From a broken economic model to one that heals and protects

We only have to look at the growing levels of mental ill health – along with high suicide rates (according to the World Health Organisation, deaths from suicide now exceed the total number of world deaths from war and homicide combined each year) – to see there are some serious problems with our society and economy.

It is unsurprising people see few paths open to them beyond working harder, buying more, speeding up the hedonic treadmill, stressing more and panicking more.

Some of us have become so busy we outsource almost everything – our cleaning, our care, our shopping. We outsource it to those who have little choice but to take the poverty wages we flutter in their face. We pay others to pick boxes of cereal from the shelves of a massive supermarket in part because, through our neglect, the local shops have closed down. It is unsurprising people see few paths open to them beyond working harder, buying more, speeding up the hedonic treadmill, stressing more and panicking more – with some eventually leaping into the chasm of the misalignment and into various forms of protest or hopelessness. Yet we wonder why we’re stressed, we wonder why inequality is rising within countries, and we wonder why people with jobs are queuing for food parcels. It is because we let them. In the natural world the concept of enough – of sufficiency, of saturation – is well understood. Yet within the orthodox economics that ostensibly directs policy making, there seems to be little appreciation of the limitations to growth (as conceived as faster rises in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)). The limitations stem from the disconnect between GDP and social progress, and also from the environmental impact of the sort of growth we see today. But instead, the goal of more and faster, dominates. This goal outweighs any concern for the distribution of the wealth created, let alone the quality of growth. It overwhelms actions to mitigate and reduce the impact of growth on the planet. Attending to this misalignment requires greater equality so people are not entangled in harmful status anxiety and competition. It requires quality jobs for the many, not the few: jobs which are designed to ensure people have direction over their tasks and satisfaction in their work. It requires strong social safety nets so people know they will be supported when they experience misfortune. And it requires control so people really are at the apex of policy making. Elements of this new economy range from business models that offer greater equality and sustainability; new methods of manufacturing; pro-social ways of organising work and employment; appropriate measures of national and business success; and initiatives that retain money and control for local communities. These, and many more examples, are found in Oxfam’s Our Economy report. Such ideas and proposals are connected by the need to go beyond (narrow, trickle-up, and often harmful) economic growth to ‘good development’ via which a community – or a country or even a planet – can prosper and flourish.