Some decades ago, I had been putting my savings in a "socially responsible" mutual fund. I trusted them to define "socially responsible."
Then, I paid attention to one of the things they sent me that I usually put right into recycling; it was a statement of their investments.
Some 40% of their holdings were in the health care industry. I was profiting from the pain and suffering of others.
I soon divested of the stock market completely.
Sometimes, that hurts a bit when I hear of the stock market reaching record after record. But I remind myself that is groupthink; my strategy these days is the opposite of the "American Dream": I strive to earn and spend as little as necessary for a modicum of comfort.
"Those other places in Europe, Canada, and Asia, that are envious of America, have better health, better education, and happier populations."
I question the major premise. That seems to be a uniquely American point-of-view.
Soon after my "aha moment" outlined above, I emigrated to Canada, thinking, "Things can't get much worse!" That was 2004 — boy, was *I* wrong!
I don't know of *any* fellow Canadians who are "envious" of the US! I have European friends; *none* of them are "envious" of the US!
So that's something that is only in the heads of Americans.
I want to respond to this as the main point… “Until America decides prosperity is well-being and not just money, we won’t address the environmental degradation that threatens our civilization.”
Their will always be work to do on this subject of prosperity but on balance in even one generation as a western society we have come a long way on many things and fell back on others.
In terms of the environment, we have cleaner water air and land even though we have industrialized significantly.
Although we have just as much diversity of wealth the average citizen is better off, but its agreed not as much as they should be as they have not shared in the massive productivity improvements as we have lost the balance between capital and labor due to globalization and this has also allowed wealth to be transferred from the west to the rest.
Deaths due to social safety and climate has dropped due to technology.
The fancy word for improving our reliance on “capitalistic growth” is “Sustainability” that talks about the circular economy and finding ways to rebalance “needs with wants” for physical items also made worse by a throw away social trend.
You need to explain what you mean by “environmental degradation” as so far its been a positive not a negative.
Thanks for the conversation on this. Our economic system, technology and other factors have lifted million (billions on a global scale) out of poverty and made their lives better.
These natural systems are our life support system, and most of them are in the red and getting worse. I argue that we need to prioritize moving back to the safe zone in these systems. This doesn't mean people go back to living in caves, but that we downscale our activities that are most harmful. For example, a recent paper showed that a 13% reduction in beef production could sequester 125 B tons of CO2. We as a planet emit about 40B tons a year. This is the kind of effort we should do. Beef isn't evil. I like it, but it has a massive environmental footprint that is damaging to climate, land, waterways, and many of the Earth's systems. Beef wouldn't be rationed, but a global agreement or even a national one that looks to get to that 13% number would have great positive environmental benefits. https://www.outlookbusiness.com/planet/sustainability/cutting-beef-production-by-13-could-remove-125-billion-tonnes-of-co2-study-finds
Yes, that would harm beef producers some, but net - net the benefit to society would be a positive. This could be done over a decade to ease into the change. An historical example is smoking. After the smoking settlement decades ago, smoking in the US has fallen off a cliff. The beneficial impact to public health far outweighs loss in GDP and profit to shareholdrs from a societal perspective.
More folks in finance (and the world in general) need to understand the environmental impacts our actions have. That doesn't mean stopping them entirely, but adjusting them to get those planetary boundaries back in the safe zone, because it is our life support system we are dealing with.
I fully realize that the kinds of actions I mentioned in beef, if applied to transportation, construction, tourism, and all other sectors would have a detrimental impact on the value of companies. I have a 401K too. But I've done the math, the benefits of action far outweigh the costs of inaction b/c inaction will get pretty ugly in the coming years as the problems in our natural systems expand.
Not all scientists are concerned about these planetary control limits.
They say there are too many assumptions made and most are just theories.
For example… it talks about Biosphere integrity…. and we know CO2 in greening the planet and its still not clear to all that CO2 has any big effect on global temperature.
Then we also know that ocean acidification is not considered a big issue by all scientists.
Plus… its going to near impossible to stop emerging economies wanting what the west has got.
Plus we don’t have real alternatives to fossil fuels that are viable for a prosperous industrial society.
We need to be realistic, not just about the impact of these planetary limits, but also the ability to meet any challenges these impacts throw at us..
So….It may be far less painful to undertake little mitigation of these planetary boundary elements and just adapt as these impact issues may arise.
Much wisdom here that the American story is about money. This is why I think there's tremendous potential in working to move the Overton window toward real conversations about our monetary policy. Debt-free sovereign currency could provide funds for the work we need to do in the world without bankrupting our government or relying on taxes. Imagine the slogans: "Debt-free economy," "Tax-free economy" (because I think you can plausibly argue that "taxes" in Modern Monetary Theory are really "wealth caps"). With the right strategy, I think monetary policy could be a way to build a strange coalition of left, right, and independents.
"'taxes' in Modern Monetary Theory are really 'wealth caps'"
Say what? In the US, billionaires pay less tax as a proportion to income than any other group except the abject poor. Taxes are a middle-class phenomenon.
It's not this way in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, when I was a child, the marginal rate for people making over $200,000 a year in the US was some 90%!
Like when a reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of "western civilization" ("I think it would be a very good idea!"), I think a "wealth cap" would deal with so many problems the US is having these days.
Huge social stratification never comes out well. It always results in torches, pitchforks, and revolution. Except this time, the wealthy has somehow hoodwinked the hoi poli into thinking that the wealthy are really on the side of the common person. How could that be?
We now have the spectre of the world's wealthiest person unexpectedly "sitting in" on a call between the President-elect and the elected leader of an invaded country. One shakes one's head in dismay…
Thanks for these observations. I totally agree about the value of a high marginal tax rate and wealth caps. I realized my sentence about MMT and taxes was unclear. I meant that if a society used MMT as its monetary system, I think what MMT literature calls a "tax" could be described as a "wealth caps." That is, as I understand it, MMT would only use "taxes" to remove excess money from the system to contain inflation and would do this by "taxing" the wealthiest people and firms. Social goods would be directly funded by debt-free sovereign currency; i.e., the government would just create the money to fund those things, no tax revenue needed. I did not mean MMT describes our current tax structure as a "wealth caps." It does not, for the reasons you explain well.
Excellent post - though I might add that this is really a human-species problem, though it's been definitely turbocharged in the American system. The bottom line is that no societal change can happen without (at least a tipping point of) inner, personal change. Education is thus the only key.
"Healthcare is about making money."
Some decades ago, I had been putting my savings in a "socially responsible" mutual fund. I trusted them to define "socially responsible."
Then, I paid attention to one of the things they sent me that I usually put right into recycling; it was a statement of their investments.
Some 40% of their holdings were in the health care industry. I was profiting from the pain and suffering of others.
I soon divested of the stock market completely.
Sometimes, that hurts a bit when I hear of the stock market reaching record after record. But I remind myself that is groupthink; my strategy these days is the opposite of the "American Dream": I strive to earn and spend as little as necessary for a modicum of comfort.
"Those other places in Europe, Canada, and Asia, that are envious of America, have better health, better education, and happier populations."
I question the major premise. That seems to be a uniquely American point-of-view.
Soon after my "aha moment" outlined above, I emigrated to Canada, thinking, "Things can't get much worse!" That was 2004 — boy, was *I* wrong!
I don't know of *any* fellow Canadians who are "envious" of the US! I have European friends; *none* of them are "envious" of the US!
So that's something that is only in the heads of Americans.
I want to respond to this as the main point… “Until America decides prosperity is well-being and not just money, we won’t address the environmental degradation that threatens our civilization.”
Their will always be work to do on this subject of prosperity but on balance in even one generation as a western society we have come a long way on many things and fell back on others.
In terms of the environment, we have cleaner water air and land even though we have industrialized significantly.
Although we have just as much diversity of wealth the average citizen is better off, but its agreed not as much as they should be as they have not shared in the massive productivity improvements as we have lost the balance between capital and labor due to globalization and this has also allowed wealth to be transferred from the west to the rest.
Deaths due to social safety and climate has dropped due to technology.
The fancy word for improving our reliance on “capitalistic growth” is “Sustainability” that talks about the circular economy and finding ways to rebalance “needs with wants” for physical items also made worse by a throw away social trend.
You need to explain what you mean by “environmental degradation” as so far its been a positive not a negative.
Thanks for the conversation on this. Our economic system, technology and other factors have lifted million (billions on a global scale) out of poverty and made their lives better.
Environmental degradation though is on a global scale. Climate is just one of them and can best be seen in the Planetary Boundaries Framework: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
These natural systems are our life support system, and most of them are in the red and getting worse. I argue that we need to prioritize moving back to the safe zone in these systems. This doesn't mean people go back to living in caves, but that we downscale our activities that are most harmful. For example, a recent paper showed that a 13% reduction in beef production could sequester 125 B tons of CO2. We as a planet emit about 40B tons a year. This is the kind of effort we should do. Beef isn't evil. I like it, but it has a massive environmental footprint that is damaging to climate, land, waterways, and many of the Earth's systems. Beef wouldn't be rationed, but a global agreement or even a national one that looks to get to that 13% number would have great positive environmental benefits. https://www.outlookbusiness.com/planet/sustainability/cutting-beef-production-by-13-could-remove-125-billion-tonnes-of-co2-study-finds
Yes, that would harm beef producers some, but net - net the benefit to society would be a positive. This could be done over a decade to ease into the change. An historical example is smoking. After the smoking settlement decades ago, smoking in the US has fallen off a cliff. The beneficial impact to public health far outweighs loss in GDP and profit to shareholdrs from a societal perspective.
More folks in finance (and the world in general) need to understand the environmental impacts our actions have. That doesn't mean stopping them entirely, but adjusting them to get those planetary boundaries back in the safe zone, because it is our life support system we are dealing with.
I fully realize that the kinds of actions I mentioned in beef, if applied to transportation, construction, tourism, and all other sectors would have a detrimental impact on the value of companies. I have a 401K too. But I've done the math, the benefits of action far outweigh the costs of inaction b/c inaction will get pretty ugly in the coming years as the problems in our natural systems expand.
Here is an alternative approach..…
Not all scientists are concerned about these planetary control limits.
They say there are too many assumptions made and most are just theories.
For example… it talks about Biosphere integrity…. and we know CO2 in greening the planet and its still not clear to all that CO2 has any big effect on global temperature.
Then we also know that ocean acidification is not considered a big issue by all scientists.
Plus… its going to near impossible to stop emerging economies wanting what the west has got.
Plus we don’t have real alternatives to fossil fuels that are viable for a prosperous industrial society.
We need to be realistic, not just about the impact of these planetary limits, but also the ability to meet any challenges these impacts throw at us..
So….It may be far less painful to undertake little mitigation of these planetary boundary elements and just adapt as these impact issues may arise.
Much wisdom here that the American story is about money. This is why I think there's tremendous potential in working to move the Overton window toward real conversations about our monetary policy. Debt-free sovereign currency could provide funds for the work we need to do in the world without bankrupting our government or relying on taxes. Imagine the slogans: "Debt-free economy," "Tax-free economy" (because I think you can plausibly argue that "taxes" in Modern Monetary Theory are really "wealth caps"). With the right strategy, I think monetary policy could be a way to build a strange coalition of left, right, and independents.
"'taxes' in Modern Monetary Theory are really 'wealth caps'"
Say what? In the US, billionaires pay less tax as a proportion to income than any other group except the abject poor. Taxes are a middle-class phenomenon.
It's not this way in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, when I was a child, the marginal rate for people making over $200,000 a year in the US was some 90%!
Like when a reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of "western civilization" ("I think it would be a very good idea!"), I think a "wealth cap" would deal with so many problems the US is having these days.
Huge social stratification never comes out well. It always results in torches, pitchforks, and revolution. Except this time, the wealthy has somehow hoodwinked the hoi poli into thinking that the wealthy are really on the side of the common person. How could that be?
We now have the spectre of the world's wealthiest person unexpectedly "sitting in" on a call between the President-elect and the elected leader of an invaded country. One shakes one's head in dismay…
Thanks for these observations. I totally agree about the value of a high marginal tax rate and wealth caps. I realized my sentence about MMT and taxes was unclear. I meant that if a society used MMT as its monetary system, I think what MMT literature calls a "tax" could be described as a "wealth caps." That is, as I understand it, MMT would only use "taxes" to remove excess money from the system to contain inflation and would do this by "taxing" the wealthiest people and firms. Social goods would be directly funded by debt-free sovereign currency; i.e., the government would just create the money to fund those things, no tax revenue needed. I did not mean MMT describes our current tax structure as a "wealth caps." It does not, for the reasons you explain well.
Excellent post - though I might add that this is really a human-species problem, though it's been definitely turbocharged in the American system. The bottom line is that no societal change can happen without (at least a tipping point of) inner, personal change. Education is thus the only key.