Trash the system or crash the planet: those are the choices in our economic future, according to Tim Jackson in a TED talk given in July. Either we continue using up scarce resources and emitting carbon or we accept serious economic consequences; the only way out of this dilemma is a blind confidence in our own cleverness, in our ability to create solutions using technology and doing things more efficiently.
To stop the economic system crashing over the past two to three decades, we have expanded the money supply by expanding credit and debt so that people can keep buying stuff so that economic growth continues. Between 1993 and 2008 in the UK, personal debt increased from around 60% to over 100% of GDP and at the same time personal savings plunged from around 11% of disposable income to below 0%.
In the future, investment has to change its purpose from the mindless pursuit of consumption growth. It has to be about protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends. Prosperity has social and psychological aims as well as material ones. In order for the poorest people in the world to share in prosperity, we need to define a more meaningful and less materialistic version of prosperity.