Page 18 RAIN May 1981 reduced inflation and better times in some ever-receding future (despite the grim realities that daily polarize Britons further to the left and right). Even Britain's invisible exports (s'ervices, insurance, etc.) may soon fall into deficit after a century of surpluses, due ironically to the repatriatio,n of profits from North Sea oil to U.S. oil companies. Thus the old world trade game is turned on its head: The economies of the dawning Solar Age will require a closer fit with local cultures and skills, as well as local resources.and ecosystems. It is better to be an investor in someone else's country than to have foreign investments in one's own country! Even Sweden, long an example of enlightened industrialism, is ending an era of labor-management accord to free balance-of-payments deficits, tax revolts, and rising oil import bills. Here too, the issues must be discussed in real terms, not heroic economic abstractions: Should Sweden retain any domestic steel industry, using its still high-quality ores in small, rural mines? Or should it buy all its steel from Taiwan with earned foreign exchange while closing down small producers, adding to welfare rolls and depopulating rural Sweden further? Shbuld Swedes buy all their shirts made from oil-based polyester from Hong Kong at the social costs of closing domestic textile industries, further centralization of their economy, and an increasing population of welfare recipients? Or should Sweden retain arid develop a customized textile industry based on local fabrics skills and patterns for a more specialized "carriage trade" market which would keep people employed where they are in the smaller towns? Similar dilemmas face Mr. Reagan's administration in the demands of automakers and their unions to subsidize Chrysler and Ford and restrict imports of more fuel-efficient Japanese cars. It is clear that the economists' all-purpose generalizations, such as "protectionism" or "global efficiency," are not sharp enough tools to analyze each different case. For example, the U.S. ~uto industry may be unsustainable in its current state of managerial inefficiency and it might be more socially efficient to give workers, who were not to blame, a guaranteed income for life than to bail out managers and stockholders with tax monies. The issues in Sweden, Britain and other countries will be based on real world considerations and new trade-offs between complex social costs beyond e~onomic calculation. They cannot be framed in the over-aggregated terms of macro-economics such as "average" unemployment, inflation, investment, and GNP growth, when all these terms no longer fit any real-world case. Toward a Solar Economics Today, the key issues must be discussed in plain language: to what extent should any country be inter-linked on the world trade rollercoaster-and to what extent does this increase or decrease domestic vulnerability and destabilization? At what rates can various sectors of a domestic economy adjust to global monetary flows and events, and what are the social and ecological costs of such adjustments? What are the political, economic,. and technological consequences of world trade dependence, vis-a-vis domestic self-reliance? None of these issues lend themselves to old economic formulas. Neither can they be discussed under catch-all slogans such as "reindustliialization," which suggests little more than backing into the future looking through the rearview mirror, while begging the question of which sectors to subsidi'ze, bail-out, let stand or fall in the world trade arena. Most leaders will continue to be pressured to bail out the "dinosaur industries" of the past, based on unsustainable resource- and energy-intensity, rather than to capitalize the future economy, which has no vested interests or constituency except the young and future generations. Future economies may foster increased domestic tranquility and self-reliance, smaller enterprises, more bartering and, regionalism and require less dependence on export-led, GNP-measured "economic development." Capitalizing the renewable-resource based economie~ pf the future may at the same time help solve the social costs of today's world trade instabilities, since the economies of the dawning Solar Age will also require a closer fit with local cultures and skills, as well as local resources and ecosystems. DD Hazel Henderson is the author of The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics, forthcoming from Anchor/Doubleday this spring.
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