Eudaimonia, Plenitude, and Sustainability

[This is the text of a talk I gave at the 2013 annual conference of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry, which follows up and reiterates some of the points I made in the 2008 ISME talk (q.v., posted earlier in this blog).]

At the 2008 ISME conference, I presented a talk entitled “Republicanism and the Eudaimonic Economy”, in which I argued that the massive material surplus generated by the American economy was distributed in ways that threatened America’s political institutions, social fabric, and environment. I focused on the threat to political institutions on that occasion, specifically the current trend toward oligarchy that is evident in American politics. I argued that the Aristotelean tradition offered a coherent normative rationale for a “eudaimonic economy”, meaning an economy that would take surplus wealth away from financial speculation, consumerism, and the military-industrial complex and redirect that wealth toward massive investment in those sectors of the economy that were directly concerned with the realization of human potential, namely education, research, and the arts. Today I would like to look at the other two threats posed by the ways in which the surplus is distributed, those being its destructive effects on the environment and the social fabric. 

 

Aristotle has a lot to say about the social fabric, but he does not explicitly address issues of environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, Aristotelean practical philosophy offers a way of life that is significantly more sustainable than the work-and-spend lifestyle that is typical of middle- and upper-income inhabitants of the developed world. There is a significant overlap in the prescriptions of the Aristotelean tradition and those of certain contemporary advocates of green living and critics of consumerism. I will focus on a recent work by one such advocate and critic, Judith Schor, and compare her prescriptions with those of Aristotle.

The sociologist Juliet B. Schor has built her career upon her critique of consumerism. In her most recent book, Plenitude, she proposes the eponymous concept as an alternative to affluence as it is usually understood. [Incidentally, Lewis Mumford made a similar proposal 50 years earlier using the same term, plenitude (Mumford  393)].

Schor argues that the pursuit of affluence, measured mainly by GDP growth, through what she calls “business as usual” (BAU), is destroying the environment and the social fabric.  “Business as usual” is a term that Schor has borrowed from debates about climate change.  She uses it to refer to "the continuation of current economic rules, practices, growth trajectory, and ecological consequences of production and consumption.  It especially refers to the large corporate entities that dominate the market and are heavily invested in it." (4)

Schor offers four principles upon which her concept of plenitude is based:

Schor’s first principle is “a new allocation of time.”  Schor says, "For decades, Americans have devoted an increasing fraction of their time and money to the market -- working longer hours, filling leisure time with activities that require more income per unit of time, and buying, rather than making, more of what they consume.  It’s time to reverse this trend and diversify out of [. . .] business-as-usual (BAU) economic activity." (4)

Schor calls for a “moderation in hours of work” that would allow people to spend more time on family and community activities and learning the new skills and knowledge that a green economy will demand.

Schor’s second principle “is to diversify away from the BAU market and ‘self-provision’, or make, grow, or do things for oneself.” This ties in with the first principle. If people spend less time in the BAU market economy, they will be able to spend more time in the non-market economy growing their own food, making their own clothes, building and renovating their own homes, and so on. She argues that this can be more than a “marginal craft movement” because “new agricultural knowledge and the invention of small-scale smart machines make it possible to turn household provisioning into a high-productivity -- and economically viable -- use of time.” (5)

Schor’s third principle is what she calls “true materialism”, i.e., “an environmentally aware approach to consumption.” Schor argues that consumers must become more informed about the environmental impact of their purchases, but that doing so need not entail an ethos of sacrifice. Consumers who “downshift” and reject the vicissitudes of fashion and its needless churn of “acquiring and discarding products” can still enjoy high quality clothes, food, gadgets, and travel. (6)

True materialism can overcome what Schor calls the “materiality paradox” (27). The unprecedented affluence of the developed world has led to a consumer culture in which the symbolic value of objects has become more important than the material value. Some more optimistic observers have linked the rise of symbolic value with a “dematerialization” of the economy, meaning that increasing affluence would not necessarily require increasing use of material resources. But Schor says that, paradoxically, the increasing importance of symbolic value may lead to more material consumption rather than less, because consumers will replace clothes, cars, and gadgets that have lost symbolic value long before they wear out physically.  

Schor’s fourth principle is “to restore investments in one another and our communities” (6). Schor reminds us that social capital is a form of wealth that is as important as money or material goods. This is another reason to reduce hours spent in the BAU labor market, because "One casualty of an intense market orientation is that community has gotten thinner and human ties weaker [. . .] By recovering hours, individuals are freed up to fortify their social networks." (6-7)

Schor sums up her principles as follows: “work and spend less, create and connect more.” (7)

Schor’s prescriptions are consistent with a eudaimonic economy. Of particular importance is the emphasis on working less in the market economy. Schor shows that American workers were putting in significantly more hours at work in 2006 than they were in 1979 (104-107; 163-168).  This is an issue of distributive justice, since while working hours and productivity have increased, the share of the nation’s wealth and income that goes to middle- and lower-income workers has declined. In a highly productive, technologically advanced society, no family should have to provide more than 40 hours a week of adult labor to an employer in order to enter or remain in the middle class.   

Aristotle’s account of the relationship between the household (oikos) and the broader political community (polis) supports Schor’s call for restoring social capital. Aristotle recognizes that the household is an intermediate level of organization between the individual and the polity, and that the polity cannot succeed if the households that compose it do not perform their function (Politics, Bk I). Relationships among spouses, parents, and children cannot flourish if the members of the household cannot spend sufficient time with each other due to excessive demands of the labor market.

Aristotle’s concept of the household has an economic dimension as well as a familial one. Economically, the paradigmatic household of Aristotle’s day was where most of the necessities of life were produced. This ties in with Schor’s advocacy of self-provisioning. Emerging technologies such as 3-D printing may make a return to home-based production increasingly feasible. 

Finally, from an Aristotelean point of view, reducing work hours is important because Aristotle’s contemplative ideal requires sufficient leisure (schole) to realize (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 10, ch. 7; Politics, Book VII, ch. 5).

        

Schor also discusses the relationship between the economic theories that have been favored in academic and policy-making circles and the practices that have led to environmental degradation and economic upheaval. 

Schor reviews decades of debate within the field of economics and among economists and researchers from other fields. In the 1970s, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, the systems theorist Jay Forrester, and the Club of Rome group argued that unlimited economic expansion would eventually lead to shortages of key resources and ecological catastrophe; these claims were articulated in the book The Limits to Growth, by Donella Meadows et al., published in 1972. Their predictions were opposed by William Nordhaus and other economists, who argued that market-driven technological innovation and slower population growth would allow growth to continue (Schor 49-51).

By 1982, it appeared that the economists were correct. Agricultural innovation had increased the food supply, new exploratory and extractive techniques had opened up new sources of oil and minerals, and population growth had stabilized in many countries. But the economists had not taken climate change into account. By the 90s, “an outpouring of scientific data was reframing the discussion away from the fixed resources highlighted in Limits to the renewable systems on which life depends -- atmosphere, forests, oceans, wetlands, and soils” (52-53).  

Today, in 2013, I trust that the reality of the threat posed by climate change has been established, so I will pass over further details of past debates.  Of greater interest to those who study the relationship between theory and practice is Schor’s account of “a fateful methodological choice” made by mainstream economists in the course of these debates and the way it buttressed BAU.

Schor says that standard treatments of markets have either failed to take environmental impacts into account or have treated those impacts as externalities. Schor also notes that mainstream economists have tended to overestimate the rationality of markets and have been unduly sanguine about the replaceability of natural  resources. To the extent that public policy and business strategy are informed by these methodological and ideological biases, prices are distorted. “Goods and activities that degrade the environment . . . are priced too low”, so the market produces too much of them (70). Prices of goods and activities do not reflect the damage being done to the environment, and artificially low prices lead to overconsumption.

Schor also disagrees with mainstream economists about the role of intellectual property. Schor argues that there is a connection between the “open source” movement and sustainability. In order to facilitate the spread of green technology and design, Schor endorses a “knowledge commons” and a “knowledge-intensive economy” based on decentralized production. She cites Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who says,

"The networked environment makes possible a a new modality of organizing production:  radically decentralized, collaborative and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, locally connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial comments." (qtd. in Schor, 151)   

So far, I have accepted Schor’s account of how the U.S. economy functions and agreed with her prescriptions concerning how to change it. But I do have some reservations.

Schor is strangely silent about the growth of the service sector. The omission may simply be due to limits of space and scope; she covers a lot of ground as it is. A less charitable interpretation would be that the growth of the service sector does not fit neatly into her narrative of crisis resulting from ever-increasing material consumption.

Schor disagrees with certain observers who believe that a process of “dematerialization” is taking place in the cultures of advanced nations, and that this dematerialization will significantly reduce the strain that consumerism puts on the environment. These thinkers argue that a symbolic economy, represented by such phenomena as the rising importance of branding, is superseding the material economy. Schor accepts the premise that the symbolic value of objects has become more important to consumers than the material value, but rejects the conclusion that this will lead to less material strain on the environment.  Her pessimism on this point is based on the “materiality paradox” mentioned above. Schor may be right about the materiality paradox as it pertains to goods, but she overlooks the possibility that the rise of the service sector may yet play a role in reducing unnecessary consumption. 

Looking at the growth of the service sector from a eudaimonistic perspective, one might ask, given that the majority of the population of a society will be employed in the service sector, is it a matter of indifference what services they spend their days providing? The Aristotelean answer is no; other things being equal, it is better to be a teacher than a mortgage broker. (The classical liberal answer would be to let the market decide.) 

In addition to their connection with human flourishing, education and research place less strain on the environment than consumeristic enterprises because they do not essentially depend on a constant flow of material resources in order to stay in business (this is true to a lesser extent of the arts). A library is greener than a Barnes & Noble store, and a community college is greener than a shopping mall.

I have previously argued that the increasing wealth generated by technological advances must be systematically redirected toward education, research, and the arts in order to counteract the oligarchic effects of current distribution patterns. This redirection can also address environmental concerns by effecting dematerialization without the materiality paradox that has accompanied the rise of symbolic value in the consumer economy.

This brings me to my most serious disagreement with Schor. Schor argues that economic growth must be limited in order to head off environmental catastrophe.  She uses the ecologists’  I=PAT equation (environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technological factors) to explain her position. Demographers expect the world population to stabilize at about 9 billion later this century; it is already at or slightly below the replacement level in many developed economies. She presents reasons for thinking that advances in green technology will probably not be sufficient to slow climate change to sustainable levels before irreparable harm is done. That leaves affluence as the remaining variable. She acknowledges a theoretical possibility that rising incomes might be de-linked from rising environmental impact (i.e., dematerialization), but considers it unlikely due to the materiality paradox. She concludes that growth in affluence must be curbed.

This is not feasible because it will either require the poor to permanently accept their lot or the rich to make enormous sacrifices. In an expanding economy, distributive justice can be achieved by allowing the rich to keep what they have while giving other classes a larger slice of the expanding pie; this was in fact what happened in the US between approximately 1932 and 1972. If the economy does not grow, then either the poor must agree to remain poor, or the rich must agree to give up their wealth through confiscatory redistribution. No program that makes social mobility impossible is just, and no program that requires the rich to voluntarily stop being rich is politically realistic.  

Schor says that we must “grow less or grow differently.” She chooses the former; I choose the latter.  We should not give up on dematerialization.  Rather than limiting growth, we should redirect growth toward the goal of achieving a eudaimonic economy. A eudaimonic economy would be one in which the majority of the GDP would come from education, research, and the arts. An intermediate step toward a eudaimonic economy might be a “human service economy” based on the eudaimonic fields, the healthcare industry, and various services that are usually provided or funded by government or nonprofit organizations, such as social work and law enforcement. A human service economy can allow growth in income with proportionately less environmental impact than growth based on material consumption. 

That said, I fundamentally agree with Schor about the way production and distribution should be organized in a post-industrial society. “Work and spend less, create and connect more.”

Works Cited

Aristotle.  The Complete Works of Aristotle.  Jonathan Barnes, ed.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1995.

Mumford, Lewis.  The Myth of the Machine:  The Pentagon of Power.  New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Schor, Juliet.  Plenitude.  New York:  The Penguin Press, 2010.

Image taken from goodreads review of Plenitudes 

Copyright 2013, M. D. Robertson. The author grants permission to republish, reprint, or distribute this work with attribution for non-commercial purposes.