A Way Out?

It is generally agreed that humanity has to develop a sustainable economy; otherwise we will consume ourselves out of house and home. Various proposals have been made for achieving sustainability such as retuning to a simpler life in which we consume less and much of what is consumed is produced locally thereby reducing the many adverse environmental impacts of the global market. When one considers proposed solutions such as this the problem of how to get from here to there inevitably becomes daunting because of the apparently insurmountable social and economic changes that would be required, which would, past human behavior indicates, create enormous suffering and violence. It would take stark awareness of impending doom to bring humanity to this point.

There may be, however, a method of transitioning humanity to a substantially less environmentally demanding economy than the one we have. Additionally, we have already incorporated a great deal of this less demanding economy into our everyday lives. I suggest that we look carefully at the service economy as a device for segueing to a less destructive economy.

Given the low wages that many people associate with service jobs, e.g. waitresses, store clerks, gardeners, etc., this may seem like a real downer. Consider however that doctors, lawyers and teachers are also service jobs. In a World Bank Report titled Growth of the Service Sector, which may be found at http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/beyondco/beg_09.pdf, another dimension to the service economy is that it can handle growth with much less adverse impact than the commodity capitalism that now prevails.

We thus have in the service economy an existing and growing economy. Mike Davis in his book Planet of the Slums observes that the so called informal economy, in which individuals work for other individuals under terms arbitrarily stipulated by the employer, e.g. domestics, gardeners, constitute as high as 70% of total employment in some poorer countries. The service economy is already there. It has to be made more rewarding. One way of doing this is to impose a cost-to-the-environment tax on the producing of things. Notice that we now allow oil and mining companies to deduct a depreciation allowance from their taxes for the materials they remove from the earth, not to mentions such allowances on equipment made from mined ore. The environment requires that we make far fewer things than we have in the past, yet we subsidize that activity. That subsidy could be put to far better use by increasing the wages in the poorer parts of the service economy.

To my mind, the service economy offers other benefits as well. By its very nature it brings people closer together in shared undertakings in a time when the fascination with technology is displacing the fascination with people. The world of things we have created has introduced a substantial level of individual isolation. Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone notes some of the fallout from this. The service economy is also much more directly focused on human beings than our economy of production. It keeps humanity at the center of things, not some arbitrary function called profit. Keeping human beings as the focus in something as bedrock serious as employment is necessary as the so-called economies of robotization dictate that humans compete increasingly with their machines for existence. Economies are created by humans and humans must insure that their economies serve them well, including preserving their home.

Bob Newhard