Capitalism
Today, as part of my ‘15 days of economics’ blog series, I looked at a Chapter from the book: ‘Talking to My Daughter’ by Yanis Varoufakis, a notable and controversial Greek economist. It was a fascinating read which has convinced me to buy the book. The main reason for this is that his target audience for the book is young economists such as myself, who are interested in finding solutions to the all the issues (environmental, social and economic) that have arisen as a result of humanities exploitation of the Earth for our own short term benefit. Varoufakis describes this through the medium of the film: The Matrix. He quotes the artificial intelligence of the story who states “every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not… There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern… A virus.” Ultimately, I would say it is hard to argue with this assessment, we have driven species to extinction, acidified lakes, polluted oceans, damaged our atmosphere and destroyed our forests.
What I found most interesting in this chapter was the question he put forward: how can we make collective responsible for the planet’s resources an integral part of society? A landless worker may say the way to prevent the exploitation of land is to prevent ownership of it: collective responsibility will only be brought about by collective ownership. However if you were to ask a wealthy land owner this question he would likely say that the government is not a good expression of the collective interests of the people it governs, just the interests of those within it. Another thing worth pointing out here is the inescapable links between Politics, Geography and Economics, it is impossible to talk about one without the others.
One solution that has been put forward in answer to this question is, if we give the planets natural resources exchange value instead of just experiential value market society will value it much more. The example used is: if trout in a river were privately owned, the owner would have reason to protect them, perhaps charging an entrance fee or hourly rate, and ensuring that fishing was limited both protecting the trout from running out and the jobs of the fisherman. This could also be applied to the atmosphere. If it was privately owned then industries would have to pay to pollute it. This however does seem to be very close to feudalism. Those in favour of it would argue that if natural resources were available to be bought and sold, it would naturally end up in the hands of those who can manage it most profitably and efficiently a concept similar to the invisible hand. He then goes into further detail about the potential benefit of this concept through the introduction of shares etc which would allow for more collective control.
This was the solution I found most interesting not because I wholly agree with it, but because of how controversial it seems to provide more power over the environment to those who the everyman would say is responsible for it’s destruction.
Varoufakis then goes on to his preferred solution to this problem: Democracy and how despite its obvious flaws it is the best solution we have in dealing with this issue. I may choose to dive deeper into this on a later blog, as it this topic is possibly the most relevant to our society at this moment in time. I look to forward to reading the rest of this book in the future and hope we can find a solution to these issues as move further into the 21st century.
