Using your head: why pedestrians need helmets

Canadians take the lead in public safety regulation with a new mandatory pedestrian helmet law coming into effect tomorrow.

Inside Job: what's the deal with the credit crisis?

Yesterday we finally got around to watching Inside Job (despite having recommended it all the way back here). If you, like me, often feel out of your depth in discussions of banking, finance, stock markets and the global economic instability of the last few years, then this is the film for you. Bringing dry and complex details into vivid comprehensibility, this film cuts through the bafflement factor and, via a series of fascinating and jaw-dropping interviews with key players, lays out many of the key threads that that led to the headline-grabbing events of 2008 and its aftermath (which continues to play out today).

The film won best documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards and currently sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is easy to see why. Tackling an important subject with insight, emotion and sensitivity, this film is pure outrage mixed with damning evidence of systemic problems in the US financial industry from traders to CEOs, from regulators to investors, from president to ratings agencies, from academic economists to congress. There is plenty of blame to go around. And yet, somehow, no one is in gaol for the greatest inside job in history.

And very little has changed.

Threatening to leave

In other news, Jimmy Riches, 9, of Little Waddington, has threatened to take his bat and ball away from the local village boys' game of cricket unless his special rules are retained. Since he owns the only equipment in the small settlement, he demanded to set the terms on which the game is to be played. "Jimmy's code" included extra lives for Jimmy while batting and all his runs counting triple, plus being allowed to be sole umpire for contentious calls. The other boys felt these rules gave Jimmy an unfair advantage and sought to soften them, suggesting that perhaps he should only score double and that he had to state how many extra lives he had today before coming to the crease. Jimmy rejected these modifications and has warned that if the other boys insist on them, he will go and play with the lads in the next village.

Better than growth

Is growth good? Australia needs more economic growth like a kick in the head.

The pursuit of ever more goods and services is not delivering what most people want, but their opposite. Rather than meaningful work and rest amongst genuine communities in tune with healthy natural environments, we are overworked (or unemployed), families and communities are fragmented and we are living well beyond our ecological means.

Many studies have shown that once a basic standard of material well-being has been achieved, further increases in consumption levels do not correlate with higher levels of reported happiness, health or mental well-being. Instead, we are fatter, more stressed and more depressed than previous generations. And worst of all, we are squandering our inherited ecological wealth at an alarming rate. Our average ecological footprint (the third largest in the OECD) means that were everyone to live like us, we would require four Earths. Australia has the highest percentage of threatened vertebrates and plant species in the world. Our carbon footprint is the highest in the OECD, despite possibly being the developed country most directly threatened by climate change.

The ongoing quest for growth all else is killing us, since growth without reference to its context is cancer.

So am I then a cheerleader for what economists quaintly call "de-growth" (i.e. recession), or am I perhaps advocating the dramatic overthrow of the present order? Both are too simplistic. It is possible to argue that creative, practical reforms are possible (and necessary). Things don't have to be this way and the alternatives don't have to involve living in caves or blood on the streets (though these could be some of the ultimate results of business as usual).

The Australian Conservation Foundation has recently released a very interesting 40-page report called Better Than Growth, which lays out three problems with our obsession over GDP growth and suggests eight areas in which a re-conceived better-than-growth economy would be an improvement over current assumptions and practices. Each of the eight areas receives a brief chapter suggesting creative changes to Australia's economic system. Here is the outline:

1. Better progress: improving quality of life, not quantity of wealth
Emphasising measurements of social and individual wellbeing, and ecological health, will give us better results than focusing on narrow economic measurements such as GDP.

2. Better work: balancing paid and non-paid work, family and leisure time
While some australians are unemployed, many more are overemployed. We’d be better off reducing average working hours and increasing time available for leisure, family, community and our democracy.

3. Better production: making cradle-to-cradle manufacturing a reality
Rather than producing disposable goods that are destined for the tip, we should reorient design and manufacturing toward completely reusable products.

4. Better consumption: stepping off the consumer treadmill
Overconsumption is at the root of many social and environmental challenges. Government can support people to become smart consumers; to consume less and consume smarter.

5. Better markets: aligning prices with social and environmental impacts
Ensuring that the full environmental and social costs are included in the price tag of goods and services will stimulate a cleaner economy.

6. Better business: matching private incentives with long-term public goals
Businesses that focus too much on short-term profits are unlikely to be part of a long-term transition to a more sustainable economy. Supporting non-profit business models and ensuring that executive compensation rewards long-term performance are needed.

7. Better taxation: rewarding work, not waste
Shifting taxes away from productive activity such as income generation and towards pollution and resource use would create jobs while improving environmental performance throughout the economy.

8. Better regulation: fixing cost-beneft analysis
Much government analysis depends on cost-benefit calculations which are based on faulty assumptions and exclude the full value of the natural environment. We should insist that cost-benefit analysis include all aspects of wellbeing.

Fortunately, many of the solutions are staring us in the face. As William Gibson said, “The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet." In each of this report’s sections, we outline some of the best thinking from around the world on what is needed to transform to a better-than-growth economy. All of these ideas and specific policy recommendations are already being implemented or seriously considered somewhere around the globe.

The full ACF report is available here.
H/T Greg.

From a great height

"The Harper government is reluctant to impose regulations on 'energy-intensive industries' like the oil sands in the absence of comparable U.S. moves, arguing that to do so would damage Canada’s economic competitiveness."

- From The Globe and Mail.

Developed nations attempting to outdo one another in economic growth are a little like skydivers competing for the highest terminal velocities in free-fall. Refusing to regulate the tar sands because it might damage economic competitiveness is akin to refusing to open a parachute because the other guy might get ahead of you.

Failure to address climate change will lead to big government

"We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We're going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be."

- John Holdren, White House science director.

Here is an interesting article in today's Washington Post making the important argument that avoiding serious action on climate change due to fear of large government is precisely backwards. Some people committed on principle to small government (which is not a bad principle) see the regulations associated with most climate policies that take the science seriously as their worst nightmare. Yet the truth is that failure to minimise ongoing and accelerating climate disruption is much more likely to lead to governments being increasingly called upon to respond to crop failures and costly "natural" disasters (perhaps we'd better just called them extreme weather events, since it is becoming increasingly inaccurate to consider such disasters natural). Climate instability is highly likely to lead to social instability, which will either result in big government, or societal collapse.

In praise of... government regulation

What does rat faeces have to do with climate change? Both are instances of the goodness of government regulation, argues history lecturer Kelly Mandia in a guest post at her husband's blog.

On governments and regulation

Jeremy Kidwell is a fellow PhD student here at New College working on a theology of manual labour. He has just started a new blog series on governments and regulation in which he will mount an argument against carbon trading schemes, "but not for the reasons you might be expecting". I am sure it will be worth a read.