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What Could a New Economy Look Like?
Joshua FarleyCommunity Development and Applied
EconomicsGund Institute for Ecological Economics
University of Vermont
What is Economics?
Allocation of scarce resources among alternative desirable ends
The desirable ends and the characteristics of the scarce resources determine how we should allocate
Leverage Points for Changing Complex Systems
Change the paradigm What is possible?
Change the goals What is desirable?
Change the rules How do we allocate?
Changing the Paradigm
Changing the paradigm
What is biophysically possible? Laws of physics Laws of ecology Basic requirements for sustainability
What is behaviorally possible? Self-contained globules of desire vs.
persons in community Competitive self-interest vs. cooperative
altruism Behavior and institutions
Changing the Goals Efficiency: maximizing monetary value and
economic growth? Is it ecologically sustainable? Is it just and efficient?
Income distribution Food, water and eflornithine
Does it make sense? Food and energy Or sufficiency?
Ecological sustainability Social justice Economic efficiency, redefined
Justice and Efficiency
• level of trust• mental illness and drug
addiction• life expectancy and
infant mortality• obesity• children’s educational
performance• teenage births• homicides• imprisonment rates• social mobility
Changing the Rules: Resource Use
Sustainability Quantitative limits determined by science
Extraction and emissions Inalienable property rights for future
generations Scale is price determining, not price
determined Just distribution
Who is entitled to resources created by nature and society as a whole?
Changing the Rules: Energy and Technology
Fossil fuels vs. alternative energy Rivalry and excludability
Green technologies and ecological problems Minimizing costs Maximizing benefits
From competition to cooperation
Changing the Rules: Monetary Systems
Money as interest bearing debt Creation and destruction
Won’t finance public goods Growth and inequality or collapse
Changing the Rules: Monetary Systems
Return seigniorage to the public sector 100% fractional reserves
Creation expenditures on public goods, full
employment, green technologies, ecological restoration, etc.
Destruction AEAs Taxes
Spend and tax Degrowth without misery
Taxation and Justice
Is Change Possible?
Economies are complex adaptive systems; constantly evolving e.g. fossil fuel economy, speculative
economy Change is inevitable
Failed growth economy vs. planned degrowth
Adaptive management required