Supplementary Memorandum submitted by
Professor Tim Jackson
Q1. There is considerable detail on this
in our forthcoming report. But the short answer is that a government
campaign to address consumption would have to do two things. The
first is to redress the systematic bias towards consumerism. The
second is to provide the opportunities for people to flourish
in less materialistic ways.
Redressing the consumerist bias will mean curtailing
signals (including advertising) that promote unproductive, status
driven positional consumption and ensuring that government's own
messages are consistent in relation to consumption and the need
to consume less. At the moment of course this is very difficult
for Government to do because of the assumption that consumption
growth is essential for economic stability. But in a longer-term
better thought through strategy, this consistency of message will
be an essential part of government's role in achieving sustainability.
Providing the capabilities for flourishing means
investment in public spaces and infrastructures, support for community-based
resources and the strengthening of social goods and services.
There is more detail on this in our forthcoming work. Suffice
it to note here that there are clear opportunities for stimulus
investment here, particularly in relation to public investment
in social infrastructure.
The "ecologically sustainable" level
of consumption should be established according to principles laid
out some time ago by Herman Daly that refer to a "constant
stock of capital that can be maintained by resource throughputs
(and emissions) that remain within ecological limits". Establishing
those limits—as the UK has done for carbon emissions—is
a vital first step in figuring out a sustainable level of consumption.
The next step is to develop the capacity to understand the macroeconomic
implications of an economy constrained in this way. Again, this
point is developed more fully in our Prosperity report.
Q2. Jonathon's point, and I agree with it,
is that within the existing model, we rely on growth to maintain
full employment and to furnish growing revenues for increased
public spending. When liberal market economies collapse, the biggest
hits are to jobs and to public sector revenues. These things both
matter. Both are essential to providing people with capabilities
to flourish. In our prosperity report we identify this as "the
dilemma of growth". Neither is easy to solve but there are
some mechanisms for redressing the structural reliance on growth
and addressing the impacts of recession. Essentially these mechanisms
come down to the question of fair shares: sharing the available
work and national income in ways that protect the most vulnerable
and promote social wellbeing. There is more detail on this in
our Prosperity report, but there is also a lot more work that
needs doing—by Treasury and others—to get from points
of principle to a workable low-growth economy. Clearly, however,
this demands active policy that goes beyond the dogma of free
market economics. Hopefully at this point in time our eyes are
open wide enough to accept this point. It should be noted, though,
that planning for low-growth is very different from negotiating
unplanned collapse. What we're seeing at the moment is the abject
failure of plan A (assumptions of continued growth) and the blinding
realisation that there is no plan B.
Q3. Again a lot depends on how this happens.
In some ways, Jonathon was making an obvious point that when investment
stalls, it is difficult to fund the investment in technological
and infrastructural changes that is essential to achieve the transition
to a sustainable society. It's become very obvious that in fact,
when economies collapse it is essential for government to intervene,
particularly through public investment and spending. The point
here, and I know that Jonathon agrees wholeheartedly with this,
is that this provides a unique window of opportunity to target
that investment and that spending towards things that we know
are needed to put us on a path to sustainability. As I hoped to
make clear in my oral evidence, these investments offer clear
returns to society not just in terms of reduced carbon emissions,
and better lives but in economic terms as well. As such they are
much better places to put our money than in blind fiscal stimulus
to promote blanket increases in undifferentiated high-street spending.
February 2009
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