Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare - Hardcover

Henderson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1881052907 ISBN 13: 9781881052906

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler, 1996

Synopsis

World-renowned futurist Hazel Henderson extends her twenty-five years of work in economics to examine the havoc the current economic system is creating at the global level. Markets are now spreading worldwide - a spread which is often equated with the hope of democracy spreading along with it. But markets still run on old textbook models that ignore social and environmental costs - leading to a new kind of warfare: global economic warfare. Building a Win-Win World demonstrates how the global economy is unsustainable because of its negative effects on employees, families, communities, and the ecosystem. Henderson shows how win-win strategies can become the norm at every level when people see the true current and future costs of short-sighted, narrow economic policies.

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From the Back Cover

World-renowned futurist Hazel Henderson extends her twenty-five years of work in economics to examine the havoc the current economic system is creating at the global level. Markets are now spreading worldwide - a spread which is often equated with the hope of democracy spreading along with it. But markets still run on old textbook models that ignore social and environmental costs - leading to a new kind of warfare: global economic warfare. Building a Win-Win World demonstrates how the global economy is unsustainable because of its negative effects on employees, families, communities, and the ecosystem. Henderson shows how win-win strategies can become the norm at every level when people see the true current and future costs of short-sighted, narrow economic policies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BUILDING A WIN-WIN WORLD

LIFE BEYOND GLOBAL ECONOMIC WARFAREBy HAZEL HENDERSON

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 1996 Hazel Henderson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-881052-90-6

Contents

List of Illustrations......................................................................................................viiiAcknowledgments............................................................................................................ixIntroduction...............................................................................................................11. Global Economic Warfare versus Sustainable Human Development: Flash Points, Trends, and Transitions.....................112. Juggernaut Globalism and the Bankruptcy of Economics....................................................................493. The Technology Trap.....................................................................................................744. The Jobless Productivity Trap...........................................................................................955. Government by Mediocracy and the Attention Economy......................................................................1126. Grassroots Globalism....................................................................................................1317. Rethinking Human Development and the Time of Our Lives..................................................................1498. Cultural DNA Codes and Biodiversity: The Real Wealth of Nations.........................................................1689. Information: The World's Real Currency Isn't Scarce.....................................................................19610. Redefining Wealth and Progress: The New Indicators.....................................................................21911. Perfecting Democracy's Tools...........................................................................................24712. New Markets and New Commons: The Cooperative Advantage.................................................................26913. Agreeing on Rules and Social Innovations for Our Common Future.........................................................293Notes......................................................................................................................331Glossary of Acronyms.......................................................................................................352Bibliography...............................................................................................................355Index......................................................................................................................366About the Author...........................................................................................................397

Chapter One

GLOBAL ECONOMIC WARFARE VERSUS SUSTAINABLE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: FLASH POINTS, TRENDS, AND TRANSITIONS

After the Cold War, the six-thousand-year-old competition/ conflict paradigm transmuted into the spread of market capitalism, global corporations, and competitive economic warfare. Management theorists and journals such as Fortune began to describe the global economy as a jungle or a new military theater for all-out economic warfare. The global economic warfare system collided with trends leading toward more sustainable forms of development. The common definition of sustainable development is "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

While early writings on the need for a transition to sustainability were widely ignored or rejected, a considerable body of expert political and government opinion now exists that such a transition is urgent and necessary. In Paradigms in Progress (1991, 1995), I diagrammed three zones of transition. (See Fig. 1. Three Zones of Transition.) Influencing the emerging consensus on the need for a shift to sustainable development are at least six great globalization processes that are increasingly interactive at all levels and accelerating trends toward global interdependence. These include the globalizations of (1) industrialism and technology, (2) work and migration, (3) finance, (4) human effects on the biosphere, (5) militarism and arms trafficking, and (6) communications and planetary culture.

The effects of these globalizations, including the erosion of the sovereignty of nation-states, are driving paradigm shifts in many countries toward reintegration of fragmented, reductionist academic disciplines; emerging studies of dynamic interactive systems; and a new focus on the life sciences and futures research. A set of post-Cartesian scientific principles based on a global life-sciences view includes the following: (1) interconnectedness, (2) redistribution, (3) heterarchy, (4) complimentarity, (5) uncertainty, and (6) change. Today's post–Cold War landscape, with increasing uncertainty, cultural pluralism, and interpenetration, is producing much cognitive dissonance. Yet the new confusion also leads to the possibility of rapid paradigm shifts, social innovation, and learning. Ethnic, religious, and cultural conflict and negative scenarios, some tinged with nihilism and others bordering on paranoia, are increasing.

I will not attempt to assign probabilities to any of these trends and scenarios since today's global system is so highly interactive and accelerating toward further interdependence. Seeking certainties can be comfortable but may not be the most realistic course. In a changing world, policymakers will need to scan broadly, make rapid course corrections, and sometimes resort to skillful improvisation. A useful review of recent global modeling finds many academic, business, and government models retrogressing toward competitive and economic paradigms, while grassroots movements are shifting toward sustainability. Easily the best global model of sustainability is Global 2000 Revisited: What Shall We Do? (Barney, Blewett, and Barney 1993).

A systemic shift from the paradigm of maximizing global economic competition and gross national product (GNP) growth to a paradigm of more cooperative, sustainable development—which in earlier times might have taken hundreds of years—is at least possible in today's interdependent, rapidly evolving world system. Since these are complex, synergistic pathways of interpenetration, we will examine these trends from a cybernetic perspective, identifying key positive and negative feedbacks. As I elaborated in Paradigms in Progress, systems theory and dynamic change models are overtaking macroeconomics, which is based on the idea that economies are in a general state of equilibrium.

The basic models of change and growth come from nature. Nonliving and some living systems can be (1) homeostatic and kept in a steady state and structure (morphostatic), like the temperature in a house governed by a thermostat; or (2) living systems that can grow and change shape (morphogenesis), like children or human cities. These two processes are governed by feedback loops, which in the case of number one are negative feedback loops damping the effects of change and maintaining stability, and in the case of number two are positive feedback loops amplifying themselves and their cross-impacts and pushing the system into new structural forms. (See Fig. 2. Two Cybernetic Systems.) In 1995 the United Nations University Millennium Project was launched to provide a global capacity for early warning on long-range issues. Two hundred futurists and scholars from fifty countries, including myself, participated in the project's feasibility phase.

I will examine the collisions between the historic, global, competition/warfare system and trends toward sustainable development at seven levels of the world system:

1. Global population and the biosphere

2. International and global governance structures

3. The global civil society and cultures

4. Nation-states, domestic policies, and democratic processes

5. Global markets, corporations, trade, and finance

6. Provincial, urban, and local governance

7. Family/community/individual values, ethics, and behaviors

Level 1: Global Population and the Biosphere

Over the next thirty years, global population is projected to grow by nearly two-thirds, from 5.5 to 8.5 billion people. Though this is a projection, substantial growth is inevitable because of the relatively large percentage of young people in today's population. This provides built-in momentum for further population growth, even as the number of children per family declines. Of the 8.5 billion people, about 7.1 billion will live in developing countries, primarily in urban areas. Population in industrialized countries, now 1.2 billion, is projected to rise to only 1.4 billion by the year 2025, with virtually all of that growth occurring in the United States. The exponential growth of human populations is an example of positive feedback loops at work—people have more children who then have more children—and other complex factors, including declining death rates. Thus growth of sheer human numbers has become a flash point for confrontations over policy and paradigm changes.

Longer-term population growth depends on the course of fertility decline in developing countries, which in turn depends on the effectiveness of family planning programs, progress in reducing poverty and elevating the status of women, and many other factors. A reasonable estimate is that global population will continue to grow, reaching ten billion in the year 2050.8 Population growth has a significant impact on the environment, but the relationship is not straightforward. Many other factors—government policies, legal systems, access to capital and technology, the efficiency of industrial production, inequity in the distribution of land and resources, poverty in the South, and conspicuous consumption in the North—interact to modify or amplify humankind's impact on the environment.

In Paradigms in Progress I described how population policies of the late 1980s were slowly refocusing beyond contraception to concerns for education and pre- and postnatal health care to prevent early childhood diseases and unnecessary infant mortality. This twenty-year evolution of population policies includes the shift in focus to the Indian Equivalents formula: I=PAT. In this formula, I (Impact) is the product of P (Population size) times A (per capita Affluence) times T (damage done by the Technology used to supply each unit of consumption). While the population hawks and doves in the North and South have reached some common ground, such as the IPAT approach, there is a long way to go. Women and children are still pawns in most policies. Raising the level of industrial countries' aid programs in health, family planning, education, and sanitation is a key priority. These programs clash with old paradigms, including those of patriarchy, elite decision making, militant nationalism, free trade, global corporate commercialism, and consumerism.

The cutting edge of population policy will also need to include assessment of the past decade's successes and failures. For example, in China, the greatest demographic experiment in human history has been under way for over a decade: the one-child policy. During the 1980s, as the policy took hold, China was the darling of population hawks. The more serious consequences of this huge, unprecedentedly swift demographic transition are still underreported. How will China's current small cohort of "little emperors and empresses" cope with the enormous burden of millions of additional older Chinese citizens with life expectancies of seventy years? What will motivate each of these young people to work to support not only both parents but all the additional surviving elders? In just over a decade, China—still a developing society—has taken on the same kind of burdens as the countries of post-industrial Western Europe, North America, and Japan. Intergenerational conflicts are emerging and China's social security and health-care systems are facing huge strains as fewer active workforce participants must support growing numbers of aged dependents.

Only holistic global agreements around population issues can assure that leaders such as China, as well as Singapore, another early experimenter, will be emulated. By 1995, family planning in developing countries had reduced the average number of children born from 6 to 3.5, and China's fertility rate had fallen to below the 2.1 replacement level. The 1994 UN Summit on Population and Development in Cairo became a flash point as it examined the relationships between population growth, environmental degradation, demographic factors, and sustainable development. Its courageous secretary-general, Dr. Nafis Sadik, suggested a set of goals to be attained by the year 2015. These include reducing the infant death rate from the current 62 to 12 per 1,000 live births; lowering the maternal mortality rate to 30 per 100,000 women; extending life expectancy to seventy-five years in all countries; giving all pregnant women access to prenatal services; entitling all school-age children to complete their primary education; enabling contraception to reach 71 percent of the population; and making family planning information and services universally accessible.

More controversial are important policy changes: redistributing land to the poor women who usually produce food on it; allowing women workers to form unions, such as the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India; retargeting structural adjustment so that it helps not hurts the poor; taking social and environmental costs into account in trade pacts; and shifting military budgets to civilian sectors. As the EarthAction Network points out, if women's empowerment doesn't include such macro-policy shifts, as well as adequate credit for women's enterprises, mere education will do little but ready women for insecure, minimum-wage, or part-time jobs. Similarly, reproductive health programs must also target male responsibility for birth control and child support as well as the broader issues of declining social safety nets due to the pressures of competitive globalization. All of these issues between patriarchal expansionist paradigms and paradigms of human development are flash points of bitter confrontation.

The increase in population will affect resources and the environment in many significant ways. Population growth will heighten demand for food, energy, water, health care, sanitation, and housing. What is less clear is how the demand for such goods and services will be met and the effect this will have on the environment. A critical challenge for governments is to devise policies that mitigate the environmental and resource effects of population growth and also encourage a slowing in the rate of population growth. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) calculates that just 20 percent of government budgets in developing countries (U.S. $88 billion per year) and 20 percent of bilateral development assistance from the North ($12 billion per year) would be enough to meet these needs for all humanity. This 20/20 Compact, a win-win proposal at the 1995 UN World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen, was widely accepted as common sense, but ridiculed in the world's dominant competitive marketplaces and media.

While global population is likely to double between now and 2050, the combined effects of rural-to-urban migration and natural urban population increase mean that urban populations are likely to triple—another flash point for fundamentally new approaches. Given relative population growth rates and incomes, migration pressure appears likely to be strong from North Africa into southern Europe, from Latin America into the United States, from East and Southeast Asia into North America and possibly Japan, and from the southern tier of former Soviet republics into Russia. Migration also occurs within countries. In the United States, there has been continuing migration in recent decades to coastal areas of the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico; more than 50 percent of the U.S. population now lives within seventy kilometers of a coastal area. In China, there are growing migration pressures from the arid and relatively poor interior to the economically booming coastal provinces. But by far the most dramatic internal migration pattern—found in nearly every country—is migration from rural to urban areas.

The world's population is urbanizing much faster than it is growing. There are several reasons: declining resource availability per capita; shrinking economic opportunities in rural areas; and hopes of jobs, opportunities, and services in urban areas. In virtually every country, per capita consumption of goods and services is higher in urban areas than in rural communities, although gaps are wide between rich and immigrating poor in burgeoning squatter settlements, often without basic municipal services. Urban populations exhibit consumption patterns that are unlike those of rural populations and have a different kind of environmental impact. City residents, particularly in industrial countries, tend to consume more industrial goods and energy-intensive services. Urban populations everywhere create concentrated air and water pollution and solid waste, which can reach crisis proportions in cities experiencing both rapid GNP growth and immigration, such as Bangkok, Thailand; Mexico City, Mexico; and São Paulo, Brazil.

Cities have been experiencing multiple crises of unsustainability. The $1.2 billion budget gap in Los Angeles caused massive cuts in health and social services to its nine million residents. Murder rates in Washington, D.C., and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, reached 60 per 100,000. New York City's tribulations led to a downgrading of its bonds by Standard and Poor's in 1995. City employment fell by nine thousand jobs in the first quarter, and the city's budget of $31.5 billion required $3.1 billion to balance. One-shot sales of city assets included a $2.3 billion "sale" of its water and sewerage systems—a fiscal gimmick of shuffling debt between city agencies.

Populations in the industrialized world in 1995 were about three-fourths urban, compared with about one-third in the developing world. Newly industrialized Latin America is already as urbanized as Europe. By the year 2005, half of the world's people will live in urban areas; by the year 2025, that number will be about two out of three. The rate of urbanization is a product of migration and the birth rate among the urban population. In the industrialized world, migration was a gradual process: from 1875 to 1900, the annual rate of urban growth was 2.8 percent. In the developing world, urban populations have grown at an annual rate of about 4 percent from 1975 to 1990. Such rapid urbanization places enormous strain on developing countries to provide the infrastructure necessary to support their populations. By 2025, four billion people in developing countries will be classified as urban—equivalent to the world's total population in 1975. The UN Habitat II Conference in Istanbul, 1996, is drawing much needed attention to urbanization.

Global collision of the two paradigms continues on additional key issues around population: (1) per capita consumption and waste in industrial societies, the environmental impacts of which are multiplied manyfold over those of populations in developing countries, even though they are growing faster; and (2) the growing consensus that population growth can best be stabilized by educating and empowering women, coupled with the further evidence that empowering women as educators, food producers, and family providers is a key factor in development. For example, one-third of all households worldwide are headed by women. The Human Development Report, 1995 found that $16 trillion is missing from the global economy each year—$5 trillion represents the unpaid work performed by women and men, and $11 trillion is the additional unpaid work of women. This crucial role of women in development has been obscured for decades by the competitive GNP-growth paradigm, which deems unpaid production for use-value "noneconomic." Empowerment of women is opposed by fundamentalists in many patriarchal religious traditions, such as Islam and Roman Catholicism, as well as by many of the world's predominantly male decision makers.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BUILDING A WIN-WIN WORLD by HAZEL HENDERSON Copyright © 1996 by Hazel Henderson. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1881052907
• ISBN 13: 9781881052906
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320