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Pursuing reform within a system can help, but what is now desperately needed is transformative change in the system itself. To deal successfully with the many challenges we now face, we must complement attempts at reform with at least equal efforts aimed at transformative change to create a new operating system, one that routinely delivers good results for people and planet.
At the core of this new operating system must be a sustaining economy based on new economic thinking and driven forward by new politics. The purpose and goal of a sustaining economy is to provide broadly shared prosperity that meets human needs while preserving the earth's ecological integrity and resilience – in short, a flourishing people and a flourishing nature. That is the paradigm shift we must now seek.
I believe this paradigm shift in the nature and operation of America’s political economy can be best approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transformations – transformations that attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current system. Transformations that replace these old structures with new arrangements needed for a sustaining economy and a successful democracy.
- The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow:
- Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities.
- The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest.
- The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the democratization of capital.
- Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government.
- Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness.
- Indicators: from GDP (‘grossly distorted picture’) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
- Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough.
- Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity.
- Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from today to tomorrow.
- Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.
- Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.
We know that systemic, transformative change along these dimensions will require a great struggle, and it will not come quickly. The new values, priorities, policies, and institutions that would constitute a new political economy capable of regularly delivering good results are not at hand and won’t be for many years.
The truth is we are still in the design stage of building a new operating system. That system won’t be yesterday's socialism, by the way, but it won’t be today's American capitalism either.
This blog is excerpted from "America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I" by Gus Speth, published by Orion Magazine.
Source: http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/03/23/this-is-the-moment-of-democratic-possibility
