Having said that, let's review the last week. It started out with 2 1/2 days of lecture/discussion with Manfred Max-Neef, a gentleman in his mid-70's known around the world for his work as a human-focused economist. Yes, I said human-focused economist. Yes - it's an apparent contradiction. Economists aren't typically focused on humans. This guy has coined the phrase "human scale development" and I'm confident that one of his favorite phrases is "the economy exists to serve people, it's not that people exist to serve the economy." It's a pretty good point. We focus on the GDP, when in reality the GDP is pretty silly as a measurement of progress when you take time to think about it -- it measures all economic activity, whether or not that activity is "good." So the costs associated with cancer treatments or the costs for asbestos abatement or the costs for recalling defective products all add to the GDP... and thus are "good" for the economy... while clearly they are not so good for people.
Max-Neef talked quite a bit about the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) -- a tool for considering both the quality and the distribution of economic growth. Read more about the GPI here: http://www.rprogress.org/newpubs/2004/gpi_march2004update.pdf Just for the record, he was clear that the GPI should NOT replace the GDP, but rather should complement it... that both have a place in the world. He also showed charts for over a dozen countries that show how the GDP keeps going up, but that in "developed" countries the GPI (or instead of the GPI, the ISEW - Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) has flattened. In the US the GPI started flattening out in the 1970's and turned slightly downward in the 1980's, while in developed countries around the globe the ISEW started going down in the 1980's. A classmate leaned over and asked my what happened in the 80's... the only thing that popped into my head was Reagan... so that's what I whispered back, along with the suggestion to ask the question out loud. She asked the question, and the response was: Reaganomics. I felt smart.
Then we talked a bit about what Reagan and Thatcher's economic policies were... the idea that if the tide rises, then all boats will rise -- that if the rich get richer, then it will trickle down to everyone else also. But in fact throughout the 1980's that was not the case in the US; the poorest one-fifth of the population lost 0.5% of their income each year, while the income of the top 5% increased 3.9% per year. Max-Neef said that what Reagan claimed - that increasing the top would increase everyone -- was clearly not the case. I volunteered that Reagan's policies did exactly what he intended them to do: to increase the wealth of the wealthy with no regard for the rest. Max-Neef went off on a brief tirade in which he appeared to agree with my statement, but was somewhat concerned that I would voice such a true and yet impossible-to-admit statement. And so still I wonder -- when we will wake up to the obvious economic truths of our times: the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And chances are good that if you're reading this blog, you're somewhere in the upper-middle of that continuum.
So that was Monday through Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon brought forth Goran Carstedt, a former top-exec with Volvo and IKEA, as well as a leading member of the Society for Organizational Learning (www.solonline.org) and now chair of The Natural Step International. Dr. Carstedt is a very bright guy -- and he's planning to come back in November to visit our class again.
On Thursday the class spent the day exploring Max-Neef's theory on human needs that I mentioned last week, and on Friday David Cook (CEO of The Natural Step International) joined us for the day. All in all it was a VERY full week, and I'm still trying to wrap my mind around all that we saw, heard, and experienced -- including Chinese cane dancing at a potluck on Monday night.
This weekend I made progress on my hydro garden... don't actually have anything planted yet, but I do have a rather serious looking contraption consisting of 3 one-meter long window box trays, a 50-liter (~ 14 gallon) tub, a bilge pump, and a few hoses connecting them. For several hours on Saturday I was using an exact-o knife to cut holes in the tubs for hoses and to cut out bits of an old bicycle inner-tube for gaskets. Then finding a power adapter that would work to run the 12-volt pump is proving to be quite a challenge -- I've only found a temporary solution that involves converting from 220 to 110 to 12 volts... far too complicated for my "simple" little project.
And all of that messing around has put me a few hours behind in my reading. Again. So I'm off to get some sleep and then to hit the ground running this week. We have a quite large group project due soon focusing on the United Nation's Millenium Development Goals -- so be looking forward to hearing about them in the week to come.
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