyges
I Realy love this Vlog.
Dan O´Neil presents the cornerstones of a new Economy system in very brief very clear words.
I am in research and learning progress in this since i learned about Peak Oil, Limits to growth, and finaly through the talkes o the great William E. Rees also an advokat for Ecological Economics, about so much so important stuff. Finaly i Wrote on this a very smal book. rather graphs and images and not that much text that condensed all this, rather for me but for others.. I never brought my book to the bookstores. because i was still not convinced i am right. and ... i hadnt the money for this. and.. becaus reactions in my surrounding and company .. well.. would say where difficult in some cases.
But now i will make a secound aproach. My architectural Company has got 500 Employees.. We build the most unsustainable ... still very beautiful things to imagine.. for example airports.. Yesss.. but a group of architects interisted in sustainability has evolved, and my aim is to convince this very rich company to .. spend mony for real sustainable researches, understanding that degrowth will come whether they like it or not. ... what would the bioregional City of Hamburg realy look like.
Well... keep on dreaming Tom... (me) ... But i have to try.
Now one thing left for me.. what is missing in all sustainability Vlogs is the research and Question of how we can come from a growing and growthdependend Economy to a much much smaler steady state Economy, whithout triggering a gigantic and catastrophic implosion of our current system.. He mentioned here like it is caled in germany, Vollgeld.. Money spent from the society, like he told.. just forgot the english name..
But there seems to be a lack of research in this topic. Or can anyone point me to ideas? Who could i contact to get more sophisticated material about this.. would be nice from germany. and anywhere else..
Mr O´Neil.. I love your work.. its important we have people who bring it to the public
I appreciate the concept of population control as well or better than most, but demographic challenges presented by population decline in industrialized countries (or any country, for that matter) can't be so easily ignored. Financial incentives for reproduction exist for powerful, multifaceted reasons and are thus difficult to untangle and/or erase. I am very much on board with what you're doing here, but I do think we have to drill down a lot deeper on questions like these to provide workable solutions for global governments. Like it or not (and I don't like it, ha), these solutions have to be politically palatable to be actionable in the absence of authoritarian regimes...which I suspect most of us can agree that we'd prefer to avoid. That said, this is a great foundation for a lot of people looking for answers (or at least the right questions) on the subject. Thanks for your work.
Great video, thanks for sharing your knowledge
If only our exam wasn't limited to 250 words, I would love to talk for ages about this.
I think of it like this. You get in a car and start down a long straight road. Classical economics says put your foot flat to the floor and you will continue gathering speed indefinably. We know this isnt true and you will reach the max speed of the car and you will always want to go faster Steady state economics says take your foot off the gas when reaching a reasonable speed. Your speed wont be maximum but its a reasonable speed and sustainable without the car falling apart.
The analogy isn't perfect as it doesn't take care of overshoot but you get the idea.
John Stuart Mill also came closer than did Smith and most of their contemporaries in an understanding of the problems created by the private appropriation of the rent of land. Unfortunately, Mill did not live to consider the analysis of political economy provided by Henry George. I agree with George that the public capture of rents would lead to the most efficient use of nature, of locations in our towns and cities and of natural resources, generally.
As for population growth challenges, there is a direct correlation between educational and career opportunities for women and the age at which women begin to have children and the number of children to which they give birth.
Thank you for the presentation! The question of population is really tricky. You argue that we need to stabilize global population in order to stay within planetary boundaries. You mention that it is a touchy topic as it touches on a lot of uncomfortable moral questions, and it's a highly complex topic linked to women's right or immigration, among others.
Should the question of population become mainstream in the climate change question, there is definitely a risk that it is instrumentalized to push authoritarian and colonialist policies in the global South to restrict natality or even to sterilize by force people, as it happened in China and India.
So it might be a wise approach to stay uncomfortable with the population question, as the risks of focusing too much the debate on it are great.
Ecofascism, imperialism and population control is better.
We’ve been keeping quiet about it for the last 40 years. How’s that working out for us? Population absolutely needs more attention and discussion. Given the solution is to give women a say over how many children they have and to improve peoples wealth + education, I’m curious where you see the controversy?
I agree - this is more of a political consideration than a system theory one, but it's true if this was a common feature in environmental discourse we might see environmentalists tarred as advocating genocide, and see the movement co-opted by fascists with ulterior motives, both of which would have negative consequences for the movement as a whole.
We have to question ourselves about our lifestyle, what we really need and what we don't. But a world where everyone takes a plane to cross the planet, or where we find any kind of fruit from the other side, or a world where everyone has a holiday house is not fisically posible, and internally we know it. It is necessary to change radically our understanding to adapt to these new circumstances in order to avoid the worst scenarios, such us totalitarianisms. It is going to be really hard to keep our democracies in a context of severe shortages
The Spirit Level? I thought that book was largely conjecture and opinion? The statistics were shaky.
Who said the statistics are shaky? It's well-established that greater inequality causes more social dysfunctions, and this relationship is inevitable because it pushes more people into poverty that the number of wealthy people it makes richer, and the individual and social losses at the bottom end of the income curve are much worse than the gains achieved by moving someone from $150K a year to $160K a year.
@@karlwheatley1244 My statistics professor said so. We read the book in our multivariate course as an example of what not to do when interpreting statistics. It went way too far in using data to justify their moral goals, without robust proof of a relationship between the two.
@@visicircle Thanks for your reply. The book was really for a general audience, so I don't expect it to provide the detail that would make your statistics professor happy. I'm a senior university professor too, and I would agree they could have explained the underlying causal mechanisms better, but there's actually a solid list of mechanisms (more poverty, more unequal [and less adequate] services, expenditure cascades, social status pressures, various psychological mechanisms, power differentials and political corruption) that guarantee that societies with higher income and wealth inequality will be more dysfunctional. Some of these are proven through experimental research--you can create social dysfunction with depressing speed in groups just by increasing wealth and power inequalities.
Others are simply built into the relationships between the income distribution and human well-being--greater inequality pushes more people into poverty, and the decline in well-being for $5K less income for a person making $20,000 a year is far greater than the gain in wellbeing for someone making $100K a year getting $5K more a year. Specifically, the income-wellbeing slopes steeply upward for people under and around the poverty line, but above $75K a year, incremental gains in income yield very little (and diminishing) gains in well being. Moreover, in very unequal societies, the super-rich are better able to use their wealth and political power to their advantage (but in ways that leave most others worse off--cuts in food benefits, low-income housing, education).
Their newer book, The Inner Level, is supposed to have strengthened their arguments, but whether it does or not, there's lots of research to back their main conclusion. I'm actually writing a book in which a pivotal conclusion of the book is that it's impossible to have healthy and just (or sustainable) societies with high levels of income/wealth inequality.
Take care.
Steady state of economy seems unnatural to human kind nature, too much idealistic, but growth push us to the disaster and degrowth will be inevitable, as thermodynamics and physiscs are saying
I think you're confusing human nature with behaviours that are encouraged under our current system - any anthropologist will tell you there's a multitude of examples of cultures operating under completely different conceptions of what is natural.
imagine always having the same number of followers, likes, or even clicks hits, saves, shares ... it would not exist - it would collapse. The internet should definitely collapse one day because that itself was and never will be a steady state..
Why? It's all imaginary internet numbers anyway. YT completely got rid of dislike count and the world didn't implode.
the internet was originally conceived as precisely this - a digital world not bound by scarcity and therefore no obsessive private ownership and growth - only after the botched sale of the physical infrastructure of ARPANET did we see the slow development of our modern, privatised internet; but it is by no means an inevitability. There's a good book on this called 'internet for the people'.
The last time a steady state economy existed was when our ancestors were Hunter-Gatherers and lived in clan social groups and in a balanced relationship with the rest of nature. This academic BS not withstanding. Stress R Us
I disagree. Population growth was definitely a thing back then too. Got to get bigger than the other tribes so we can defeat them in war! This mindset, unfortunately, seems to still hold. Our hunter-gatherer predecessors weren't perfect either.
@@stab74 Human population numbers when we lived in clan social groups (not tribes, which are temporary gathering of clans for a specific purpose), we numbered approx. 2.6M worldwide and our low tech lifestyles made us ecologically balanced, as well as spaced out in separate territories. Read the work on the Kung San by Lee, etc. No group could get bigger than their territory could support and they were migratory, so the female could only have one child at a time and had to carry him/her. There were no wars as we see them today. There was no need and with only 100-150 members, losing members was too costly. Read "Stress R Us" along with Lee and, then, you'll have a better educated opinion to share. Stress R Us
I prefer societal collapse.