...methinks Bernard Salt needs to update a few of his own facts...there might be a plan, but its not a very good one. Tax base arguments are Ponzi demography, and merely delay the day of reckoning (by which time the consequences will be many times magnified) and the task of thinking of another way to meet societal needs without the need to keep growing.
Unmanaged growth, managed growth - none question the concept of whether more growth is desirable in the first place.
The concerns of the 'anti-growth' lobby - aka the 'pro quality of life' lobby - are not just about infrastructure. They go beyond cities, they go far beyond this country.
Reposted from The Australian, 7 October 2010
'FOR the next decade at least, we need to maintain an average annual population growth rate of 350,000, including net migration of 180,000.
Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics last week confirm that in the year to March, population growth was 403,000, down from a record 457,000 one year earlier.
These figures compare with a growth rate during the 1990s of around 220,000 a year, including 100,000 migrants.
The reason why we need to ramp up the growth rate is to maintain our skills and tax base as baby boomers retire from 2011 onwards (when those born in 1946 turn 65).
This outlook for an elevated growth rate is the subject of heated debate.
Conservation groups argue that the migration rate should be reduced to 70,000 per year which, combined with natural increase, would result in annual growth of about 190,000.
Here is the nub of the argument: a Big Australia needs 350,000 per year whereas a Small Australia makes do with 190,000.
A recurring theme advanced by the Small Australia lobby is that we need a plan if we are to continue on the trajectory to a Big Australia.
The question is whether there are in fact plans to manage 350,000 additional residents per year. So pervasive is the assertion that "there is no plan" that it seems to have entered popular belief. But perhaps it's worthwhile to examine its veracity.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics published Population Projections in September 2008 that articulated the Big Australia vision.
The purpose of ABS projections is to inform government departments and business of possible future trajectories for the nation.
This document informed the assumptions used by Treasury in subsequent Intergenerational Reports that reiterated the Big Australia outlook.
Here are two plans published by federal government departments that outline the pathway to a Big Australia.
The existence of a "plan" gets no plainer than the publications of the ABS and Treasury.
But these are demographic and economic plans. What we mean when we say "there is no plan" is that there is no plan for the housing and urban form that underpins Big Australia.
Well, actually there is.
Before the release of the ABS's Big Australia document, strategic planning for Melbourne showed the city's population rising to about 4 million by 2030.
By the end of 2008, the Victorian government had released Melbourne @ Five Million, which plans for a bigger city by the mid 2030s.
The same goes for the South East Queensland Regional Plan, which was revamped earlier this year to accommodate a bigger population with new communities at Flagstone, Yarrabillba and Ripley Valley.
I might add that since September 2008, there has also been a revision to the strategic plan for Adelaide (February 2010). And Sydney's plan, Towards 2036, is currently being reviewed.
Less than three months ago, the Committee for Melbourne published a bold view of the city's form beyond 5 million.
Earlier this month in the Northern Territory, the Country Liberals published a discussion paper for Greater Darwin that imagines a city of 1 million residents, or eight times its current scale.
Darwin may not get to 1million residents in the 21st century, but surely it is a worthwhile exercise to at least think about a city's long-term direction. Far better than stamping your feet and repeating "there is no plan".
The fact is that there are a series of plans to take Australia towards 35 million. These plans stem from federal and state government departments and from special interest groups.
What I suspect the anti-growth lobby really means when it says "there is no plan" is that "there is no investment in the infrastructure required to support growth at this rate".
This is a different question and is one that I am sure state premiers would vehemently disagree with. The Victorian government, for example, is managing a $4.3 billion regional rail link to deliver new and upgraded railway lines to the city's booming west. Name a bigger single investment in public transportation infrastructure on the urban fringe.
I don't think the issue is so much with the trajectory to a Big Australia: with due care, 350,000 extra residents per year can be managed.
The problem is that the Big Australia debate has surfaced precisely at a time when the nation was undergoing hyper growth that scared the public into thinking that this was the way of the future.
Perhaps it's time to consider the facts. No one is suggesting recent hyper growth should be maintained into the future. And despite assertions to the contrary, there are demographic, economic and strategic plans in place to manage future growth.
I think the real issue is infrastructure funding on a grand scale (regardless of the odd success in places such as Melbourne's west).
But this funding will never receive the political will it needs until the nation galvanises behind a belief in a common future. And in order to achieve this end, it is important to understand exactly what is being proposed and the plans that are in place to help us get there.'
19 October 2010
Bigger Australia as Certain as Death and Taxes
*sniff, sniff* I smell a self-fulfilling prophecy! We get what we PLAN for!
Reposted in full from Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2010
'Australia's population will get bigger no matter what politicians do and it's wrong of them to pretend they can stop the growth, a new study says.
Even if migration is drastically cut, the population could be almost 30 million by 2050, and older than it is today.
''Politicians should stop pretending that they can control what Australia's future population will look like. Instead they should turn their attention to the real policy issues … housing, roads, pensions and our natural environment,'' it says.
The report, by the Centre for Independent Studies, tested 36 scenarios using different combinations of migration levels, fertility rates and life expectancy. Population would grow under every scenario except in the unlikely event where migration was cut to zero, the birth rate plummeted and life expectancy stagnated.
''Our future is a bigger Australia and we must start preparing for it,'' said Oliver Marc Hartwich, a research fellow and co-author of the study with Jessica Brown, a policy analyst. ''Big'' Australia became an election issue after then prime minister Kevin Rudd enthusiastically embraced Treasury projections of a population of 36 million by 2050. The two main parties later campaigned on promises to curb growth.
The report, Populate and Perish?, says advocates of a ''small'' Australia want net migration cut by more than half to 70,000 a year. But if the birth rate stayed the same, the population would still reach 29.1 million by 2050.
''It is wrong to think we can control Australia's population size by simply cutting migration,'' the report says. Changes in the birth rate could have a bigger impact. But it was debatable whether governments could influence fertility rates.
Under the study's six most realistic scenarios, the population could vary from 25.3 million to 34.6 million, with it ageing in each case. The lower population assumed low migration of 70,000 a year, low fertility of 1.5 births a woman, which is the current average in Europe, and medium life expectancy; the higher population assumed medium migration of 143,000, high fertility of 2.1 births, and medium life expectancy. Another combination - of medium migration and medium fertility of 1.9 births, the current rate in Australia - would see population rise to 33.4 million.
Clive Hamilton, the author of Requiem for a Species, said Australia could choose between a small or large population increase. ''We can have a 3 million increase or a 14 million increase and that makes a huge difference to everything,'' he said. ''It's rubbish to say 'we can't do anything, get used to it'.''
Net migration could be cut to 50,000 a year, and pro-natalist policies such as the baby bonus ended, to achieve 26 million by 2050. Dr Hamilton agreed this would hasten the ageing of the population but ''we have to have an ageing population sooner or later and the Treasury's Intergenerational Report shows we are in a better position than most countries to deal with it.''
He said Australia had to cut greenhouse gas emissions sharply by mid-century and the bigger the population, the bigger the cut each of us would have to make.
Reposted in full from Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2010
'Australia's population will get bigger no matter what politicians do and it's wrong of them to pretend they can stop the growth, a new study says.
Even if migration is drastically cut, the population could be almost 30 million by 2050, and older than it is today.
''Politicians should stop pretending that they can control what Australia's future population will look like. Instead they should turn their attention to the real policy issues … housing, roads, pensions and our natural environment,'' it says.
The report, by the Centre for Independent Studies, tested 36 scenarios using different combinations of migration levels, fertility rates and life expectancy. Population would grow under every scenario except in the unlikely event where migration was cut to zero, the birth rate plummeted and life expectancy stagnated.
''Our future is a bigger Australia and we must start preparing for it,'' said Oliver Marc Hartwich, a research fellow and co-author of the study with Jessica Brown, a policy analyst. ''Big'' Australia became an election issue after then prime minister Kevin Rudd enthusiastically embraced Treasury projections of a population of 36 million by 2050. The two main parties later campaigned on promises to curb growth.
The report, Populate and Perish?, says advocates of a ''small'' Australia want net migration cut by more than half to 70,000 a year. But if the birth rate stayed the same, the population would still reach 29.1 million by 2050.
''It is wrong to think we can control Australia's population size by simply cutting migration,'' the report says. Changes in the birth rate could have a bigger impact. But it was debatable whether governments could influence fertility rates.
Under the study's six most realistic scenarios, the population could vary from 25.3 million to 34.6 million, with it ageing in each case. The lower population assumed low migration of 70,000 a year, low fertility of 1.5 births a woman, which is the current average in Europe, and medium life expectancy; the higher population assumed medium migration of 143,000, high fertility of 2.1 births, and medium life expectancy. Another combination - of medium migration and medium fertility of 1.9 births, the current rate in Australia - would see population rise to 33.4 million.
Clive Hamilton, the author of Requiem for a Species, said Australia could choose between a small or large population increase. ''We can have a 3 million increase or a 14 million increase and that makes a huge difference to everything,'' he said. ''It's rubbish to say 'we can't do anything, get used to it'.''
Net migration could be cut to 50,000 a year, and pro-natalist policies such as the baby bonus ended, to achieve 26 million by 2050. Dr Hamilton agreed this would hasten the ageing of the population but ''we have to have an ageing population sooner or later and the Treasury's Intergenerational Report shows we are in a better position than most countries to deal with it.''
He said Australia had to cut greenhouse gas emissions sharply by mid-century and the bigger the population, the bigger the cut each of us would have to make.
American Wasteland
Excerpt from Huffington Post, 18 October 2010
'...Journalist Jonathan Bloom has a brand new book out called American Wasteland, which looks at why we waste so much perfectly edible food. What is it about our relationship to food that's changed so drastically since the Depression-era hoarding of our parents or grandparents?
Bloom goes through the entire food chain, from gathering to garbage bin, to show where food is wasted and to offer suggestions why. This is an important book, make no mistake. His insight gets to the heart of not only what it means to be a consumer, but more to the point, what it means to be an American in this age. I caught up with Bloom for a few quick questions before he hit the reading circuit...
Chris Elam: Let's cut to the chase, Jonathan - why do Americans today waste so much food?
Jonathan Bloom: We waste food because we take it for granted, simple as that. Food is so abundant in this country. We produce about twice the amount of calories needed to feed all Americans, and it shows - both in the levels of obesity and waste.
Furthermore, we waste food because we can. For many Americans, food is still tremendously cheap in relation to our incomes. True, food prices have risen in the last few years. Yet we still only spend about 10 percent of our disposable income on food - less than any other nation. Those last few scoops of broccoli may seem pretty worthless, but those actions have a cumulative effect. The average family of four throws out $1,350 of food every year (using the conservative 15 percent rate of waste advocated by some experts).
Finally, we squander so much of our food because we've become quite superficial about it. We expect our fresh foods to be both beautiful and uniform, or at least supermarkets think we do. Anything not cosmetically flawless nor the right shape and size is cast aside at some point in the food chain. This increased emphasis on our food's appearance stems largely from the ever-increasing popularity of food TV and the abundance of glossy cooking magazines. Yet, food isn't always "glossy."
CE: How about giving us 3 examples - let's call them "eye-poppers" - that unmistakably demonstrate we've got a major problem on our hands?
JB: Picture the Rose Bowl, the vast 90,000 seat stadium in Southern California. Now picture it filled to the brim with food. America wastes that much food every single day. How much waste is that, exactly? I thought you'd never ask. About 40 percent of all food produced in this country isn't eaten. That waste occurs at every stage of the food chain, from farm to fork.
At what cost? Here's another eye-popper: every year, through uneaten food, we waste 70 times the amount of oil that was spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the three months of the Deepwater Horizon gusher. That's because a tremendous amount of energy goes into producing, harvesting, transporting and chilling our food. When we don't eat the items, those resources were used in vain.
Finally, by simply removing trays from all-you-can-eat cafeterias would reduce food waste by about 30 percent. That proves what we already suspected: our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. If left to our own devices, we consistently take more food than we need and waste an awful lot....'
A Melbourne of 8 Million?
Bernard Salt - will you start reading the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, IPCC, Global Footprint Network et al ad infinitum...this is NOT just about density, or what is the 'norm' elsewhere in the world right now, its about a whole perfect storm of trends, demographic and otherwise, that are brewing.
Reposted in full from the Herald Sun, 19 October 2010
'MELBOURNE is facing massive changes as its population surges towards eight million by 2060, big business has warned.
Nuclear energy and a fast-rail link to Sydney are vital developments being pushed by the Committee for Melbourne.
The business think-tank also says government should appoint a minister for Greater Melbourne.
Committee for Melbourne chief executive Andrew MacLeod said a doubling of Melbourne's population over the next 50 years was a "normal" rate of growth.
He slammed suggestions the city's population spurt should be capped, rejecting arguments by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and activist Dick Smith that Australia didn't have the infrastructure to cope.
A population cap was one of the "greatest threats" to Melbourne's future as it would allow governments turn a blind eye to the reality of growth.
At the current growth rate, Melbourne will overtake Sydney as Australia's biggest city in the 2030s.
Demographer Bernard Salt said Melbourne had the capacity to double in size.
"A city of eight million may seem shocking now but it will be no bigger than London or Paris are currently," he said.
"And it will rebalance Melbourne with most of the future growth expected to be in the north and west of the city.
"At the moment Melbourne stretches 50km to the east to Pakenham but only 30km to the west to Melton."
A population of eight millions would stretch the city's boundaries to Wallan in the north and Werribee in the west.
Moving jobs out of the CBD was the key to maintaining Melbourne's liveability, Mr Salt said.
Six new "central activities districts" have already been designated at Box Hill, Broadmeadows, Dandenong, Footscray, Frankston and Ringwood.
Mr Salt said this would breathe life into suburbia, allowing people to spend less time commuting and more time with their families.
But the third volume of the Committee for Melbourne's Melbourne Beyond 5 Million documents to be released today warns of "significant challenges and shortfalls" for Melbourne.
It highlights a $100 billion backlog of unbuilt roads, rails and ports in Victoria that is getting worse by the day.
A vital part of the growth strategy is moving the Port of Melbourne out of the city to Hastings, in Western Port Bay, and freeing up the land at Fisherman's Bend for housing.
Mr MacLeod said the key to maintaining Melbourne's position as one of the world's great cities would be an increase in medium density housing in outer suburbs.
"We don't want a Docklands on every corner," he said.
"But property prices show Melburnians prefer a St Kilda location with its cafes and transport options close to the city than a low-density area like Sunshine."
A spokesperson for Planning Minister Justin Madden said plans were being drawn up for about 600,000 new homes across the city.
"The Urban Growth Boundary was recently expanded to release enough land for more than 20 years - enough for 134,000 new homes," the spokesperson said.
"And there is significant capacity for more housing in Melbourne's existing suburbs, such as the re-use of old industrial sites.
"It is vital to draw on this capacity when planning for Melbourne's growth."'
Reposted in full from the Herald Sun, 19 October 2010
'MELBOURNE is facing massive changes as its population surges towards eight million by 2060, big business has warned.
Nuclear energy and a fast-rail link to Sydney are vital developments being pushed by the Committee for Melbourne.
The business think-tank also says government should appoint a minister for Greater Melbourne.
Committee for Melbourne chief executive Andrew MacLeod said a doubling of Melbourne's population over the next 50 years was a "normal" rate of growth.
He slammed suggestions the city's population spurt should be capped, rejecting arguments by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and activist Dick Smith that Australia didn't have the infrastructure to cope.
A population cap was one of the "greatest threats" to Melbourne's future as it would allow governments turn a blind eye to the reality of growth.
At the current growth rate, Melbourne will overtake Sydney as Australia's biggest city in the 2030s.
Demographer Bernard Salt said Melbourne had the capacity to double in size.
"A city of eight million may seem shocking now but it will be no bigger than London or Paris are currently," he said.
"And it will rebalance Melbourne with most of the future growth expected to be in the north and west of the city.
"At the moment Melbourne stretches 50km to the east to Pakenham but only 30km to the west to Melton."
A population of eight millions would stretch the city's boundaries to Wallan in the north and Werribee in the west.
Moving jobs out of the CBD was the key to maintaining Melbourne's liveability, Mr Salt said.
Six new "central activities districts" have already been designated at Box Hill, Broadmeadows, Dandenong, Footscray, Frankston and Ringwood.
Mr Salt said this would breathe life into suburbia, allowing people to spend less time commuting and more time with their families.
But the third volume of the Committee for Melbourne's Melbourne Beyond 5 Million documents to be released today warns of "significant challenges and shortfalls" for Melbourne.
It highlights a $100 billion backlog of unbuilt roads, rails and ports in Victoria that is getting worse by the day.
A vital part of the growth strategy is moving the Port of Melbourne out of the city to Hastings, in Western Port Bay, and freeing up the land at Fisherman's Bend for housing.
Mr MacLeod said the key to maintaining Melbourne's position as one of the world's great cities would be an increase in medium density housing in outer suburbs.
"We don't want a Docklands on every corner," he said.
"But property prices show Melburnians prefer a St Kilda location with its cafes and transport options close to the city than a low-density area like Sunshine."
A spokesperson for Planning Minister Justin Madden said plans were being drawn up for about 600,000 new homes across the city.
"The Urban Growth Boundary was recently expanded to release enough land for more than 20 years - enough for 134,000 new homes," the spokesperson said.
"And there is significant capacity for more housing in Melbourne's existing suburbs, such as the re-use of old industrial sites.
"It is vital to draw on this capacity when planning for Melbourne's growth."'
15 October 2010
Break the Habit
Confronting video about childhood obesity...
Sourced from Scary Ideas
'You wouldn't inject your children with junk...so why are you feeding it to them?'
Sourced from Scary Ideas
'You wouldn't inject your children with junk...so why are you feeding it to them?'
13 October 2010
Humanity Now Using Nature's Services 50% Faster Than Earth Can Renew
Sourced from Global Footprint Network, 13 October 2010:
'Humanity is now using nature's services 50 percent faster than what Earth can renew, reveals the 2010 Living Planet Report, released Oct. 13 in Bristol, UK. Produced by WWF in collaboration with Global Footprint Network and the Zoological Society of London, the report examines the state of our natural world, and our impacts upon it.
How Big Is The Human Footprint On The Earth?
The report reveals humanity’s Ecological Footprint has more than doubled since 1966. In 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, humanity used the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support its activities.
Yet change is possible. This edition of the report presents scenarios based on actions that could change the curve, as well as the outlook if we remain on our current course.
See the interactive graph to explore how the typical Ecological Footprint in your country compares to that of others.'
Download the 2010 Living Planet Report
(for languages other than English, click here)
See a fact sheet with key Ecological Footprint findings
Released at the same time as the Living Planet Report is the Ecological Footprint Atlas, with complete 2010 Ecological Footprint and biocapacity results. Click here for more info.
06 October 2010
Peak Leak
Excerpt from the New Scientist, 7 September 2010
'Thousands of ships sunk in the second world war are seeping oil – and with their rusty tanks disintegrating, "peak leak" is only a few years away..There may be huge uncertainties about exactly how much oil is out there, but no one doubts that it dwarfs any single previous maritime spill. Etkin and Trevor Gilbert put the figure at somewhere between 2.5 million tonnes and 20 million tonnes. Even the lower estimate is more than double the amount of oil thought to have been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon accident and more than 60 times that of the Exxon Valdez (see diagram)...'
01 October 2010
Are There Too Many Eco-Labels and Green Ratings?
Reposted in full from Greenbiz, September 2010
'Every day, each and every one of us is faced with an overwhelming number of choices. From when we wake up in the morning until we go to bed, we make hundreds of decisions among the thousands of choices we have. Grocery stores now carry over 30,000 unique products and many big box retailers carry over 100,000. And as a society, we love choices. In fact, the United States was founded on individuals' autonomy to choose, dating back to the Declaration of Independence.
But having so many choices isn't always good for us. Thomas Jefferson's declaration of our inalienable right to liberty has gotten a bit out of control. We spend a large amount of our time making irrelevant and unimportant decisions. Such complex decision making causes stress, anxiety and self-doubt.
When faced with the choice of 300 different types of cookies in the store aisle, whether I choose to buy Chips Ahoy or Oreos will have no impact on my well-being, but yet I still spend three minutes agonizing over each package.
Likewise, we face a similar conundrum with ecolabels. With over 300 ecolabels and many more being added each year, consumers and businesses have to make increasingly complex and convoluted decisions. Manufacturers must weigh many different factors when making their choice of what ecolabels to get for their products, including cost, ROI, and credibility of the label.
Businesses of all types must decide what, if any, ecolabels they trust for purchasing. In the business world, especially at product companies, managing sustainability certifications, standards and labels requires at least a full-time position.
But businesses have an easier decision-making process than consumers. Businesses make a significant financial investment in choosing the "correct" ecolabel(s) and therefore spend time evaluating their myriad of options, weighing the pros and cons, and meeting with the various certification organizations to hear why their program is better than the others.
Consumers only have the luxury of a few seconds to make their choice while in a store aisle. Although mobile technology now makes it easier to access information anywhere, an ordinary consumer in the store aisle isn't going to spend thirty minutes evaluating cleaning products with three different certification labels to learn which one is best.
A small percentage of consumers are willing to dig into the details and do their research to decide which one is better for them, but most consumers that are willing to make a purchasing decision based on sustainability just want one recommendation on what they should buy. That is why Energy Star has been so successful in the consumer market; one authoritative body provides a simple way to make a choice.
By no means am I advocating for the elimination of all ecolabels and development a system with one choice. That would be even more disastrous. A competitive market is necessary in order to keep raising the bar on all ecolabels in the market. Having various programs compete on transparency, rigor, credibility, service and price, ensure all stakeholders receive maximum value from the market.
What we need is an oligopoly with larger barriers to entry. A handful of credible certification programs, labels and rating systems to dominate the market. This will minimize consumer confusion while working to ensure labels and ratings are held to high standards. Despite the hundreds of ecolabels that exist, this scenario isn't actually too far from where we are now.
While there may be hundreds of labels, any given decision requires no more than a few choices. Ecolabels are segmented by product category, industry or geography. When I go to buy paper, or glass cleaner, or seafood in the supermarket, I'm not choosing among hundreds of ecolabels, I'm choosing among a small subset for each of my decisions.
And while there are more and more ecolabels being introduced by many different organizations, from nonprofits to retailers, there is also consolidation starting to happen. UL recently acquired the Canadian certification program TerraChoice. In the past year we have also seen considerable consolidation in the SRI industry, with MSCI ultimately swooping up RiskMetrics, KLD, and Innovest.
There is little doubt that the sustainability labeling and ratings space may now be heading down a path of further collaboration and consolidation. Consumers will continue to become more concerned with the products they buy, businesses will invest more in green marketing to communicate with their customers, and credible labeling and ratings schemes will continue to grow as a key aspect in all product purchasing decisions.'
29 September 2010
Treasury Admits GDP Used Inappropriately
...much hilarity about this, as the official's name is Gruen, as in Gruen Transfer!
'The Gruen Transfer is a show about advertising, how it works, and how it works on us...[it] is named after Victor Gruen, the guy who designed the very first shopping mall. The term describes that split second when the mall's intentionally confusing layout makes our eyes glaze and our jaws slacken... the moment when we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers...'
Reposted in full from ABC Online, 17 September 2010
The Treasury's macroeconomics director Dr David Gruen told an audience at the NatStats conference in Sydney today that the body uses gross domestic product to measure economic wealth despite knowing its limitations.
"Economists and statisticians have long known that GDP is not and was never intended to be a measure of wellbeing or progress. While we have long known its limitations, we as a discipline, have not done enough to discourage its use in inappropriate places," Dr Gruen admitted.
"In fact, we arguably, if inadvertently, do much to promote GDP as a measure of progress. For example, speaking of my own institution, in the budget papers we present detailed analysis on the level and growth of GDP as well as its determinants."
As Dr Gruen reflected on the use and importance of the GDP, he cautioned institutions to be more mindful of how it is utilised.
He went on to say that the GDP has a lot of limitations, particularly because it does not take into account most household production.
It also does not factor in many goods and services produced by the public sector, thus in effect favouring the private sector and privatisation.
"It is largely a measure of market production and therefore misses a significant amount of household activity as it excludes home production of goods and services other than imputed rents," Dr Gruen explained.
"It doesn't appropriately measure the goods and services produced by the public sector, and it can also sometimes give a misleading picture of how well the economy is performing."
Dr Gruen's views were echoed across the NatStats panel which included OECD chief statistician Martine Durand, United Nations statistics division director Professor Paul Cheung and Griffith University's Associate Professor Geoff Woolcock.
Ms Durand preceded Dr Gruen's speech by saying that governments need to stop using GDP as the primary measure of wellbeing and instead use a range of indicators with broader coverage.
She also added that whilst statisticians recognise the limitations presented to them by using GDP as a measure, they should not be hasty to replace it with another indicator, but rather to find measures that complement it.
"We know GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing. What we need now is not something to replace GDP, but to compliment GDP in order to address the right issue," Ms Durand said in her address.
"Don't start by saying throw away GDP and replace it with something else, I think that will be wrong."
Professor Cheung reinforced this notion by urging governments to first define progress in a way that can be applicable across the country.
He said the same should be done with sustainability.
Professor Cheung says people should not leave it up to statisticians to define such complex and politically charged words that ultimately have a resounding impact of the way in which we view the economy.
But he said that broadly, GDP does its job well.
"Is there a conspiracy to get us in trouble?" Professor Cheung joked.
"We all know what GDP is about. It is a measure of output, it has its problems, but as an index it serves its purpose. So why don't we just leave it at that?"
He reiterated that the job of the statisticians is to ultimately provide undisputed benchmarks for national trends and not be coerced in to the political process.
Dr Gruen also addressed the global financial crisis, saying the lead-up was perversely masked by the use of GDP.
"In the lead-up to the global financial crisis, measures of GDP did little to warn us of the increasing fragility of the global financial system," he told the audience.
"In the period before the crisis, much of the strong growth in GDP in many countries was driven by unsustainable asset price inflation and strong growth in consumption, funded by increased borrowing that turned out to be unsustainable."
Such distortions are visible in the way GDP measures activity in the banking sector.
Dr Gruen drew the conference's attention to the fact that when using GDP, compensation for bearing risk is included as output in the finance sector.
"When banks increased interest margins in late 2008, in response to a radical reassessment of expected defaults and liquidity risks, this increase was booked as an increase in the output of the financial sector rather than a correction in the price of risk as it should have been," he told the audience.
This essentially overstated the output from the financial sector.
This distortion is not only limited to the finance sector, but also extends to the natural resources sector.
"The value of natural resources when they are extracted is treated as production and an increase in GDP. However, natural resources are assets already owned by the community. Their extraction and sale represents the transformation of an asset, the natural resource, into another asset - cash."
"By not counting the depletion of the natural resource asset, production or value added is measured by GDP is overstated, possibly at the expense of the wellbeing of future generations," Dr Gruen stated.
'The Gruen Transfer is a show about advertising, how it works, and how it works on us...[it] is named after Victor Gruen, the guy who designed the very first shopping mall. The term describes that split second when the mall's intentionally confusing layout makes our eyes glaze and our jaws slacken... the moment when we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers...'
Reposted in full from ABC Online, 17 September 2010
A senior Treasury official has admitted that his department has been guilty of overusing gross domestic product (GDP), after recognising that it is a flawed measure of economic wellbeing and social progress.
The Treasury's macroeconomics director Dr David Gruen told an audience at the NatStats conference in Sydney today that the body uses gross domestic product to measure economic wealth despite knowing its limitations.
"Economists and statisticians have long known that GDP is not and was never intended to be a measure of wellbeing or progress. While we have long known its limitations, we as a discipline, have not done enough to discourage its use in inappropriate places," Dr Gruen admitted.
"In fact, we arguably, if inadvertently, do much to promote GDP as a measure of progress. For example, speaking of my own institution, in the budget papers we present detailed analysis on the level and growth of GDP as well as its determinants."
As Dr Gruen reflected on the use and importance of the GDP, he cautioned institutions to be more mindful of how it is utilised.
He went on to say that the GDP has a lot of limitations, particularly because it does not take into account most household production.
It also does not factor in many goods and services produced by the public sector, thus in effect favouring the private sector and privatisation.
"It is largely a measure of market production and therefore misses a significant amount of household activity as it excludes home production of goods and services other than imputed rents," Dr Gruen explained.
"It doesn't appropriately measure the goods and services produced by the public sector, and it can also sometimes give a misleading picture of how well the economy is performing."
Dr Gruen's views were echoed across the NatStats panel which included OECD chief statistician Martine Durand, United Nations statistics division director Professor Paul Cheung and Griffith University's Associate Professor Geoff Woolcock.
Ms Durand preceded Dr Gruen's speech by saying that governments need to stop using GDP as the primary measure of wellbeing and instead use a range of indicators with broader coverage.
She also added that whilst statisticians recognise the limitations presented to them by using GDP as a measure, they should not be hasty to replace it with another indicator, but rather to find measures that complement it.
"We know GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing. What we need now is not something to replace GDP, but to compliment GDP in order to address the right issue," Ms Durand said in her address.
"Don't start by saying throw away GDP and replace it with something else, I think that will be wrong."
Professor Cheung reinforced this notion by urging governments to first define progress in a way that can be applicable across the country.
He said the same should be done with sustainability.
Professor Cheung says people should not leave it up to statisticians to define such complex and politically charged words that ultimately have a resounding impact of the way in which we view the economy.
But he said that broadly, GDP does its job well.
"Is there a conspiracy to get us in trouble?" Professor Cheung joked.
"We all know what GDP is about. It is a measure of output, it has its problems, but as an index it serves its purpose. So why don't we just leave it at that?"
He reiterated that the job of the statisticians is to ultimately provide undisputed benchmarks for national trends and not be coerced in to the political process.
Dr Gruen also addressed the global financial crisis, saying the lead-up was perversely masked by the use of GDP.
"In the lead-up to the global financial crisis, measures of GDP did little to warn us of the increasing fragility of the global financial system," he told the audience.
"In the period before the crisis, much of the strong growth in GDP in many countries was driven by unsustainable asset price inflation and strong growth in consumption, funded by increased borrowing that turned out to be unsustainable."
Such distortions are visible in the way GDP measures activity in the banking sector.
Dr Gruen drew the conference's attention to the fact that when using GDP, compensation for bearing risk is included as output in the finance sector.
"When banks increased interest margins in late 2008, in response to a radical reassessment of expected defaults and liquidity risks, this increase was booked as an increase in the output of the financial sector rather than a correction in the price of risk as it should have been," he told the audience.
This essentially overstated the output from the financial sector.
This distortion is not only limited to the finance sector, but also extends to the natural resources sector.
"The value of natural resources when they are extracted is treated as production and an increase in GDP. However, natural resources are assets already owned by the community. Their extraction and sale represents the transformation of an asset, the natural resource, into another asset - cash."
"By not counting the depletion of the natural resource asset, production or value added is measured by GDP is overstated, possibly at the expense of the wellbeing of future generations," Dr Gruen stated.
NYC To Curb Water Runoff With Blue And Green Roofs
[NYC Mayor] Bloomberg estimates the city could save $2.4 billion over 20 years if the state allows it to use this kind of green [roof] technology instead of relying on so-called grey infrastructure, such as storage tanks and tunnels.
Oh, so going green actually saves money? Well, I never!!
Reposted in full from Planet Ark, 29 September 2010
'New York City wants to catch and store rainwater temporarily in new roof systems to stop heavy storms sending sewage spilling into city waterways.
Oh, so going green actually saves money? Well, I never!!
Reposted in full from Planet Ark, 29 September 2010
'New York City wants to catch and store rainwater temporarily in new roof systems to stop heavy storms sending sewage spilling into city waterways.
The catchment systems would consist of "blue" roofs that have a series of drainage pools and "green" or grass- or ivy-covered roofs, under a plan unveiled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg estimates the city could save $2.4 billion over 20 years if the state allows it to use this kind of green technology instead of relying on so-called grey infrastructure, such as storage tanks and tunnels.
"Our PlaNYC goal of making 90 percent of City waterways suitable for recreations requires us to do more, and that means reducing the combined sewer overflows that have plagued the City for decades," Bloomberg said in a statement.
During heavy storms, the city's 14 wastewater treatment plants turn into major polluters. That is because much of the city's water system was built 150 years ago when it was common practice to let rainwater drain into the sewage system.
To prevent treatment plants from flooding, bypasses kick in when there are major rainfalls, spewing sewage into harbors, canals and rivers.
New York City could capture an inch of rain in 10 percent of the older neighborhoods by using a variety of green methods, such as rain barrels and porous parking lots. Sidewalks could be planted with strips of greenery which also could absorb rainwater and release it slowly.
Bloomberg said his strategy could reduce sewer overflows into waterways by 40 percent by 2030. It also would curb increases in water bills paid by businesses and residents.
Now in his third term, Bloomberg has progressed from banning smoking in restaurants in his first terms to unveiling PlaNYC in his second term, which aims to cut the city's carbon emissions, and cleanse its air and water by 2030.
Should the state reject the city's new green water strategy, New York City will have to spend $6.8 billion to fix the decades-old problem of flooded treatment plants, he said.'
Mesh - Making Sharing Irresistable
Reposted in full from Boing Boing, 23 September 2010
'The "Mesh" describes businesses and organizations that share stuff, fueled in part by the mobile web & social networks. Mesh lifestyles and businesses embrace a world in which access to things trumps owning them. In my book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, I talk about dozens of these new outfits, and why they are growing at such a prodigious rate. There are a couple of thousand more at www.meshing.it.
Meshing It'
'The "Mesh" describes businesses and organizations that share stuff, fueled in part by the mobile web & social networks. Mesh lifestyles and businesses embrace a world in which access to things trumps owning them. In my book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, I talk about dozens of these new outfits, and why they are growing at such a prodigious rate. There are a couple of thousand more at www.meshing.it.
Well-known examples include car & bike sharing, (Zipcar , B Cycle & GetAround) and vacation home-sharing services. (AirBnB & VRBO). But there are lots of more surprising ideas brought to market - fashion & craft exchanges, tools libraries, p2p energy, co-working, rooftop farming, p2p money lending, technology driven by sharing, and support for the arts. Mesh companies leverage billions of dollars of investment in tech and physical infrastructure, and are relatively inexpensive to start and run.
For many people, the Mesh will provide opportunities to generate extra income (through "meshing" your possessions on sites that help with all the details), and to save money by only accessing goods and services only when you need them, rather than aspiring to own one of everything. In the next decade, I predict, this model will conspicuously shape how we think about our lives and work and will shake-up the buy-and-throw-away economy. (hint: it already has) By re-using, repairing, and recycling goods, the Mesh also makes sense as the global population zooms toward 9 billion persons.Meshing It'
Provocative GrowthBusters Film about the 'End of Growth' Taps Crowd Power
...very proud of my virtual colleagues Dave Gardner and Donnie Maclurcan!
Please get in touch with Dave if you have any means to help source funding to assist with the completion of this film:
Dave Gardner
+1-719-576-5565
dave@growthbusters.org
Reposted in full from Yahoo! News, 28 September 2010
'A groundbreaking documentary about the end of growth promises to shake things up when released next year. But it’s already turning heads by virtue of the way it’s being made.
A few recent films, such as Age of Stupid, have been “crowd-funded,” in which the general public pitches in to finance films they want to see made. “Crowd-distribution” of independent films has also come into vogue. Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, was seen by 500,000 people in one week by way of 7,000 house parties and community screenings.
Filmmaker Dave Gardner is adding “crowd-produced” to the lexicon. His upcoming documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth, is relying on a team of highly-motivated volunteers to actually produce the film and offset much of the film’s $500,000 budget. So far, footage has been contributed by filmmakers in Ethiopia, India, the U.S. and Great Britain. The film’s voluntary co-producer, Donnie Maclurcan, resides in Sydney, Australia. Edmonton, Canada’s Alexandra Billings serves as the film’s voluntary project manager. Everywhere Gardner shoots, volunteers serve as members of the film crew.
Gardner has converted the basement of his Colorado home into offices and an editing suite, and a spare bedroom houses visiting volunteers who spend anywhere from a few weeks to a few months working on the project. “One volunteer even offered to pitch a tent in my backyard while working on the project,” Gardner adds. A team of virtual volunteers around the world is busy transcribing interviews, conducting research, assisting with distribution and publicity plans, and contributing financially when they can.
Why such an unorthodox method of producing a film? “As a non-profit project, we’ve so far not attracted large foundation grants,” Gardner explains. “GrowthBusters questions one of our most basic beliefs: that growth brings prosperity and well-being. It takes a real visionary to write a check for this project.”
In the absence of substantial institutional funding, the producers are turning to volunteers and like-minded film professionals to cut the cash budget by more than half. Gardner and Maclurcan are harnessing the power of fans who believe the world needs to see this film. “There is a growing movement of people who are restless with ‘business as usual’ and intrigued by the possibilities of a post-growth world,” notes Maclurcan.
“Of course, we still need to raise additional funding, as there are some things volunteers cannot do, like manufacture a DVD,” adds Gardner. With a little more power from the crowd, the filmmakers are confident GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth will be finished in the coming six months, ready to be shared with the wider world.
GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth is a non-profit, feature-length documentary planned for release in the first half of 2010. Produced by Citizen-Powered Media, the film examines the sustainability of modern society’s worship of unending economic, population, urban and consumption growth.
Photos, logo and other media information at www.growthbusters.org/media-and-bloggers
For a description of the film, see www.growthbusters.org/find-out-more/about-the-film
For more, see www.growthbusters.org
Please get in touch with Dave if you have any means to help source funding to assist with the completion of this film:
Dave Gardner
+1-719-576-5565
dave@growthbusters.org
Reposted in full from Yahoo! News, 28 September 2010
'A groundbreaking documentary about the end of growth promises to shake things up when released next year. But it’s already turning heads by virtue of the way it’s being made.
A few recent films, such as Age of Stupid, have been “crowd-funded,” in which the general public pitches in to finance films they want to see made. “Crowd-distribution” of independent films has also come into vogue. Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, was seen by 500,000 people in one week by way of 7,000 house parties and community screenings.
Filmmaker Dave Gardner is adding “crowd-produced” to the lexicon. His upcoming documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth, is relying on a team of highly-motivated volunteers to actually produce the film and offset much of the film’s $500,000 budget. So far, footage has been contributed by filmmakers in Ethiopia, India, the U.S. and Great Britain. The film’s voluntary co-producer, Donnie Maclurcan, resides in Sydney, Australia. Edmonton, Canada’s Alexandra Billings serves as the film’s voluntary project manager. Everywhere Gardner shoots, volunteers serve as members of the film crew.
Gardner has converted the basement of his Colorado home into offices and an editing suite, and a spare bedroom houses visiting volunteers who spend anywhere from a few weeks to a few months working on the project. “One volunteer even offered to pitch a tent in my backyard while working on the project,” Gardner adds. A team of virtual volunteers around the world is busy transcribing interviews, conducting research, assisting with distribution and publicity plans, and contributing financially when they can.
Why such an unorthodox method of producing a film? “As a non-profit project, we’ve so far not attracted large foundation grants,” Gardner explains. “GrowthBusters questions one of our most basic beliefs: that growth brings prosperity and well-being. It takes a real visionary to write a check for this project.”
In the absence of substantial institutional funding, the producers are turning to volunteers and like-minded film professionals to cut the cash budget by more than half. Gardner and Maclurcan are harnessing the power of fans who believe the world needs to see this film. “There is a growing movement of people who are restless with ‘business as usual’ and intrigued by the possibilities of a post-growth world,” notes Maclurcan.
“Of course, we still need to raise additional funding, as there are some things volunteers cannot do, like manufacture a DVD,” adds Gardner. With a little more power from the crowd, the filmmakers are confident GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth will be finished in the coming six months, ready to be shared with the wider world.
GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth is a non-profit, feature-length documentary planned for release in the first half of 2010. Produced by Citizen-Powered Media, the film examines the sustainability of modern society’s worship of unending economic, population, urban and consumption growth.
Photos, logo and other media information at www.growthbusters.org/media-and-bloggers
For a description of the film, see www.growthbusters.org/find-out-more/about-the-film
For more, see www.growthbusters.org
Vulnerable Arab World Lags On Climate Change Action
'"The entrepreneur and the economist need to see some revenue prospects from addressing climate change. Without them, nothing will happen...'
Nature has begun instigating bankruptcy proceedings against human industrial society - find some revenue in THAT.
Reposted in full from Planet Ark, 23 September 2010
'The Arab world will be one of the regions worst hit by climate change but still lacks any coordinated response to its potentially devastating effects, experts said at a conference this week.
Nature has begun instigating bankruptcy proceedings against human industrial society - find some revenue in THAT.
Reposted in full from Planet Ark, 23 September 2010
'The Arab world will be one of the regions worst hit by climate change but still lacks any coordinated response to its potentially devastating effects, experts said at a conference this week.
With hotter, drier and less predictable climates, the amount of water running into the region's streams and rivers is set to fall 20 to 30 percent by 2050, worsening desertification and food insecurity, the United Nations Development Programme says.
Arab states, many rich in petroleum and grappling with fast-growing populations, lack the political will to act, experts said at the UNDP regional meeting that ended on Tuesday.
"They are leaving entire generations who will wake up and find a disaster on their hands that they will be completely unequipped to handle," Mostafa Tolba, former executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, told Reuters.
The region is home to six of the world's ten most water-scarce countries. Its citizens have access to an average of 1,000 cubic meters of water a year, a figure seven times below the world average and expected to shrink to 460 cubic meters by 2025.
Another looming concern for many countries in the region is rising sea waters that threat small-island states like Bahrain as well as natural and man-made islands in the Arabian Gulf.
In Egypt, where over 50 percent of the population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast line, 6 to 8 million people could be displaced, said Mohamed El Raey, Executive Director of the Regional Center for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Egypt is already the world's biggest wheat importer and rising waters on its low-lying Nile Delta, where nearly half of the country's crops grow, could submerge or soak the land in salt water.
"Climate change will render many of our coastal zones redundant or obsolete," Shaden Abdel Gawad, president of Egypt's National Water Research Center, told the conference.
The prospective damage of rising sea waters could chip off 16 percent of Egypt's gross domestic product, the worst potential damage in the region, El Raey said, citing World Bank figures. Qatar and Tunisia follow closely behind.
Arab world greenhouse gas emissions are growing at one of the fastest rates in the world, with Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar the biggest emitters per capita, although the region only accounts for 5 percent of the world total.
Experts said climate change was on Arab government agendas but they called for measures to engage the private sector, saying the only way was to target the pockets of businesses.
"The entrepreneur and the economist need to see some revenue prospects from addressing climate change. Without them, nothing will happen," Tolba said.'
Democratizing Money
Excerpt from new economics foundation, 28 September 2010
'...But one area that is not prominent on the agenda of the Banking Commission’s review, nor across any mainstream debate on the financial crisis is an analysis of money itself, how it is produced and allocated.
'...But one area that is not prominent on the agenda of the Banking Commission’s review, nor across any mainstream debate on the financial crisis is an analysis of money itself, how it is produced and allocated.
The first point to make here is that money is not, as orthodox economics would have us believe, a natural phenomenon. Contrary to what you will read in most the textbooks, modern money did not naturally ‘emerge’ through market forces as a more effective tool for exchange than bartering. Whilst it’s true that money does enable more efficient exchange, modern money is a creation of the state and has only been with us, in its current form, for less than 160 years. In 1844, the Bank of England Act outlawed the creation of money (then mainly coins and notes) by anyone other than the Bank. Prior to this, a range of private regional and local currencies circulated. Today, there remain a range of ‘complementary currencies’ existing independently of the state, including commercial currencies such as Air Miles and loyalty points schemes and social currencies that nef has promoted, such as time-banking and the Transition currencies, not to mention a rapidly increasing virtual money scene enabled by the internet. Money is as much a socially and politically constructed institution as the health service, the welfare state, the police or the education system.
These institutions are the subject of intense and healthy political debate and scrutiny. Moves to remove them from the democratic sphere through privatization tend to be fiercely resisted. Not so with money. Whilst the 1844 Act outlawed the creation of notes and coins by anyone other than the state, it didn’t mention digital money. As advances in ICT developed, more and more of the money in circulation became digital, issued by private banks as IOU’s through fractional reserve banking. Today 97% of money in circulation is ‘created’ by private banks as interest-bearing debt while only 60 years ago, this was closer to 50% with the remainder issued – debt free - as coins and notes by the state.
How does fractional reserve banking work? When you put £100 in the bank a strange thing happens. The bank holds on to a ‘fraction’ of your deposit (say 1/10th) and lends the remainder out, charging interest upon it. This £90 loan is described as an ‘asset’ by the bank – it has created it, as if by magic. It charges interest upon the loan and it must be repaid by the debtor with the interest or they will commit a criminal offence. The debtor pays the £90 in to another bank who can then loan out £81, again at interest. The process goes on and on and eventually through this ‘money multiplier’ process, £987 of completely new debt-money is created.
This capacity of banks to create money on the basis of maintaining very small fractions of deposits is one of the most important elements of modern capitalism. Indeed the great German economist Joseph Schumpeter believed it to be the distinguishing feature of capitalism from all previous economic systems. It certainly helps us to explain the astonishing pace of growth we have seen in the Western world (where this system is most developed) over the past 200 years.
It has become clear, however, that our economies cannot keep on growing at the exponential rate we have seen over the past two centuries. Even if we weren’t facing disastrous climate change, there simply isn’t enough cheap oil to maintain such levels. As economist Herman Daly puts it, fractional reserve banking is not growth neutral, but a ‘growth pusher’:
“…For all those loans to be paid back with interest the borrower must make the money grow by a rate at least as high as the rate of interest… The result is that economic growth is required just to keep the money supply from shrinking as old loans are repaid.” (Daly, H., 1999: 133).
Daly’s quote also points to the inherent instability of our financial system. If virtually all the money in circulation is created as debt by banks then money is effectively, credit (or debt). The problem is that if debtors default on their debt (as with the sub-prime crisis), or, indeed, all suddenly choose to pay off their debts and stop borrowing, suddenly the magical ‘multiplier’ goes in to reverse. This is exactly what is happening now across the western world following the recession. People are tightening their belts, concerned about their jobs. They’ve stopped borrowing, whether it be for holidays, cars or, most importantly in the UK, homes. As a result, the money supply is shrinking.
On top of this, many banks are still attempting to rebuild their capital reserves following the financial crisis so are also reluctant to lend unless they are very sure about their investments. Small businesses are feeling the brunt of this as they tend to be seen as riskier investments by banks. Lacking working capital, they shed jobs or close down, further weakening demand and increasing people’s reluctance to borrow and further shrinking the money supply. We are then caught in the disastrous ‘debt-deflation’ scenario that has afflicted Japan for the last 20 years...
The academic and policy research on alternatives to fractional reserve banking is thin on the ground. This needs to change. nef is working to try and change the way the public and the government thinks about modern money. We’re supporting Positive Money, a new campaign helps build momentum for change and educate the wider public about how the monetary system really works...'
28 September 2010
The Power of 10
Excerpt from Project for Public Spaces via Adelaide City Councillor David Plumridge's notes, 28 September 2010
'The Power of 10 is a concept the organisation “Projects for Public Spaces” uses to highlight principles of the Placemaking Process.
The basic idea is that it’s not enough to have just one great place in a neighborhood—you need a number of them to create a truly lively neighborhood. And it’s not enough to have only one top-notch neighborhood in a city—you need to provide people all over town with close-to-home opportunities to take pleasure in public life. And then it’s not enough to have a single livable community in a region—you need a collection of interesting cities and towns to offer a high quality of life the wider area...
Any Great Place itself needs to offer at least 10 things to do or 10 reasons to be there. These could include a place to sit, playgrounds to enjoy, art to touch, music to hear, food to eat, history to experience, and people to meet. Ideally, some of these activities are unique to that spot and are interesting enough to keep people coming back. Local people who use the space most regularly are the best source of ideas for what uses will work best.
How many quality places are located in the City, and how are they connected? Are there other places that should be more meaningful but aren’t?
Answering these questions can help residents, businesses and stakeholders determine - both individually and collectively - where they need to focus their energies. The Power of 10 offers an easy framework that motivates stakeholders to revitalize urban life, and shows that by starting efforts at the smallest scale you can accomplish big things. The concept also provides people something tangible to strive for and helps them visualize how to make their community great.'
'The Power of 10 is a concept the organisation “Projects for Public Spaces” uses to highlight principles of the Placemaking Process.
The basic idea is that it’s not enough to have just one great place in a neighborhood—you need a number of them to create a truly lively neighborhood. And it’s not enough to have only one top-notch neighborhood in a city—you need to provide people all over town with close-to-home opportunities to take pleasure in public life. And then it’s not enough to have a single livable community in a region—you need a collection of interesting cities and towns to offer a high quality of life the wider area...
Any Great Place itself needs to offer at least 10 things to do or 10 reasons to be there. These could include a place to sit, playgrounds to enjoy, art to touch, music to hear, food to eat, history to experience, and people to meet. Ideally, some of these activities are unique to that spot and are interesting enough to keep people coming back. Local people who use the space most regularly are the best source of ideas for what uses will work best.
How many quality places are located in the City, and how are they connected? Are there other places that should be more meaningful but aren’t?
Answering these questions can help residents, businesses and stakeholders determine - both individually and collectively - where they need to focus their energies. The Power of 10 offers an easy framework that motivates stakeholders to revitalize urban life, and shows that by starting efforts at the smallest scale you can accomplish big things. The concept also provides people something tangible to strive for and helps them visualize how to make their community great.'
21 September 2010
Growing Problems on the Road to Recovery
Excerpt from International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) via SWTR, 4 March 2010
'Economic growth is unquestioningly assumed to be a ‘good thing’.
'Economic growth is unquestioningly assumed to be a ‘good thing’.
Mainstream economic theory, developed world political leaders, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, financial markets and the majority of the public back the view that economic growth is essential for economic stability. And in the short term they are right.
If economies don’t grow there is likely to be growing instability in financial markets, mass unemployment and the end of the economic and political order as we know it. It’s undeniable that this would be worrying to live through.
In the long term, however, prolonged economic growth might be the cause of far more instability than meets the eye. It is no secret that growth has always entailed ever-increasing consumption of resources and energy. We might become more efficient – more output for each unit we put in – but efficiency gains have always been more than offset by more growth. Relative resource use (the ratio of inputs to outputs) may have fallen over the years, but absolute resource use has never stopped growing. Economic growth has always entailed physical growth of the economic system in the form of ever increasing flows of matter and energy. Economic growth and resource use are now, and will remain for the foreseeable future, firmly coupled.
...and the Limits to Growth
The problem is, as ever, the fact that we’ve only got one Earth. The economy must be housed within the physically finite limits of the planet’s ecosystems. Since it can’t expand to be greater than this, economic growth is going to have to stop at some point. So the real question is not whether economic growth will stop, but when and how.
In fact, there are strong arguments to be made for a controlled transition to a zero growth economy in order to keep within planetary limits. The Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy has been advocating this as a more appropriate government economic strategy target for developed economies for several years.
Another commentator exploring the possibility and desirability of a zero growth economy is Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the UK-based University of Surrey. Jackson headed the team from the government’s Sustainable Development Commission who produced the report Prosperity Without Growth. He followed this up last year with a book of the same name, in which he discusses what such an economy might look like, and the steps we might take to get there.
Some of the pressure for adopting an economy that functions within natural limits is coming from researchers in the physical sciences. A recent paper from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, also published in UK science journal Nature, Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity suggests that there are nine boundaries (for example, climate change and biodiversity loss) that if breached for extended periods would be likely to cause sudden changes highly detrimental to the continuance of life as we know it. The paper estimates that humanity has already overshot at least three of these boundaries.
On a more positive note, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has commissioned Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning US economist, to lead a starry team of fellow economists in investigating measuring economic success beyond the growth-centric GDP. A draft report was published last year and the French premier was very supportive of the report at its launch...
An End to Growth?
The end of economic growth seems to be less of a question of if than of when and how. The recession has undoubtedly caused great suffering for many in both Northern and Southern countries. But does the problem lie with the recession itself or the fact that our economic and belief and social systems are poorly set up to cope without constant and steady growth?
The recession has usefully highlighted some of the global economy’s more dysfunctional aspects. Should we not use this as an opportunity to re-examine some of these aspects and try to fix them? And the more so, if we accept that the current recession is seen not as an isolated event but a taste of things to come if we stick to the ‘business as usual’ path.
Re-engineering the global economy to work without growth is not just a sensible precaution against breaking key planetary constraints and the inevitable consequences. It is also an ethical necessity if we believe the current Northern economic dominance to be unjust and that Southern economies have a right to develop.
Continued growth is not possible indefinitely. Ecological and economic shocks should be expected to increase in frequency and magnitude as we push the boundaries of earth’s capacity to house and sustain the economy and our abilities to distribute the products of the economy efficiently and fairly. It would therefore seem prudent for stability and survival to re-engineer economic systems to cope without growth.
Nevertheless, even for the most ardent of ‘steady statists’, the task of building a zero growth economy is daunting. Perhaps the scariest part is not a world without growth but the transition to such a system. Like any addiction, getting ‘clean’ can be painful even when it´s clearly necessary.
In the same way that national governments delay making necessary cuts to reduce their deficits, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to put off the inevitable day of reckoning for as long as possible. Yet an end to growth must happen. We’re sitting on the only planet we’ve got. Surely it is better to have some proactive control over the transition rather than passively wait for the limits to be breached?
All this begs the question; are we hoping for the right kind of recovery?'
Robert Rapier on Peak Oil
Everyone should listen to this man, Robert Rapier (not just for his great accent!), and all like him who are working hard to raise the alarm on peak oil...
Sourced from YouTube
An Inconvenient Sandwich
Sourced from the new economics foundation, 25 June 2010
'The British appetite for quick, cheap, convenient food that we can eat wherever we happen to be has hidden costs to society, public health and the environment. This report investigates the economic pressures facing independent cafés and sandwich bars which often forces social justice, sustainability and health off the menu.
Being casual about what, when, and where we eat is both a cause and a symptom of the hectic, mobile lives we lead. It helps to shape our aspirations and our sense of identity.
Although casual food is everywhere, the ‘casual eating’ subdivision of the catering sector is overlooked. So diverse that it can seem to defy classification, it has no shared voice or body of knowledge. Nevertheless, it requires closer scrutiny.
Casual food tends to be cheap, is often highly processed, and generates a lot of food and packaging waste. Although it is hugely popular, it is criticised for being unhealthy, and information about where it comes from or what it contains is rarely available when you buy it. Work in the sector is poorly paid, precarious, and sometimes illegal.
The whole food system is under widespread pressure to become more sustainable. Broadly speaking, the challenge is to produce more and better quality food, more ethically, from less land, using fewer resources, and with fewer negative impacts, and to share it more equitably. Efforts to make the food system more sustainable will have to take the social, environmental, and economic impacts of our casual eating habit into account.
This report is based on a series of interviews with the owners of small independent takeaways and cafés.'
'The British appetite for quick, cheap, convenient food that we can eat wherever we happen to be has hidden costs to society, public health and the environment. This report investigates the economic pressures facing independent cafés and sandwich bars which often forces social justice, sustainability and health off the menu.
Being casual about what, when, and where we eat is both a cause and a symptom of the hectic, mobile lives we lead. It helps to shape our aspirations and our sense of identity.
Although casual food is everywhere, the ‘casual eating’ subdivision of the catering sector is overlooked. So diverse that it can seem to defy classification, it has no shared voice or body of knowledge. Nevertheless, it requires closer scrutiny.
Casual food tends to be cheap, is often highly processed, and generates a lot of food and packaging waste. Although it is hugely popular, it is criticised for being unhealthy, and information about where it comes from or what it contains is rarely available when you buy it. Work in the sector is poorly paid, precarious, and sometimes illegal.
The whole food system is under widespread pressure to become more sustainable. Broadly speaking, the challenge is to produce more and better quality food, more ethically, from less land, using fewer resources, and with fewer negative impacts, and to share it more equitably. Efforts to make the food system more sustainable will have to take the social, environmental, and economic impacts of our casual eating habit into account.
This report is based on a series of interviews with the owners of small independent takeaways and cafés.'
20 September 2010
Warning: Your Reality is Out of Date
Important and fascinating post on meso-facts - those that do not change quickly or slowly...
Excerpt from The Long Now via The Boston Globe, 28 February 2010
'When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
Excerpt from The Long Now via The Boston Globe, 28 February 2010
'When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.
Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.
Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity...
The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.'
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)