Every one of us is used to the idea of a budget. If you ignore your budget it does not mean you get away without one. It means the limitationsof the resources available will catch you by surprise and you budget will be imposed upon you rather than by your choice.

I don’t envy the job of making a budget for a nation. It is hard enough making a personal budget. And yet, it must be done. I expect it to be done. The larger the range of the budget the bigger the consequences for not doing one. If I do my personal budget poorly, I will be adversely affected. If the government doesn’t do a budget the nation will be adversely affected. Limited resources into the government purse are simply a fact of life. We don’t argue about it. It simply is. You don’t get skeptics saying that there is no limitation in the budget, spend as much as you can. No sane person ignores the budget.

The limitation is not an enemy, it simply is, we must work within it.

The earth is approximately 510 million square kilometers, about 71% of which is ocean. There is constant growth and decay and systems that purify and clean; it is not static. But there is still a limited amount of biomass that a particular size piece of land can produce and a limit to the resilience of any eco system. There is a finite amount of pollutants that the oceans can absorb before they are adversely affected. There are a specific number of fish in the sea. A cow takes a known amount of space. There is a limited number of cattle that could survive on all the availiable pasture land. Land for which there are competing uses. Yet there seems to be an inability or unwillingness to consider the possibility that we live with a limited system.

A global resource budget is required. A budget is not the enemy. It allows us to make choices to live within finite resources. Otherwise, limitations will be imposed upon us. Neglecting a personal budget is foolish; neglecting a national budget would be tragic; neglecting a global budget would be catastrophic, but we are doing exactly this. A global case of the tragety of the commons.

However, we are resourceful people. There are several approaches being advocated. One that is worth thinking through is the idea of placing global commons in trust. Here is one example; the Earth Atmospheric Trust.

The mainstream model of development, sometimes known as the “Washington Consensus,” is based on a number of assumptions about the way the world works, what the economy is, and what the economy is for (see the table on page 33). These assumptions emerged during a period—the early industrial revolution—when the world was still relatively empty of humans and their built infrastructure. Natural resources were abundant, social settlements were sparser, and inadequate access to infrastructure represented the main limit on improvements to human well-being. It made sense, at that time, not to worry too much about environmental and social “externalities.” They could be assumed to be relatively small and ultimately manageable.
It made sense to focus on the growth of the market economy, measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), as a primary means of improving human welfare. It made sense, in that context, to think of the economy as only marketed goods and services, and to think of the goal as increasing the amount of goods and services produced and consumed.

The world, however, has changed dramatically since that time. We now live in a world relatively full of humans and their built infrastructure. Since the end of World War II, the planet has experienced what some have called “the great acceleration” in the consumption of fossil fuels and the growth of market economies. The human footprint has grown so large that, in many cases, limits on the availability of natural resources now constrain real progress more than limits on capital infrastructure do.

In this new context, we first have to remember that the goal of an economy is to sustainably improve human well-being and quality of life. Material consumption and GDP are merely means to that end, not ends in themselves. We have to recognize, as both ancient wisdom and new psychological research tell us, that material consumption beyond real need can actually reduce well-being.

Such a reorientation leads to specific tasks. We have to identify what really does contribute to human well-being, and recognize and gauge the substantial contributions of natural and social capital, both of which are coming under increasing stress. We have to be able to distinguish between real poverty in terms of low quality of life, and merely low monetary income. Ultimately we have to create a new vision of what the economy is and what it is for, and a new model of development that acknowledges the new full-world context.

[Robert Costanza is an ecological economist at the University of Vermont. To read the rest of this article either click the previous link and see the range of publications, or click here.]

The New Zealand Center for Ecological Economics have been developing a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for New Zealand That looks to take all of the externalities and costs into account. These include: health, overwork, air pollution, crime, and water quality.

For methodology and a full list of what is taken into account visit the website. New Zealand Center for Ecological Economics.

The GPI for New Zealand is nearly complete and due for release soon. (And not a moment to soon. The National Government has just cut funding to cycling and walking in favour of building more roads, presumably to get the economy moving.)

There are a number of countries that have a GPI indicator already complete. The results are interesting.

In each case at a certain point the GPI and GDP diverge. After that point a pursuit of GDP would seem to be a complete waste of time. An efficient economy that ‘manages the household’ well would be a better pursuit.

Is a focus change to GDI as an economic indicator as well as policy driver sufficient? If the mandate of the church is to become involved in the transformation of all society as part of a proclamation of good news, is pressing for the abandonment of a conscienceless GDP in favour of GDI a helpful direction? Does this have the ability to help the most marginalised and poorest in our society where a pursuit of unlimited growth doesn’t?

So what are our options in terms of economic transformation? Not being an economist I feel overwhelmed. I lap up the complaints against the un-level playing field of the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment regime, and see the flaws around power in the putative free market approach of the WTO, but don’t see how the entire economic system could be transformed or redeemed. Those in the greatest position to transform the system are those most advantaged by maintaining it. Even well thought out and engaging books like ‘Being Consumed’ by William Cavanagh - a fantastic theologian who is also an economist of some standing – doesn’t seem to get much beyond suggesting fair-trade tea instead of normal.

For a Christian response I can see two directions to explore. At one end of a spectrum is the idea that the church is called to be a gathered body of believers who live in such away among themselves that they bare witness to the present reality of our future hope – life characterized by the kingdom of God. A counter-cultural community living ‘now’ in light of what is ‘not yet.’ In this case local currency alternatives within church communities might be the best approach. Time-banks and or green-dollar systems would form the heart of our economic engagement, creating the space where it becomes possible to simplify, become less busy in isolated work places, and step out of consumerism. The church community holds out a new hope, people are drawn to participate in this kingdom living. For want of a label this might be called an Anabaptist approach. The danger is that we become so separated that we cease to be a witnessing community and become a reclusive community that doesn’t engage with the suffering around us.

At the other end of the spectrum we work to transform all of society, to make the current system more in keeping with the ideals of the kingdom of God. Perhaps characterized as a Reformers approach. In this case we may need to be involved in an entire remake of the current economic system globally that may have created unsurpassed wealth, but without conscience has also created unsurpassed environmental destruction and global wealth disparity. The danger of this approach is that we become so involved and complicit in the system that there is no distinctive in the believing community; we look no different than the culture we are immersed in.
Somewhere along the spectrum may be response that is both pragmatic and faithful. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Car travel has become cheaper and cheaper in the UK over the past few decades, so no wonder road transport is keeps rising. I wonder what comparable stats for NZ are. Similar, I would imagine. Any transport gurus out there have stats on this?

‘I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilisation.’

Of course some of the taxes we pay go to crap initiatives that are misguided and unconstructive. But maybe we should stop thinking of taxes as wholly bad, as they seem to be portrayed so often. Taxes are crucial for the funding of our health system, education, infrastructure, supporting vulnerable families, heaps of stuff that’s totally fundamental to a fair society. Maybe some of us should stop feeling so hard done by!

“When we give to the poor we are not being generous; we are merely returning to them that which we have withheld from them.” (Source unknown)

I have to admit, I feel pretty chuffed with myself when I ‘give to the poor’ in whatever form. But this quote makes a valid and uncomfortably challenging point, especially given the increasingly skewed structure of the world’s wealth distribution, shown in the graphs below.

Maybe the quote should even be a bit stronger: “We are merely returning to them that which we have stolen from them”, or at least “We are merely returning to them the wealth we have inherited from those that stole from them” (even though the lack of conciseness in that one does not make for a good quote)

Source: ‘The Community Solution’, Powerpoint Presentation “Energy and Inequity”, available from http://www.communitysolution.org/problem.html

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10536352

Plenty of people have posted stuff on what they are doing with their tax cut on the “give it up” site, cool to read the different things people are passionate about!

http://www.giveitup.org.nz

On a related note, I just read on the Maxim website that

“[New Zealand] Charitable giving in the year 2005/2006 was approximately 0.81 percent of our GDP, relatively low compared with the US where approximately 2.2 percent of GDP was given to charity.”

0.81 %!!!

Surely not

WHAT A SHOCKER

Here’s the link:  http://www2.regent-college.edu/marketplace/audio.html

Lots of interesting stuff in there. Part of the discussion I found most interesting was about land ownership and accumulation and jubilee, especially in light of some debates I’ve had with a Christian friend who’s heavily into residential property investment.

Isaiah 5:8 “Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field till there’s no space left and you live on your own in the land”

Micah 2.2 “Woe on those who covet fields and seize them, houses and take them, they defraud man of his home, a fellow human being of his inheritance”

-Paul Williams states that “These are the kinds of things that are given as reasons why the people of God are going to be exiled from the land and kicked out of it, because they have failed to live in a way that keeps relationships rightly in these respects.”