8.

Evaluating New Ideas for Your New Society

‘War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgement is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.’

Carl von Clausewitz

Did you study the right subjects in school? Is it better to have no kids, one, two, three or more? Are you sure you are living in the right house for you right now? Did you choose the right city to live in? Should you have quit your job ten years ago? How do you know you made the right decisions? How can you be sure that you have maximised the rate at which your happiness is growing? What numeric indicator do you or your family use to make big decisions, track progress and plan the future? For me, as for most people, the answer is simple: ‘None.’

Indicators, whether of the steps walked in the last day or of GDP growth in the last year, can provide information on how far we have travelled, but no simple indicator can help individuals or countries decide what they should be aiming for. As we’ve seen, the speed of economic growth is no indication that a country is heading in the right direction.

But despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of simple indicators, most parents can make important decisions with long-lasting implications for their children. And, of course, those same parents are simultaneously making myriad other important decisions, often with poor information to hand, about things that affect their lives, and possibly the lives of others. As we saw in Chapter 6, the idea that national leaders can make big decisions without reference to simple indicators is not new: kings, prime ministers and presidents were making big calls long before GDP was invented.

Those who wish to cure themselves, their community or their country of affluenza might choose to measure their progress in the number of food miles in what they eat, the size of their carbon footprint or the number of years since they last bought petrol. But while such conscious consumerism may help some people to monitor their behaviour and stay motivated, no such indicators are actually required to help individuals reshape their lives or their economy. Just as few parents keep score of their progress as parents, there is no need to keep score of the net impact of your individual decisions. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating.

The lack of a summary quantitative indicator to help us decide whether we should move house before our kids hit high school – or whether we should take the pay rise and the long hours, or take a lower-paid job closer to home – doesn’t mean that all our decisions are random or reckless. The simple fact is that, for something as complex as our personal and family lives, the best we can do is collect the available information, think about our options, ask for advice from those we trust and then make a decision that feels right, based on our principles and culture. Most of us are willing to accept that other people with access to the same information might make different decisions. And most of us are willing to admit that while we hope the decisions we make today will make us and our family happy and healthy in the future, we can’t ever be absolutely sure.

THE FOG OF LIFE

It is not just generals who must operate under a fog of uncertainty, and it is not just generals who, having collected as much information as possible, must use their judgement to decide upon the best course of action. Making big decisions amid uncertainty is the downside of the freedom and choice that most people say they want. In our home lives, our work lives and our democratic lives, we can collect a wide range of information and develop indicators of progress, but ultimately we must decide which way to go. And in the absence of perfect information, we can toss coins or we can apply a set of principles to help us make decisions that, we hope, are consistent and mutually reinforcing, and prepare us for the decisions and adversities we are yet to confront.

In a world of rapidly changing technology and culture, though, how do we pursue long-run change? How do we identify long-run priorities, choose good policies to achieve those goals, and engage in democratic and community processes in ways that still leave us time to pursue our passions, enjoy our friends and family and read a good book every now and then? How do we choose what to worry about and what to do about those worries?

Affluence gives us an incredible range of options. Just as we can choose from hundreds of brands of yoghurt, there is an infinite array of policy and cultural problems, and possible solutions, that a dedicated citizen might dedicate their life to pursuing. But there is also the strong possibility that many people, having become overwhelmed, disheartened or simply bored by such a process, will opt out. Which is, of course, what those who like the status quo are hoping will be the case.

This chapter provides a big-picture map to help you navigate the difficult terrain of democratic choice-making. Like any map it must conceal much detail in order to focus attention on the most significant landmarks. No map is perfect.

The following criteria can’t tell you what kind of life or community you should pursue, but hopefully they can help you determine better and worse policies and ideas to pursue the world you want to live in. In a democracy none of us is entitled to live in exactly the world we want, but in a democracy there is no reason to expect that if most of us want big change, we can’t have it.

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

Conservatives often compare running a country to running a household. But your household doesn’t have the capacity to print its own currency, wage war on its neighbours and detain or kill those who don’t play by its rules, so the comparison doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. But as a metaphor it is powerful, and conservatives use it for a reason: it works.

Like all metaphors, maps and rules of thumb, the idea that running a country is like running a household is a deliberate simplification, designed to help people understand something big and complex with reference to something small and familiar. The problem isn’t the use of this metaphor to help people better understand the macro economy or the government; it’s the fact that the metaphor is abused in order to confuse people about those things.

As painful as it might be for many academics and bureaucrats to hear, the truth is that humans prefer simple metaphors and analogies to complicated economic modelling and cost/benefit analyses. Ironically, many of those who yearn for a greater reliance on economic or scientific evidence in public debate seem determined to ignore decades of psychological and linguistic evidence about how humans accumulate and process information. (‘Who cares if the evidence says just talking about evidence is ineffective? Now, listen to me talk about the evidence . . .’)

As writers such as George Lakoff have long noted, it is no accident that conservatives frame debates about government budgets in terms of household budgets, and frame debates about law and order in terms of the consequences of ‘sparing the rod and spoiling the child’. All the criminologists in the world, citing all the studies in the world, have done nothing to persuade conservative voters that longer prison sentences are neither an effective nor efficient way of reducing crime. But tough-on-crime politicians keep getting tougher, not because this works to discourage the criminals but because it works to send a powerful signal to voters about ‘whose side’ the politician is on. The fact that preventing crime and raising children don’t actually have much in common, or that managing a national economy is not really like managing a household budget, doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation with voters about crime or consumer spending that starts with household examples. Scientists use simple analogies and metaphors all the time to help people understand complicated scientific issues. Again, the problem isn’t the use of simplifying analogies or metaphors; it’s the abuse of them in order to mislead people.

For example, the claim that rising public debt means that a government is ‘living beyond its means’ is politically powerful, if economically meaningless. Academic economists know that. Treasury officials know that. And most of the politicians making such claims know that. But when progressive critics attack conservatives for using simplistic analogies they are actually falling into a conservative trap. In dismissing conservative metaphors as simplistic, rather than presenting better metaphors, progressive critics of conservative economic management simultaneously steer away from using the most effective tools of mass communication while displaying themselves as ‘out of touch’ with ‘common sense’.

A more effective approach for progressives who want to talk about government budgets or the macro economy would be to start from the premise that households do know how to make good decisions, and to remind people that households regularly go into debt to fund education, cars, houses and everything in between. Like householders, the issue facing governments is not whether debt is good or bad, but whether or not the things being invested in are helping to achieve long-term goals. Just as it makes no sense to buy a house only after you have saved up the full price, so it makes no sense to delay the construction of schools, roads, hospitals, train lines, aircraft carriers or anything else that will deliver long-term benefits just because the government of the day does not have ready cash on hand to pay for it.

When used well, household analogies like this can make a useful contribution to public debate. Let’s look at another example. Most households understand that you can’t get rich by selling the family farm. Critics of the sale of public assets to help ‘balance the budget’ would probably achieve more if they relied on folksy household metaphors than if they started an ideological debate about the role of the public sector in a mixed economy.

Looked at from another point of view, the fact that some people use household analogies inappropriately or dishonestly is not evidence that the use of complicated economic modelling or cost/benefit analyses will always lead to helpful or honest public debate. Indeed, it is far more likely that heavy reliance on complicated economic models will lead to a lower quality of public debate, and even fewer people feeling that their opinions count, than if experts and non-experts are required to develop some shared language and metaphors that do help to propel public debate forward.

Whether a country’s public debate revolves around the use of kitchen-sink metaphors, cost/benefit analyses or anything else does not change the fact that it is as difficult as it is necessary to find a way to engage millions of people in national conversations about their country’s goals and priorities, and the policies that might be adopted to achieve them. And – at the risk of using a potentially misleading household analogy – debates made up of lies and shouting are unlikely to deliver the best possible decisions.

The premise of this chapter is that the principles people use to tackle affluenza in their personal lives should be consistent with the principles that communities and nations use. That is, while a person’s choice of personal transport is in no way perfectly analogous to a city’s or a country’s choice of a transport system, that does not mean that the principles by which citizens make their personal and communal choices cannot, or should not, have much in common.

PRINCIPLES FOR TACKLING AFFLUENZA

1. First, do no harm

Back before anaesthetic and antibiotics, the ancient Greeks codified the objective of medical treatment in the Hippocratic oath, the core principle of which was to do no harm. It remains good advice for those trying to cure themselves, or their society, of affluenza or anything else.

Every time someone buys a product, uses a service or casts a vote, they send a signal to themselves, to producers and to other citizens about what they want to see more of and what they want to see less of. Those who want a world in which there is no ivory trade should not buy ivory. Consumer boycotts have a long and successful track record. As hundreds of millions of people have gradually stopped smoking in developed countries, the political power of the tobacco industry has been significantly reduced. Don’t support financially what you oppose ethically.

2. Some change is better than no change

The fact that you want the world to cut greenhouse-gas emissions doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t own a car. But if you want the world to move in a particular direction, you can send a clear signal through your spending and your political choices that you are willing to move in that direction yourself. And you can’t keep it a secret. Your voice matters as much as your vote and your wallet.

Producers and politicians can show leadership, but unless citizens and shoppers show their support at the ballot box or cash register, those politicians and companies won’t be leading much for long.

While it can be hard for individuals who live a long way from public transport to stop buying petrol, it is not that hard to switch to a smaller, more fuel-efficient car, or to share rides, or to plan trips that kill two birds with one stone, or to work from home one day per week. And you oughtn’t be surprised that local politicians do nothing to provide more public transport if you have never spoken to one about how important such an investment would be to attracting or retaining your vote.

Everyone knows how to consume less petrol, electricity or meat, but not everyone appreciates the potential of small changes by large groups to spark national or even global shifts. Electricity use per person and oil consumption per person has been declining in countries such as the United States and Australia for over a decade.⁴¹ Such shifts in energy use not only reduce greenhouse-gas emissions but also the commercial appeal of new investment in coalmines and oil wells, and in turn reduce the relative political power of the fossil-fuel lobby. If just 20 per cent of people used 20 per cent less energy, that translates into a 4 per cent fall in household energy use. Given that most industries always expect growth, even small changes can have big effects.

Defenders of the status quo often say that no one who owns a petrol-powered car can credibly argue that we need to significantly reduce our society’s use of fossil fuels. (Interestingly, the same people often simultaneously argue that those who drive electric cars are privileged and wealthy ‘virtue signallers’.) By that logic, anyone who thinks taxes are too high must want them to be cut to zero, and anyone who wants more money spent on defence must want all money to be spent on defence. In reality, some change is demonstrably better than none.

Billions of people deciding to use less petrol, eat less meat, buy less bottled water and spend the money they save on services, information and experiences will have an enormous impact on the shape of the economy. Indeed, the shape of the economy is determined primarily by just such choices. And with reshaped economies come reshaped politics. The horse industry was once powerful and the car industry a mere minnow.

3. It’s not about sacrifice and denial; it’s about saving money and having a better life

Few vegetarians crave meat. Few meat-eaters in Western countries crave dog meat. And few people who understand how celebrities, advertising and culture make things such as handbags or cars seem prestigious crave the latest expensive consumer goods.

Instead of buying bottled water, remind yourself in the morning that you will get thirsty during the day and fill a bottle at home. While it may take some effort to change the habit, if you are finding it a struggle to anticipate that you will get thirsty each day, or if you really enjoy the intrinsic value of buying bottled water, you probably aren’t ready to treat your affluenza yet. But remember, some change is better than none. If you stop buying water each day but find yourself reaching for a bottle in a shopping centre one day because you can’t find a drinking fountain, that doesn’t make you a hypocrite. But hopefully it does make you write a letter to a politician asking for drinking fountains to be placed in all public spaces.

If owning something will make you and your family very happy for a long time, and if you can afford it, you should probably go and buy it. But if it is the act of buying that you hope will temporarily cheer you or your kids up, then you should think again. Curing affluenza doesn’t require us to live in an empty house (although many find such minimalism relaxing), nor does it require us to go without necessities or luxuries. On the contrary, curing affluenza requires us to love, cherish, repair and re-purpose our material possessions. Why would anyone throw away something they love? If people buy only the things they need or love, they will buy fewer things, keep them for longer, have more time and money to spare, and consume far less of the world’s scarce resources. A society that is tackling affluenza doesn’t have to deny itself any pleasure except the dubious thrill of the purchase and its brief afterglow.

Just as there is no harm in eating a piece of chocolate or the occasional slice of cake, there is no harm in buying nice things that give you pleasure for years or decades. Watches, jewellery, furniture and art made centuries ago still make many people happy today. The only thing preventing today’s manufacturers from making things that will last for centuries is a culture that values novelty. While consumerism is based on the transient thrill of the new, materialism is based on love of the old.

Rather than feel guilty about materialist pleasures, the way we love our objects – the care with which we select them, maintain them, repair them and hand them on when we are finished with them – should be a source of pride. A society that is shaking off a bad case of affluenza will accord status to those objects that are long-loved rather than recently purchased. We know how to do it for jewellery and vintage cars; only culture is stopping us from applying the same approach to housing, furniture, clothes and appliances.

4. Services are good for you

While laughter might not always be the best medicine, there is overwhelming evidence that it is often good medicine. In turn, there is no doubt that going to see a comedian, going to the movies or downloading an enjoyable television series is good for your health. Doing so also encourages jobs that don’t require the consumption of lots of natural resources.

As individuals and societies become wealthier, they tend to spend an increasing proportion of their income on services such as health care, education and aged care. For people who have met their material needs for food, clothing and shelter, it makes sense to invest in lengthening and improving their quality of life. But while not many economists or politicians would criticise wealthy people for increasing their spending on luxury cars or jewellery, the fact that wealthy countries are spending a growing proportion of their national income on health and education is often described as a sign of inefficiency. It is, of course, no such thing. But rising expenditure on health and education is usually met by a growing public sector, the least profitable component of GDP.

The fact that, as incomes rise, people want to spend a larger proportion of their income on services is a good thing. The fact that growth in demand for health and education leads to growth in the size of the public sector is no more evidence of inefficiency than the fact that growth in income leads to increased expenditure on luxury cars. Indeed, in the long run, public investment in health and education will likely deliver more lasting economic benefits than private spending on Rolls-Royces.

Similarly, to the extent that services (whether provided publicly or privately) are typically more labour-intensive and less carbon-intensive, and require far fewer natural resources to produce and create far less material waste, a shift away from goods and towards services will lighten the pressure of human activity on the natural environment.

Put simply, if you have to make a choice between services and stuff, take the services.

5. When you are full, stop consuming

Just as your stomach should tell you when you have eaten enough, your cupboards and your garage should tell you when you have consumed enough. And when you have enough stuff, stop buying it. If your last batch of stuff managed to fill a hole in your cupboard but not in your life, it’s pretty likely that the next batch of stuff won’t help either.

If you can’t afford to buy all the things you and your family really need, the easiest way to reduce your cost of living is to buy less stuff, or to buy stuff with less expensive labels on it. But what if you can afford to buy all the things you and your family really need? The answer is the same: the easiest way to improve your quality of life is to reduce your cost of living by buying less stuff, or stuff with less expensive labels on it.

After breaking the habit of buying more than your cupboards can handle, you might find yourself in the luxurious position of being able to buy more leisure. For example, a 2 per cent wage rise is equivalent to a week’s paid holiday. And while you will pay tax on your 2 per cent wage rise, your ‘holiday rise’ will be tax-free.

If your appetite for stuff is really waning, you might like to push for a nine-day fortnight, which usually comes with a 10 per cent pay cut. Or perhaps you’d prefer a 50 per cent increase in the length of your weekend? A four-day work week usually comes with a 20 per cent pay cut – but, again, that 20 per cent was taxable and your leisure time isn’t.

Think of working fewer hours as donating a job to someone else. If millions of people did it, we would all buy a lot less stuff and create a lot more jobs. Win-win for us, but a big loss for the people who make large profits by selling us stuff we don’t really need or want.

6. Get yourself and your country into better shape

No single person is in charge of the shape of the economy, but every person with an income has the potential to influence its shape in both the short and the long term. Just as hundreds of millions of people deciding to pay other people to make them coffee has transformed shopping strips over the past two decades, if hundreds of millions of people choose to buy expensive electric cars instead of expensive ‘sports cars’ or ‘sports utilities’, they will fundamentally reshape the car industry, the oil industry and the electricity industry.

While working fewer hours or taking longer holidays is a simple solution to the problem of having too much stuff and not enough time, it’s not always simple to negotiate such a solution. So if you are in the luxurious position of getting paid a lot more money than you need to meet your material needs, but for some reason you or your boss can’t countenance you working less and earning less, what can you do?

Traditionally the simple answer is to donate money to charities, causes or research you support. Such generosity can and does significantly reshape our societies and economies. And if you believe that your donation alone isn’t enough to make a tangible difference, why not talk five of your cashed-up friends into joining you? I assure you as the former CEO of a philanthropically funded organisation that the day a group of people ring to ask if you would like to meet to talk about what else the organisation could do if it had another $50,000 is a good day. Supporting the arts, research, advocacy or charitable services delivers a lot of people far more lasting happiness than adding the expensive paint option to a new car or buying the most expensive vitamin pills on the market.

A less talked-about option is to squander your own money strategically in ways designed to help reshape the economy. For those who want to start to cure their affluenza but can’t quite see themselves giving a large slab of their spare money away, there is still the opportunity to shift consumption patterns away from disposable stuff and towards either services or long-lived assets that have socially useful consequences. For example, spending a lot of money on an expensive electric car or an enormous photovoltaic solar array for your roof is better for the shape of the economy than spending the same amount on a bathroom or kitchen renovation. Early adopters of socially useful technologies such as electric cars and home battery systems have helped lower their cost and speed up their roll-out.

Finally, if you have so much money that you are worrying about what to waste it on, don’t cry poor, don’t demand tax cuts and don’t allow others to suggest that unless taxes are cut, rich people won’t want to work anymore. Voting for higher taxes is not just another way to donate to those that need it, it is a way to ensure that everyone else who can afford to does likewise.

As discussed above, while working less is a good way to redistribute work and income, getting paid a lot of money to do a full-time job you love is not the worst problem to have. If you are ‘burdened’ with too much money, don’t feel bad about it – try to do as much good with it as you can.

7. Flatter is fairer

In a famous thought experiment the philosopher John Rawls challenged people to design a world in which the distribution of income among nations, individuals, races and genders was sufficiently fair that they would choose to be born into such a world without knowing in advance whether they would be born black or white, smart or slow, in a rich country or a poor one.

Kids born to wealthy parents in wealthy countries hit the jackpot, but the vast majority of the world’s population, by definition, have no such luck. And while there have been significant improvements in life expectancy and educational opportunities in many developing countries, the fact is that, according to the United Nations, 783 million people do not even have access to clean drinking water at a time when the bottled water industry is expecting rapid growth in rich countries.

Despite the growing inequality between the rich and the rest, both within countries and between them, there is overwhelming biological evidence that intelligence and creativity are evenly distributed across countries and across the globe. But while innate ability might be evenly distributed, clearly other things are not: access to education, high-quality jobs and even clean water. While no one person, or single country, can bring an end to discrimination, structural disadvantage or global inequality, the consumption and voting decisions of each individual, and the trade and diplomatic decisions of each country, can and do make a difference.

Curing affluenza will, inevitably, free up more resources and create more opportunities for those with the least. The quicker the world moves towards a more equal distribution of resources, the sooner we will all benefit from the intelligence and creativity of billions of people who are currently unable to contribute.

We know how to redistribute money within and between countries. We know how to invest in the public services and amenities needed to ensure that all kids get a good start in life. And, with rapidly growing national income and national waste heaps, we clearly have more resources to tackle such problems if we seek to. While it’s true that renovating our kitchens creates work for builders, so too does paying more tax and building more schools. We know how to redistribute not just money, but opportunities. The question is whether we collectively want to.

FROM PERSONAL DECISION TO PUBLIC POLICY: TACKLING THE CULTURE OF AFFLUENZA

Countries don’t usually make laws about culture, but they are always making laws that reinforce or reshape their culture. Laws about everything from speeding fines and income tax to food regulation and copyright all have the capacity to define, or refine, national culture. Swedish speeding fines are set as a proportion of the driver’s income, reinforcing the notion that those with greater means should make a greater contribution. French food regulation is designed to encourage local food production and consumption. Culture, like the economy, is shaped by the net effect of millions of small decisions.

In turn, those who want to cure the culture of affluenza not only need to reconsider their personal choices, they also need to be ever-vigilant about the way that new rules, regulations, policies and budget cuts might either help or hinder them in their goal of reshaping their community or their country. When the mayor of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, with a population of more than 11 million, announced a ban on all outdoor advertising in his city, business groups predicted job losses and budget deficits. In reality the city continues to grow and an overwhelming majority of citizens support the ‘Clean City Law’. No single law will cure a culture of affluenza, but a wide range of laws can help to stamp it out.

Conversely, laws that allow developers to build football stadiums with no drinking fountains facilitate the culture of affluenza. Not only does forcing participants in public events to buy bottled water oblige them to waste their money, such planning decisions reinforce the cultural norms that sustain consumerist culture.

At a more macro level, a society that takes good care of its unemployed will find it much easier to manage the inevitable economic transitions that will arise in the coming decades than will a society that treats its unemployed with contempt and disdain.

Of course, we should not expect all citizens to have the time to evaluate every piece of local, state and federal legislation and develop a considered view. But most democracies do not rely on, or encourage, such a degree of engagement. On the contrary, just as most households make most decisions based on principles and rules of thumb, when evaluating public policy the principles listed above are a guiding framework rather than definitive rules to be followed. As the principles aim to create better outcomes, not outcomes that are definitively right, it is inevitable that well-intentioned people will disagree with them, just as well-intentioned parents disagree about whether kids should work for their pocket money or not. This is as it should be.

The following four examples start from the premise that people do have the capacity to reshape their community and that an effective way to pursue such goals is to focus on ideas that simultaneously help change not just laws and budgets, but also culture and expectations.

A MORATORIUM ON BUILDING NEW COALMINES

There is no one simple thing the world can do to rapidly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. But there are many simple things that we can do to ensure emissions continue to rise. One of the easiest ways to cause more climate change is to keep building new coalmines and drilling new oil wells.

For thirty years there have been global, national and local debates about the need to introduce carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, renewable-energy subsidies and a range of other policies. But over the same period the world’s production of coal – the single largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions – has risen from 4.5 billion tonnes in 1986 to 7.5 billion tonnes in 2016.⁴²

In 2015 the president of the small, low-lying Pacific Ocean nation of Kiribati wrote to all world leaders asking them to support a moratorium on the construction of new coalmines. He did not call for the immediate closure of the existing mines that, more than any other activity, were producing the heat-trapping gases that threatened to submerge his country; he simply called for a halt to the construction of new ones. Needless to say, most world leaders who apparently support urgent action to tackle climate change ignored this simple request.

Agreeing that the world needs to stop building new coalmines does not preclude the pursuit of subsidies for renewable energy, or imposing carbon taxes for polluting forms of energy, or any other form of climate policy. On the contrary, as efforts to reduce smoking have shown, although the simultaneous pursuit of several policy changes can seem messy, it is often effective.

Just as banning children from smoking is designed to make a clear point that the activity is harmful, a moratorium on new coalmines sends a clear signal about citizen preferences for the future shape of the economy. The unifying idea is that you can’t start going forwards until you stop going backwards.

Let’s apply the principles above to this specific proposal.

First, do no harm

If countries were serious about avoiding climate change, they would do less of the things that cause it and more of the things that reduce it. Given that coal is the largest single contributor to global greenhouse-gas emissions, a moratorium on the construction of new mines passes the ‘do no harm’ test.

Some change is better than none

A moratorium on building new coalmines is not enough to reduce emissions below levels considered safe by climate scientists. But then neither were the commitments made by countries at the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015, and neither is riding your bike instead of driving your car. The moratorium does, however, pass the ‘some change is better than none’ test.

It’s not about sacrifice and denial. Abstaining from building new coalmines will save money, free up resources for other projects and help protect the natural environment. Given that most of the world’s economies have no coalmines in them, it is clearly ridiculous to suggest that regions can’t grow without new coalmines. Indeed, given that the world demand for coal fell for three years in a row leading up to 2016, a moratorium on new coalmines would be clearly beneficial for the workers in, and owners of, existing coalmines.

Services are good for you

A world that is building fewer new coalmines will need fewer mine construction workers and will use less energy generated from fossil fuels. In turn, a moratorium on new coalmines would change the shape of the economy, making it ‘lighter’ and, almost inevitably, more service-oriented, as a greater reliance on renewable energy requires a significant substitution of engineering, information and technological development for material fuel consumption.

When you are full, stop consuming

According to climate science, our atmosphere has already consumed too much carbon dioxide, so it is high time we stopped producing so much of it. And, given the enormous amount of coal-fired energy used to produce stuff that is thrown away, a society that is curing its affluenza needs fewer coalmines anyway, even if climate change weren’t a pressing problem.

Get yourself and your country into shape

Countries that are still building new coalmines are hardly working flat-out to reshape their societies and economies in ways designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Indeed, the construction of new coalmines sends a powerful cultural signal that those in power are yet to take seriously the need to make big changes to meet big problems. Building more of what you want more of, and less of what you want less of, is central to the idea of reshaping the economy. A moratorium on building new coalmines would not prevent dangerous climate change, but it would lead to an increase in the cost of coal, give workers in existing coalmines more time to find a new job, reduce the political power of the coal industry and send an important signal about the future shape of economic activity.

Flatter is fairer

A moratorium on the construction of new coalmines would lead to a reduction in the profits of those seeking to build new mines, and an increase in profits and wages for those who own and work in existing coalmines. In the pursuit of a ‘just transition’ it makes no sense to encourage young people to acquire new skills and move to new towns to work in new coalmines that will not be able to provide long-term employment, especially when those new coalmines will simply displace coal being produced by existing workers in existing mines. A moratorium on new coalmines is not enough to ensure a just transition for existing coal workers, but by preventing new entrants into the coal industry a moratorium will mean there are more resources available to support existing coal workers.

PUBLIC-SECTOR BANKING

The finance sector has become one of the biggest and most profitable industries in the developed world. It is a major employer of some of the best educated citizens, but it is not at all clear how growth in the size or profitability of the finance sector leads to an improvement in the quality of most people’s lives. Indeed, given the fees charged by financial institutions for bank accounts, deposits, withdrawals, loans and other transactions, the banks should properly be seen, in many respects, as the private owners of a private taxation system, in which they can ‘clip the coupon’ on nearly all private transactions.

While banks once performed the physical function of safely storing money and allowing people to securely transfer large amounts of money to others, most of this formerly physical service is now conducted electronically. And despite the potential for new communications technology to lower both the cost of banking and the barriers for new firms to enter the industry, the finance sector remains highly concentrated and highly profitable.

As most employers now only pay their staff electronically, and many firms only accept payments by credit card or electronic funds transfer, banking has effectively become an essential service that people cannot opt out of, even if they think the costs are too high or the service unsatisfactory. Historically, it was the public sector that provided essential services, in order to ensure their equitable and reliable supply. Although many governments have deliberately privatised their investments in banking, technological change has created new opportunities for the public sector to enter, re-enter or expand its engagement in the finance sector in novel ways.

Consider the following. A bank account and an account with your national tax office are virtually identical from a legal and technological point of view. Both revolve around the linking of a unique identifying number to a name and account balance, along with an ability to charge (or pay) interest. In most countries it is possible for employers to make additional voluntary tax payments on behalf of their employees each pay period (deposits), which citizens can then access once a year via a ‘tax return’ (withdrawal). In short, in developed countries the computerised system that sits behind the tax system is the equivalent of a simple savings bank account, albeit one with a clunky web interface.

In fact, the degree of ‘administrative banking’ that governments can provide is far more widespread than the capacity to take deposits, hold funds and facilitate withdrawals. In the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and other countries it is possible to get ‘loans’ directly from the government, either through the tax system or the welfare system, with repayments made automatically through those same systems. Intriguingly, these loans are rarely called loans, with governments often preferring to refer to them as ‘advances’, ‘deferred taxes’ or ‘temporary supplements’. For example, in Australia, the federal government is willing to lend tens of thousands of dollars to university students (known as the Higher Education Loans Program), to lend up to $1000 to welfare recipients (known as a ‘welfare advance’) and to offer reverse mortgages to wealthy retirees (known as the Pension Loans Scheme).

When governments already have the computer systems in place, have zero-cost access to the best debt-collection system available (compulsory tax payments) and can borrow at lower rates than private banks, there is no reason, other than ideology, for the public sector not to set up simple ‘savings and loan’ accounts for any and all citizens who would like them. Citizens opting into the use of existing public infrastructure to provide low-cost banking services would effectively allow them to ‘nationalise’ the banking system one transaction at a time.

The gradual growth of such an institution would have the potential to significantly reshape the finance sector, the distribution of fees and dividends, and the economy more broadly. Needless to say such an idea would be fought tooth and nail by the owners of existing banks, most likely on the basis that public provision of services is ‘less efficient’ than private provision.

Developing widespread public competition for private banks would cause no environmental harm, would help shift the shape of the economy towards the public sector and would lead to no increase in material consumption. It could lead to a significant cut in the cost of banking (and living) for customers, and to a significant cut in the proportion of national income going to the owners of bank shares. By demonstrating that well-run public services can be superior to private-sector alternatives, the voluntary introduction of public banking would not only reduce the size (and political power) of the finance sector, it would also embolden those pushing for other, perhaps more ambitious, roles for the state.

WHAT IF GOVERNMENTS HANDED OUT STATUS CREDITS?

Frequent flyers are treated better in some public places than their less well-travelled peers. They get to use express lanes at security, they can board the plane first, and they might even get to wait in a nice lounge with free food and drinks. In an affluent society in which you can nearly always buy yourself out of trouble (if you can afford to), queuing and waiting are very low-status activities. The airlines know that allowing their best customers to jump the queue and breeze past the parents with screaming kids is a cheap way to buy loyalty – and, more importantly, repeat business.

But if airlines can hand out status credits to drive repeat business, in the same way nightclubs put the names of special people ‘on the door’, why shouldn’t governments encourage and reward the ‘right’ kind of behaviour in similar ways?

The tradition of handing good citizens the ‘keys to the city’ dates back to the times of walled cities, the gates to which were locked and guarded at night. Those given the keys were not just the recipients of public status, but had the freedom to enter and exit the city at any time, day or night. Their status in the community was accompanied by tangible benefits.

There is nothing to stop a city, a state or a nation from rewarding community volunteers, good Samaritans and people exhibiting bravery or generosity by providing them with both public status and private convenience. Imagine if:

•The best parking spots were reserved for those with ‘community status’.

•The best seats at community sporting grounds and theatres were reserved for those with ‘community status’.

•In peak-hour traffic, whole lanes were reserved for the use of teachers, nurses, aged-care workers or workers in any other profession that the government said they wished they could reward with a pay rise but couldn’t afford to.

While there’s no doubt citizens would disagree about which activities deserves status and what rewards would be appropriate, in reality such democratic decision-making is no different to decisions about who is eligible for concession cards, how many car spaces should be reserved for the disabled and who is eligible for public awards for community service.

In a society suffering from a bad case of affluenza, the private sector is the dominant provider of status, and the major recipients of that status are the wealthiest citizens, along with those celebrities who help the rich get even richer by advertising luxury clothes, cosmetics or cars. We could reduce the influence and pervasiveness of advertising by restricting it or requiring more transparency, but a more effective approach would be to make celebrities wait in line behind those citizens we have collectively, and democratically, decided are worthy of status and special treatment.

A community that was willing to award status and other non-monetary rewards to citizens whose ideas and efforts helped to improve social wellbeing could significantly reshape their community without raising taxes, borrowing money or seeking grants. The mere act of beginning a communal conversation about what behaviours might be rewarded, and the best way to reward those behaviours, could in itself strengthen community bonds and encourage higher expectations of local governments.

The strategic use of status by governments could only be harmful if the community sought to reward harmful activities. While awarding status and other non-monetary benefits will do nothing to prevent companies or individuals from doing harm, it has the potential to shift culture away from the individualism of affluenza and towards norms and attitudes that take giving to the community seriously.

REPAIR CULTURE

Imagine if manufacturers and retailers were responsible for providing a full cash refund for products that had broken and, through design or lack of availability of spare parts, could not be repaired.

Imagine if local communities provided shared facilities not just to fix things, but to bring people together in ways designed to help them help each other to fix things. Imagine if the technology of dating apps was used to introduce people with a problem to people with the skills to solve that problem. And imagine if the owners of sheds and spare rooms full of unused stuff could be linked up with people looking for a spare part or a near-new replacement for a much-used appliance or tool.

Providing a physically and technologically safe place for people with broken things and people who like to fix things to come together has little potential to do harm and lots of potential for people to save money and make new friends. While it would take time to change the laws around refunds and repairability, the barrier to encouraging such community action is low and it is highly likely that the lessons of early adopters would help other communities jump-start such activities.

It is likely that different people with different skills, at different stages of their life, would seek to contribute to, and extract from, community repair centres in different ways. Some people may wish to sell their skills, some may want to barter time for things, and some would simply want to donate their time and experience in order to contribute to their community.

While the emergence of 3D printing will make the production of spare parts simpler and cheaper, most of the repair economy would consist of the provision of services. To the extent that repaired items are a substitute for new items, repair culture would likely lead to an overall reduction in material use and an increase in the size of the service sector. To the extent that repaired goods are likely to be cheaper than new goods, repair culture would lead to falls in the cost of living and, for some, provide a source of either income or stuff in exchange for skilled labour.

In the long run, the potential size of the repair economy will be significantly influenced by cultural expectations and the consumer laws that accompany them. While some firms maximise their profits by producing goods that are destroyed when people seek to open them up, if people refuse to buy products that cannot be repaired, firms will eventually change strategy. Changes to consumer laws would obviously speed such a cultural shift, but, as discussed above, the processes of individual change and policy change are often deeply enmeshed and self-reinforcing.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD WE DO?

There is no silver bullet for affluenza. Like influenza, or any contagious disease, affluenza will continue to evolve, its transmission mechanisms will continue to change, and cultural habits as diverse as recreational shopping and humble-bragging about new purchases on social media will continue to shape the rate and severity of its spread.

On the other hand, curing affluenza does not require enormous personal or economic sacrifice; on the contrary, wasting far less time, resources and energy producing stuff that is rarely or never used will make our lives richer, and our economies more efficient and stronger – even if some parts of the economy will shrink or vanish in the way our typewriter and steam engine factories have.

But while curing affluenza will not require much, if any, genuine personal sacrifice, it will require a much larger section of the community to engage not just in social media debates about the personalities and peccadilloes of our political class, but also in debates about the goals and overall direction we want for our country. While policy detail matters to some, policy objectives should matter to everyone. At a personal level we will need to spend more time thinking about what we really need and what we really want. We have built the wealthiest societies in the world and there is nothing to prevent the vast majority of the population from having all of their needs, and most of their wants, met – unless their wants are to perpetually dispose of the things they once said they really wanted.

Alternatives to a society and economy based on consumerism exist in abundance, and new ones are being developed all the time. The first task is to decide that we want change. The second is to see ways of achieving it. The next chapter discusses the third and final step: dealing with those who are determined to block us.

Bill McKibben

Back in 1994 the world’s governments pledged to take actions necessary to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ as part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But in the years that have followed, global emissions have soared – the direct result of government decisions supporting the expansion of the fossil-fuel industries. Already these decisions are breaking some of our planet’s largest features. The icecaps are melting and coral reefs are dying off from repeated bleaching. We are seeing harsher droughts, heatwaves and wildfires, and food insecurity is stirring conflict. Lags in the climate system mean even just the emissions we have released so far have locked in worse impacts in decades to come. And yet, after all these years and after all that damage, governments are allowing and facilitating the expansion of the coal, oil and gas industries that are causing this havoc.

While it is too late to stop climate change altogether, it is not too late to slow it down. But to take on the power of the biggest industry ever, we will need to build the biggest ever social movement. We don’t just need people to turn off their lights, but to turn out in the streets. We will need some more brave people to step up and take action to stop new polluting fossil fuels – to get out in front of bulldozers, or fracking drills, or the White House, where in 2011 along with 1200 others, I was arrested protesting the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

But as that fight made clear to me, any campaign is fighting uphill so long as the industry is viewed as a respectable and even inescapable part of people’s lives. That social licence is essential to the industry’s power over our politics. It needs to be revoked. That’s where the fossil-fuel divestment campaign comes in.

Divestment is based on a simple idea: if it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. People who are serious about stopping climate change can put their money where their mouths are by avoiding investments in the coal, oil and gas companies whose business plans are inconsistent with stopping climate change. By shifting their money, people can help to shift the culture as well as the energy industry.

The climate mathematics are stark. Any reasonable chance of stopping the worst impacts means leaving the vast majority of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves underground – these reserves that are currently above-ground as assets on the books of the governments and companies that expect to profit from them. Simply put, those plans are inconsistent with a climate that works something like the one in which complex human civilisation developed.

The divestment movement turns this scientific knowledge into something people can do. As individuals we can shift our own money out of services such as banks that invest in fossil fuels to those that don’t. Similarly, we can call on our religious, charitable and educational institutions to take a public leadership position consistent with their values. It’s not just our money that matters, it’s our voice and our leadership.

The growth of the divestment movement has been remarkable. From a few campus divestment campaigns in the US and Australia five years ago, 350.org and other organisations have helped spread this simple idea into a worldwide phenomenon with its own momentum. Local campaigns have won commitments from institutions as varied as Stanford University, the British Medical Association, the Australian Academy of Science, the World Council of Churches and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which is the world’s largest fund.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard critics dismiss divestment as empty symbolism. Symbols are powerful, and the resistance to divestment only makes that clearer. Divestment has a historical track record, in movements against tobacco and South African apartheid. The stigma from divestment can create conditions for real change, increasing risks of government action and disrupting business conditions. Fossil-fuel companies now cite divestment as a material risk and they are struggling with recruitment as many of the best and brightest students now avoid working for such pariahs.

Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is going to take actions of many forms, on many frontlines. As leaders refuse to do their job, divestment allows people to show leadership from the bottom up, building pressure on governments and business alike and changing the terms of the fight. History is full of mass movements shifting culture, resources and outcomes. The fossil-fuel divestment campaign has given millions of people a powerful way to make themselves heard, and in a functional democracy, nothing is more powerful than that.

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist. His many books include The End of Nature and Oil and Honey, and he is a founder of 350.org.