I have had an uneasy long-term relationship with the books on my bedside cabinet. Not the omnivorous fiction du jour but volumes with soundbite titles and copious glossaries that have lived on in a wonky pile to somehow arrive in my brain by osmosis.
You never know when just a title could save the planet, from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by British economist E. F. Schumacher in 1973 to Rutger Bregman’s Human Kind, a Hopeful History, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World.
All of which now seem deeply comforting as we negotiate this horrible election cycle with a coalition government blaming their every austerity on either the previous government or the need to kickstart ‘the economy’.
Almost every measure in the last 10-month tsunami of ad hoc coalition legislation came with a warning that the belt-tightening in question would land most heavily on those in the grip of a ruthless cost of living crisis – a concept that seems not to compute in the coalition’s binary world of winners and losers.
Hickel’s ‘degrowth’ is worth revisiting. A first step toward a more ecological civilisation rather than reducing GDP, it is about reducing the material and energy throughout the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.
“Doing this may mean that GDP grows more slowly or stops growing or even declines. And if so, that’s okay because GDP is not what matters,” he wrote.
“Under normal circumstances this might cause a recession which happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing: it is a disaster.
“Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place.
“An economy that’s organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than around the constant accumulation of capital,” he said.
In our real time election, short-termism barely touches the sides of two structural crises, and the coalition in particular is going down the wrong tunnel on both.
Every mingy bit of legislation slammed through in this parliamentary term came with the warning that the worst effects would land on the poorest New Zealanders.
Sure enough, news this week is that white bread is up 28 percent over the last year. Potatoes have jumped nearly 23 percent. Even milk, a Kiwi staple, has gone up every month for the last two years. Allegedly, human populations can live on a diet of potatoes and milk. Not so much if you cannot afford even them.
Remember National’s pledge to bring the cost of living down? Blame Labour all you like but disadvantaged schoolkids had hot food and a better education for it.
The other ticking timebomb is that – without a blink to democracy – New Zealand Inc is going all in on data centres on a ‘trust us, we know what we are doing’ basis. It’s a $30 billion Crown investment gambling on the extraordinary bubble created by the tech industry which will eventually, magically, attract $25 to $30 billion in offshore investment in data centres and associated infrastructure over five years.
Google recently warned quantum computers could be capable of breaking some of the cryptographic systems used in most internet transactions as early as 2029, as AI helps overcome technical barriers that once slowed quantum development.
These bubbles will burst or break us, with or without data centres, for the stock market’s latest ‘fix’. There are no knowledge economy jobs coming our way just by building giant refrigerators and beggaring our energy resources so late in the game.
The global hegemony that has already accumulated huge swathes of the world’s wealth won’t be the losers.
Yet data centres are already popping up, presumably even though local planners know that each one will gobble down the same amount of water and power as a sizeable city and, once commissioned, run with derisory staffing levels.
The citizen hardship of whittling still more electricity away from once thriving manufacturing towns brought down by an insufficient power supply seems unconscionable.
The Comalco smelter electricity bonanza looked ugly in the face of the subsequent domino-loss of mills and historic manufacturing, with the prime minister saying merely that his government “could not save them all”.
The coalition’s suspicious fast-track legislation wasn’t for rats and mice planning, though that will become an issue too. And just what might the vastly expensive refrigerators be used for when the bubble bursts?
British philosopher John Stuart Mills’ inaugural address at the University of St Andrews in 1867 has been shortened by popular use to the salutary “all it takes for bad men to flourish is for good men to do nothing”.
Global resistance is mounting and the appalling absurdity of data centres has been hailed as a critical new front in the fight against ‘tech-enabled authoritarianism’. We need to find – and elect –leaders who push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes and the unfairness of inequality.• Liz Waters
