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Economic Growth & Dematerialization

Explore the origins, benefits, and challenges of economic growth, as well as the transition towards a sustainable service-based economy. Learn about the impact of industrialism, capitalism, and globalization, and discover the potential of dematerialization and the commons in building a community-based, localized economy.

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Economic Growth & Dematerialization

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  1. Economic Growth & Dematerialization What is Economic Growth? Who benefits from it? Where did it come from? How can it be stopped or changed? Can we go from Growth to Development?

  2. Industrialism: Accumulation • Production-for-production’s-sake • Invisibility of key factors • Centralization of production, massive upfront investment • Focus on labour productivity : resources substitute for human energy • Cog-labour: humans as component parts • Regulation: controls as limits • Scarcity-based: role of waste since WWII • Globalization: free trade & intellectual property

  3. Industrialism & Capitalism technical financial matter money workplace labour market (cogs) (commodities)

  4. Questions • can financial and material accumulation be severed? • does the profit-motive need to be the main economic driver? • does use-value always need to be a spin-off, side-effect, by-product, or trickle-down of monetary accumulation? • can markets be driven by social & environmental values?

  5. Markets and Material Connection between needs, wealth & markets. the Invisible Hand: worked... • for an economy focused on meeting primary needs—simplicity. • in a situation of relative scarcity • in the absence of sophisticated information technology

  6. Class Society ...based in relative scarcity: • control of scarce resources & ... • monopoly of high culture ...by a minority.

  7. The Threat of Abundance • Productivity boom of the Roaring Twenties • output outdistances worker wages • Crisis of effective demand & structural overproduction: Great Depression as a reaction to potential abundance. • White-collar work, universal education: the threat to cultural monopoly. • increasingly social character of production; rise of industrial unionism

  8. Propping Up Effective Demand after WW II • The Waste Economy: suburbanization, permanent war economy. The artificial reproduction of scarcity. The Effluent Society. • The Paper Economy: planned inflation and the establishment of the debt-based economy. The economic treadmill.

  9. The Postwar Waste Economy Permanent War Economy The Suburb Economy: Oil / Autos / Subdivisions

  10. “The greatest misallocation of resources in human history.” …James Howard Kunstler

  11. The Next Phase (post-1980) : Casino Capitalism • 70s: Costs of waste come due • Rise of the Info economy: • new source of effective demand: producer services • new sources of empty wealth creation: in effect redistributing real wealth from poor to rich. Financialization of the Economy: diversion of information revolution into new forms of waste.

  12. Living in De-Material WorldRedesign not controls Direct focus on human (& environmental) need The Service Economy: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) encouraging provision of services not stuff. Servicizing (voluntary EPR). The “Lake Economy”: economic biomimicry: sectoral orientation: regenerative food, energy, manufacturing, c ommunications. New forms of economic security Conscious support of the Commons Disarming the autonomous power of money Building a community/ecosystem base: localization.

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