Social barriers to sustainability

The social barriers to sustainability.

To avert climate change, we must outlaw inequality and open the borders.

(A shorter article based on this appeared in New Internationalist, June 2010)

by Bob Hughes

The modern global economy doesn’t just run on fossil fuels; above all, it runs on inequality: the principle that some people are worth more than others, while yet others are worthless. And an ever-growing mountain of evidence indicts inequality as the real driving force behind all the harms, and more, that have finally led to climate change. A world without inequality is not just desirable, it is necessary, and urgently. And it can be achieved. Outlaw inequality, and the emissions will fall away, as the pressure of the market’s hidden foot begins to ease off the accelerator.

US working hours and climate change

The small but growing Equality lobby has so far not made any breakthroughs, in publicising the link between inequality and the overconsumption that is causing climate change. Let's hope this changes in 2010. I feel little progress will be made, without the kind of popular, moral pressure an equality-based approach could unleash.

Long working hours are a major feature of unequal societies. This article, from Monthly Review, argues that if the US had adopted EU working hours, it could have reduced its carbon emissions by 2 percent by 2002, from 1990 levels - and given US workers 7 additional weeks of time off per year:

David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot, "Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption". They say:

If Americans chose to take advantage of their high level of productivity by shortening the workweek or taking longer vacations rather than producing more, there would follow a number of benefits. Specifically, if the U.S. followed the EU-15 in terms of work hours, then: * Employed workers would find themselves with seven additional weeks of time off. * The United States would consume some 20 percent less energy. * If a 20 percent energy savings had been directly translated into lower carbon emissions, then the U.S. would have emitted 3 percent less carbon dioxide in 2002 than it did in 1990.

Also on this theme, try Hervé Kempf's "How the Rich are Destroying the Earth" (Green Books, 2008). For hard data on the link between inequality and long working hours see Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better."

With best wishes for Christmas and 2010.

How little is your England?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published a new report on "Young people and territoriality in British cities", by Keith Kintrea, Jon Bannister, Jon Pickering, Maggie Reid and Naofumi Suzuki. It illustrates acutely well the point made by Richard Wilkinson in "The Impact of Inequality" about the intensifying competition for respect under rising inequality.

It also, incidentally but very clearly, shows up the real nature of the alleged overcrowdedness of our 'tiny overcrowded island': poorer people really are being confined - not by 'floods' of immigrants as Sir Andrew Green (of Migration Watch) would have them believe, but by the likes of Sir Andrew Green himself (whose England is a very commodious and extensive affair) and his friend Nicholas Soames (co-founder, with Frank Field, of Migration Watch's new, parliamentary front-organisation, Balanced Migration). Limitations of UK land registry make it difficult to work out just how big Soames's England is but if it's anything like his friend the Duke of Westminster's, it would need a much bigger planet than the one we have, were all true-born English folk to be granted a similar acreage.

Meanwhile, for one young man who contributed to the study, England consists of a bleak area just 200 metres square in Peterborough - as you can read in Rowenna Davis's article about the new report in yesterday's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/oct/14/children-socialexclusion

The full report is here:

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=978

It complements last year's report "Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005" by Daniel Dorling, Jan Rigby, Ben Wheeler, Dimitris Ballas, Bethan Thomas, Eldin Fahmy, David Gordon and Ruth Lupton:

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=905

What I'd really like, would be a set of maps showing the relative sizes of people's Englands, based on income, wealth, age, race, gender and disability, and showing how they have ALL shrunk as inequality has risen. As Danny Dorling said last year (re the above report) "In a more unequal society, everyone is less free to choose where they live".

Invasion of the killer zillionaires (June 2008)

HARD ON THE HEELS OF THE SEIZURE last year of 45% of Cambodia by foreign property speculators (see "Country for sale", Guardian Weekend, 26/4/2008:) comes news that 2/3rds of this island in the British Virgin Islands could be gobbled up by the super-rich, who need somewhere to park their yachts and play golf:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/119884382?z00m=15374441

The on-line petition (above) seeks to halt the development on the limited grounds that it will destroy the habitats of 26 animal species. I think that should be 27. More of the story here.

Meanwhile, our own tiny, overcrowded island is steadily getting even tinier and overcrowdeder, as floods of these same billionaires buy up and fence off rural acreages and gate their communities in their insatiable quest for privacy (e.g. see Ian Jack's article on Britain's sudden rise in land prices, in the Guardian in February).

QUESTION: how tiny would this tiny island of ours be, if the part of it occupied by the richest 1% were removed? The Isle of Dogs perhaps? (It is hard to work this out because over half of Britain isn't registered - and at least some of this has been owned by the same "happy few" since approx 1066).

FOR PERSPECTIVE:

American writer P J O'Rourke, points out that if the whole of the worlds' population moved to one place it would cover former Yugoslavia at the same density as Manhattan and he says "Manhattan is a pretty good place to live."

- from Educational charity WORLDwrite's Ceri Dingle, describing the new, pro-immigration film "The More the Merrier".

Now, positional consumption tears China apart

Positional goods are ones whose advantages are affected by social factors (notably, whether other people also have them, or not: country cottages, private educations, iPods, cars). They are a major feature of unequal societies. The "positional economy" was first described by Fred Hirsch in "Social Limits to Growth" (Routledge, 1977) and the concept was used more recently by Robert Frank in "Falling Behind: how rising inequality harms the middle class" (2007).

This piece in the New York Times of 24th April (also included in The Observer's NYT supplement, 4th May 2008) gives a very vivid illustration of their impact in China:

By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: April 24, 2008
With First Car, a New Life in China

Bradsher explains that family cars have become essential for improving your sons' marriage chances (and thence the possibility of having grandchildren). But "When [the father of the family he talked to] courted his wife in the early 1980s, he needed only a bicycle."

Bradsher's article ends with the tragic news that:

In two weeks, he will go to a leading hospital in Shanghai for more surgery, a five-hour drive to the north, followed by two more rounds of chemotherapy. But he will not be going in the family car: he sold it for nearly $8,000 last year to help cover his medical expenses.

It is a common occurrence in this country, nominally communist, but with little or no safety net. While many families are scrambling into the middle class and buying cars, others are falling out of the middle class because of business reversals, medical bills or other problems, and are unable to buy replacements for their first car.

Extreme inequality, and the riots in Tibet

This article, by Heiko Khoo, gives a very convincing explanation for the explosion of unrest in Tibet: extreme inequality that is even more acute than the already-insane inequality prevailing in China generally, which is itself driven by China's descent into the free market.
http://www.marxist.com/the-riots-in-tibet.htm
Both the Chinese and western governments seem to be making the Dalai Lama the central issue, thereby avoiding the main problem, which neither wishes to face.
Here's a snippet from the article (I believe Heiko Khoo is a researcher for Amnesty):

The ‘average wage' in China's cities as a whole is 14,000 Yuan a year, (US$1800) but wages in Tibet are nearly double the average, higher than in Shanghai and second only to Beijing. State sector employment accounts for nearly 94 percent of employment in Tibet as opposed to 66 percent in China's cities on average.

The problem is that such relatively well-paid state employment is disproportionately allocated to people of ethnic Chinese backgrounds. Higher wages are justified on the basis that living in Tibet takes you far from family and friends and often causes serious health problems due to the effects of high altitude. Tibetans, whose skills are generally lower than the ethnic Chinese migrants, look on them as a deliberately privileged layer.

Alongside the influx of state employees, engaged in administration and infrastructure projects, has come an influx of ethnic Chinese traders and to a lesser extent Hui Muslims, whose businesses thrive on the high spending power of state employees and tourists. Their nationwide networks mean Tibetans can't compete with them. The boom in Tibet has encouraged all manner of migrant entrepreneurs to open shop, including beggars' rackets and sex workers. Tibetans often think they too are subsidized by Beijing. Thus it is easy to see wherein the roots of ethnic discontent lie.

All over China the wage levels of workers have not risen in line with the economic boom. Under pressure from the army of migrant workers and the rapaciousness of private sector employers, wages for many have been frozen. According to the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) 26% of China's workers have not received a pay rise for five years despite the economy growing at an average of 10.6%. Profits have been boosted not only by new machinery and work methods but also by holding down wages. The ratio of overall labour costs to GDP has fallen from 53.4 percent in 1990 to only 41.4 percent in 2005.

Given that so much of what constitutes the western lifestyle is now manufactured in China (i.e. made possible by China's inequality) it seems inadequate to focus on western inequality alone.

Inequality and the neo-Malthusians

On Wednesday's Nightwaves (BBC Radio 3) there was a fascinating discussion about Malthus and current anxieties of various kinds about "today's crowded world" and the possibility that "the population of poor countries alone will rise by almost three billion in the next 30 years" (and what should "we" do about this?)

Some very refreshing contributions came from Matthew Connelly, a historian from Columbia University - for example:

If the world's food resources were distributed fairly there would be about 4 pounds of food per person, "including 1 lb of meat and dairy products, which would make most of us fat".

... and:

"If the problem is consumption, then of course it's the *wealthiest* people we need fewer of."

Connelly has a new book out:

Fatal Misconception: the struggle to control world population;
Matthew Connelly; Harvard University Press 2008

For a free sample chapter, see:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CONFAT.html


Here's a snippet from the programme that I liked so much, I laboriously transcribed it via the Listen Again facility:

"Too often, alas, population projections are *psychological* projections ... not that there are too many people but that there certain *kinds* of people, with whom we feel uncomfortable, who there are too many of. So when people say the US or the UK for that matter is overpopulated I want to ask them which people in particular they have in mind, who are in and of themselves a problem?

"If the problem is consumption, then of course it's the *wealthiest* people we need fewer of. I mean, Britain would do much better if it had 100 million subsistence farmers, say, than 50 million people who are doctors and lawyers and bankers and so on. It could have much less of a carbon footprint if it imported subsistence farmers from the Sahel, and exported bankers and lawyers to Africa. But nobody is proposing that."

You can hear whole program on line till next Wednesday, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/nightwaves/pip/0vffr/