l' ' of the 1990s. The Eighties will be a period of re-conceptualization and innovation; of redirected investments; recycling; redesign for conservation; rehabilitation and reuse of buildings for new life; revival of small towns and small businesses, and resurgence of neighborhood-based and local enterprises, co-ops and community development that release human energy and potential in new local and regional efficiencies of scale. Already, these growing shoots of the decentralized, informal Counter-Economy are booming: 50 million Americans belong to co-ops; in 1977 another 32 million grew $14 billion of their own vegetables; 5 million belong to self-help health care groups; do-it-yourself renovation accounted for some $18 billion of building supply sales, while 10 percent of the increase in total employment last year was not provided by the "formal" economy but was due to the increase in self-employed people. Stanford Research Institute's 1976 report on Voluntary Simplicity noted that 5 million Americans have already dropped out of the industrial rat race, reduced their cash needs in favor of simple lifestyles and inner enrichment, rather than keeping up with the Joneses. As the defectors from the formal economy increase, or opt for part-time work and less cash income, they will relieve some excess demand pressures and open up more jobs for those who want into the industrial economy's newer sectors. However, short-term macroeconomic policies will still be checkmated ·if they remain blind to the full range of socioeconomic strategies available. The narrow, monetary, fiscal and price system choices reduce to either accepting more inflation in order to keep the debt economy rolling over, or engineering the first clearly inflationary recession! Economists need to accept the reality of the non-GNP socioeconomy, and recognize the potential of consciously and democratically determined conservation and selective demand-reduction, instead of the "buckshot" of the old monetary, fiscal and price levers which work only on across-the-board demand. Selective, non-monetary, demand management would target only the bottleneck areas, such as legislating better mileage, smaller cars, and instituting equitable, white-market rationing of gasoline to reduce non-essential driving, so as to address the immediate problem of oil imports. We might target the energy over-use with full-scale public service campaigns for conservation (as in Britain) and ban advertising that encourages energy waste (as in France). Varying the total volume of product commercials on radio and TV up or downward could provide another non-inflationary demand-management tool. Another step toward political demand-management has been taken in voluntary wage/price guidelines (proving that our economy needs cooperation now as well as competition). 1 February-March 1979 RAIN Page 13 The balanced, renewable resource-based socioeconomy of the future must be designed and capitalized now, and can provide satisfying work and rewarding lifestyles for all our people. We now need economists who can see our economy whole: both the older GNP economy which is running out of steam and the emerging Counter-Economy which will broaden the way to a viable alternative future. D Copyright© Hazel Henderson and Princeton Center for Alternative Futures, Inc. Portions of this article appeared as an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 31, 1978. Used with permission.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz