Is selective affluence sustainable?

You may think that extreme poverty has long been a thing of the past in the United States of America. You would be wrong though. Before we go further, we need to understand how this extreme poverty—or say, deep poverty—is defined and how various countries can be meaningfully compared. On the latter criterion, the World Bank’s 2013 number of 769 million people living on less than $1.90 a day, and only 3.2 million of those living in extreme poverty in the United States was found misleading. 

On what is needed to live and is not available, there is a difference in what people need in countries with colder climate that those in the tropical regions. In ignoring the all-pervading differences in needs, the World Bank estimates put out erroneous figures. A Bangladeshi villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care. A poor agricultural labourer in the African tropics needs very little clothing and doesn’t need heating to go through the winters. In the United States, the anomaly presents itself when you look at California’s Santa Clara County—the home of Silicon Valley—where, with its warmer climate, one would expect fewer homeless people sleeping on the streets than in the much colder New York City. However, the reverse is true. Obviously something was amiss.

Recently that has changed to some extent. An Oxford economist estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that should be used apposite the $1.90 line for poor countries. That suggests that we should be using $4 a day when we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines “deep poverty” as living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of its poverty threshold. According to the Census Bureau, in 2016, 18.5 million people lived in deep poverty. Those in deep poverty represented 5.8 percent of the total population and 45.6 percent of those in poverty, bringing the number of poor to over 40 million. That incidentally leaves out the number of homeless living inside their old rickety cars parked in church compounds and sleeping in them or on the sidewalks. In 2017, that number stood at over half a million. 

Going back to the example of Santa Clara—the county with the largest income gap nationwide—has seen a dramatic surge in the number of homeless deaths in recent years. This, on the other hand, is home to Silicon Valley’s 76,000 millionaires and billionaires.

This, in the land of affluence! 

Surveys suggest only 5% of Americans think that anti-poverty programmes have had a big impact; 47% say they have had no impact or a negative one. And most people think that poverty is spreading—a view expressed by many politicians. In 2014, the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, then chairman of the House Budget Committee, issued a scathing critique of welfare programmes arguing they “are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse.”

So, what are we doing about it? When, if ever, we will surmise that the affluence of some may be at the cost of the poverty of many? Or, is it that science and technology will sort it all out, and in near future—before the earth’s population reaches 10 billion—all of us earthlings will live a reasonably satisfying life? 

If you say, “Fat chance” to that, then the logical question is whether this selective affluence of some is sustainable?

Now, the future of the planet relies on humans worldwide creating policies to mitigate our own environmental burdens. But by targeting those affluent lifestyles which are doing more ecological damage, we might be able to address the disproportionate cost of redressal.

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The notion that standard of living—a somewhat nebulous term—on its own is directly related to the amount a man consumes is in itself questionable. It is also true that a qualitative parameter such as standard of living doesn’t render itself for an easy quantification. We run to GDP to rescue us. And GDP, as we know, is measured as the total value of goods and services produced, and divided by the population. Having gone there, we are now going to say that a higher consuming man is better off than those who consume less. 

But the problem is that we derive out of this what is blatantly non-derivable. Since we average it all out per capita, we readily declare that the population (read country) is happier because we have registered a certain per cent growth in GDP, and hence the standard of living.  

That is when, we leave out 10% to 50% poor, depending upon which country we are talking about. They didn’t receive any crumbs of that enlarged cake. 

Let us try to get a bit more close to assessing whether we are doing it right. Let us talk about satisfaction—once again an intangible. Suppose I define it as a man’s feeling that he has all that he reasonably needs in comparison with 50% of the population he is a part of. Once again, I am foxed. May be I will say satisfaction comes from development and then go on to say that development can only be measured as GDP. 

It is not my case here to argue that calculating GDP is a waste of time. My anxiety is that it is used for macro level planning. where government routinely laud themselves seeing it rise and despair seeing it fall.  

Home makers and volunteers in community service don’t make any money, but they achieve tremendous satisfaction. GDP discounts all that while the people indulging in those activities are happy to have done that work. Most glaring is the fact that redistribution of wealth is not even a remote consideration. If rising GDP is making the rich yet richer while the poor are getting yet poorer, it shouldn’t be a cause for jubilation.

The answer lie in the fact that in the race to consume more and, in that effort, acquire yet more products and services skews the desired application of resources. Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. This boils down to thinking in terms of resource application rather that maximizing consumption as the bedrock of all developmental activity. Further, the resource application should be measured in ten different tiers of income—from top 10 percent down to bottom 10 percent.  

Try explaining that to a politician, whether in America or in any other country.

will not get us an equilibrium where most, if not all, feel satisfied with their lives. 

A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: 

Economics as if people mattered.

He wrote: "There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding." In a warning that with the growth, concentration of ownership, power and market share of modern multinational corporations more, not less relevant Schumacher adds: "The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things."

He understood very clearly the need to make finance subservient to human needs, environmental imperatives and the real economy, and promoted democratic trusteeship as an ownership and management model to achieve it. This, he wrote, overcomes, "the reductionism of the private ownership system and uses industrial organisations as a servant of man, instead of allowing it to use men simply as means to the enrichment of the owners of capital".

His book is a most unusual economic treatise, enor¬mously broad in scope, pithily weaving together threads from Galbraith and Gandhi, capitalism and Buddhism, sci¬ence and psychology.  The reader is left wishing that somehow an economist of Schumacher’s vision could be scooped from his subterranean hide-away and ushered into the White House dis¬guised as Arthur Burns.

But life like this comes at more of a cost than we realise. To coincide with the 2017 World Economic Forum, Oxfam published a new report, which claimed that the eight richest people in the world control the same wealth as half of the world’s population. A vital debate certainly – and yet not the only one that needs to be had.

In an average mature economy like the UK’s, the ecological footprint is 6.69 global hectares per person. That means if everybody in the world had this lifestyle we would need 3.7 planets to support us all. Yes, there are those who are living with a smaller footprint, but that is not a life the majority are striving for.

The wealthy few who embrace luxurious and extravagant lifestyles impose a great burden on the environment because they acquire so many possessions, and then use them in particularly profligate ways. Many have private jets and super-yachts.

Of course, those of us who are not in the elite minority could just be envious of those with affluent lifestyles. Or maybe many of those at the top have been deflecting or otherwise containing the debate, side-steppping it as they are so often accused of doing with taxation. It may even be that we all ignore the environmental consequences because modern society sees the “jet-set” lifestyle as one to aspire to, not denigrate. Perhaps all of us have some guilt in the knowledge that we too have recklessly extravagant elements to our lives, and that these may be rather difficult to change.

Affluence and sustainability

However, it is not as easy as saying we need to limit how many mansions one person owns; there are several components to the ecological burdens of wealth. Neither is this something that can be expressed simply by looking at above-average carbon emissions – though that certainly is one important dimension.

Take a look at this example: the annual average personal carbon footprint was 7.3 tonnes in 2010, and yet the estimated sustainable footprint we should all have by 2050 is 1.5 tonnes per annum. A Learjet private plane, flying on one trip from Aspen, Colorado to San Francisco – 1,386.6km (861 miles) – would, according to our calculations, have CO₂ emissions of4,411.8kg. By contrast, driving the average car 10,000km (6,213 miles) over a year would emit about 1,600kg of CO₂.

But to live an affluent lifestyle, one does more than hop on a jet. There are the houses, cars, boats, clothes, jewellery, technology – money is no object so there is no limit to the amount of objects one can possess.

You might be wondering how simply owning a lot of “things” can damage the environment. One way to understand this is through the ecological rucksack concept. This measures the total quantity in kilograms of materials moved from nature to create a product or service, minus the actual weight of the product. Aluminium, for example has a rucksack “factor” of 85:1, so 85kg of material is required to make 1kg of aluminium. Diamonds on the other hand have a factor of 53,000:1.

Though we all know what a standard lifestyle of the rich looks like nowadays, in truth the ecological footprint is largely unknown beyond the individual acts we can analyse. We could be dangerously underestimating the damage that a handful of people are doing to the environment, and not properly mitigating it.

This is not just a call for research into affluent lifestyles, we must name and shame those who are being reckless with the environment for the sake of themselves, and instigate policy action to stop them.

Eight billionaires might not account for half of the world’s environmental problems – and perhaps they do a lot of good, too – but the ecological burdens they create are surely greater than eight subsistence farmers in India. And it is about time we knew just how much more damage they are doing.

The luxury consumption and sustainability debate is one that Plato had back in 380 BC. But then, the threats of climate change and other environmental issues were not so pressing..

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. 

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.