for a shared and lastingprosperity and not just us but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished and hope
the irony is though that we have cashed out prosperity almost literally in terms of money
and economic growth and we've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope
and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades
it's a dilemma a dilemma of growth we can't live with it we can't live without it trash the system or crash the planet it's a tough choice it isn't much of a choice and our best avenue of escape from this actually is a
of around nine billion people all aspiring to western incomes western lifestyles and i want to ask the question and we'll give them that two percent hike in income in salary each years as well because we believe in growth and i want
the question how far and how fast would be have to move how clever would we have to be how much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets and here
in my chart on the left hand side is where we are now this is the carbonintensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment it's around about seven hundred and seventy grams of carbon
in the world i describe to you we have to be right over here at the right hand side at six grams of carbon it's a one hundred and thirty fold improvement and that is ten times further and faster than anything we've ever achieved in industrial history
but shouldn 't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement so
i want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics it's a bit complex and i apologize for that what i'll try and do is i'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms so it looks a little bit like this
firms produce goods for households that's us and provide us with incomes and that's even better because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services that's called the circular flow of the economy
what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth it does this in a couple of ways chasing
joseph schumpeter called this the process of creativedestruction it's a process of the production and reproduction of noveltycontinually chasing expanding consumer markets consumer goods new consumer goods and this
this is where it gets interesting because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty we love new stuff
material stuff operates as a kind of language a language of goods a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories stories for example about how important we are
status drivenconspicuousconsumption thrives from the language of novelty and here all of a sudden
we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic the economic institutions and who we are as people locked together to drive an engine of growth and this engine is not just
adam smith two hundred years ago spoke about our desire for a life without shame a life without shame in his day what that meant was linen shirts and today well you still need the shirt but you need
the hybrid car the hdtv two holidays a year in the sun the netbook and ipad the list goes on an almost inexhaustible supply of goods driven by this anxiety and even if we don't want them
we need to buy them because if we don't buy them the system crashes and to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades we've expanded the money supply expanded credit and debt so that people can keep buying stuff
the crash and you can see there consumer debt rose dramatically it was above the gdp for three years in a row just before the crisis
and in the mean time personal savings absolutely plummeted the savings ratio net savings were below zero in the middle of two thousand and eight just before the crash this is
people being persuaded to
spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won 't last on people we don't care about
but saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view keynes called this the paradox of thrift saving slows down recovery
and politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt to draw down our own savings even farther just so that we can get the show back on the road so we can keep
are as people here 's another one completely different one why is it
that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combatclimate change very very simple things like
buying energyefficient appliances putting in efficient lights turning the lights off occasionally insulating our homes these things save carbon they save energy they save us money
so is it that though they make perfect economic sense we don't do them well i had my own personal insight into this a few years ago it was a sunday evening sunday
and it was just after actually to be honest too long after we had moved into a new house and i had finally got around to doing some draft stripping installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts
and my then five year old daughter was helping me in the way that five year olds do and we'd been doing this for a while
when she turned to me very solemnly and said will this really keep out the giraffes
here they are the giraffes you can hear the five year old mind working these ones interestingly are four hundred miles north of here outside barrow in furness in cumbria goodness knows what they
of the lake district weather but actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things we're too busy keeping out the giraffes putting the kids
on the bus in the morning getting ourselves to work on time surviving email overload and shop floor politics foraging for groceries
throwing together meals escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime time tv
or ted online getting from one end of the day to the other keeping out the giraffes
what is the objective what is the objective of the consumer mary douglas asked in an essay on poverty written thirty five years ago it is she said
to help create the social world and find a credible place in it that is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives and it's a completely different vision
than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model so who are we who are these people
are we these novelty seeking hedonistic selfish individuals or might we actuallyoccasionally be
something like the selfless altruist depicted in rembrandt 's lovely lovely sketch here well psychologyactually says there is a tension a tension between
self regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors and these tensions have deep evolutionary roots so selfishbehavior is
in certain circumstances fight or flight but other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings
and it reveals to us suddenly the crux of the matter what we've done is we've created economies
and left the others unregarded and in the same token the solution becomes clear because this isn 't therefore about changing human nature
it isn 't in fact about curtailing possibilities it is about opening up it is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become
fully human recognizing the debt and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect
rembrandt 's fragile altruist within what does all this mean for economics what would economies look like if we took that vision
of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche well it might look a little bit like the four thousand community interest companies that have sprung up in the u k over the last five years
and a similar rise in b corporations in the united states enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their
when you do a search and ecosia works in pretty much the same way so we can do that here we can just put in
a little search term there you go oxford that's where we are see what comes up the difference with ecosia though is that in ecosia 's case it draws the revenues in the same way
but it allocates eighty percent of those revenues to a rainforest protectionproject in the amazon and we're going to do it
gave revenues to ecosia and ecosia is giving eighty percent of those revenues to a rainforest protectionproject it's taking profits from one place
and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources it's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy it's a form if you like of ecological altruism
put investment back into the heart of the model to re conceiveinvestment only now investment isn't going to be about
the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth investment has to be a different beast
it has to be about transition it has to be investing in low carbon technologies and infrastructures we have to invest in fact
in the idea of a meaningful prosperity providing capabilities for people to flourish
and of course this task has material dimensions it would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they didn't have food clothing and shelter but it's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this it has social and psychological aims
family friendship commitments society participating in the life of that society and this
concert halls gardens public parks libraries museums quiet centers places of joy and celebration places of
the cultivation of a common citizenship in michael sandel 's lovely phrase an investment investment after all is just such a basic economic
is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future
a shared present and a common future and we need that relationship to reflect to reclaim hope so let me come back with this sense of hope
to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door
can we offer those people it's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty it's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations
and it's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations a prosperity that
more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth based model so this is not just a western post materialist fantasy in fact an african philosopher wrote to me
when prosperity without growth was published pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional african concept of
says i am because we are prosperity is a shared endeavor
its roots are long and deep its foundations i've tried to show exist already inside each of us so this is not about standing in the way of development
it's not about overthrowing capitalism
it's not about trying to change human nature what we're doing here is we're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose and at the heart of that economics
placing a more credible
more robust and more realisticvision of what it means to be human thank you very much
question first of all economists aren't supposed to be inspiring so you may need to work on the
can you picture the politicians every buying into this i mean can you picture a politicianstanding up in britain and saying
gdp fell two percent this year good news we're actually all happier and a country 's more beautiful and our lives are better
i already am seeing a little bit of it when we first started this kind of work politicians would stand up treasury spokesmen would stand up and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves
and actually in the period through which we've been working over the last eighteen years partly because of the financialcrisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economicsactually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world
is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together or is it going to be more just civil society and companies
it has to be companies it has to be civil society but it has to have political leadership this is a kind of agenda which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma because
hooked on the growth model themselves but actuallyopening up the space to think about different ways of governing different kinds of politics and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operatedifferentlyabsolutely vital
would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century in terms of takingcarbon out of the atmosphere and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use
and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water if you can convince me we can do all that then yes i would take the two percent
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