It is the exchange of human services – rather than the relentless sale of stuff – that generates more fulfilment and wellbeing Fruit seller by Emily Sutton www.emillustrates.com full employment with declining output. And it has a surprising pedigree. In an essay called simply Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, published in 1932, the economist John Maynard Keynes foresaw a time when we would all work less and spend more time with our family, our friends and our community. Every cloud has a silver lining? It’s certainly a strategy worth thinking about when growth is hard to come by, but simple arithmetic suggests another option for keeping people in work when demand stagnates. What happens if we relinquish our fetish for labour productivity? Sounds crazy at first. We’ve become so conditioned by the language of efficiency. Output is everything. Time is money. The drive for increased labour productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of CEOs and Treasury ministers across the world.

In some places, this still makes sense. Who would rather keep their accounts in longhand? Wash hotel sheets by hand? Or mix concrete with a spade? Between the backbreaking, the demeaning and the downright boring, labour productivity has a lot to commend it.

But there are places too where chasing labour productivity doesn’t stack up at all. What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever-bigger classes? Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour? Our nurses to rush from bed to bed no longer able to feel empathy and offer comfort? Compassion fatigue is a rising scourge in the caring professions, hounded by meaningless productivity targets. Or to take another example, what – aside from meaningless noise – is to be gained by asking the London Philharmonic to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony faster and faster each year?

Trivial though this example seems, it has its roots in another famous economic essay, by the nonagenarian economist William Baumol. Analysing the dynamics of the cultural sector, he identified a general trend in modern service-based economies to slow down over time. Why? Because services require irreducible inputs of people’s time. The phenomenon has come to be called ‘Baumol’s cost disease’. Low-productivity-growth sectors are the scourge of modern economies. In formal terms these enterprises barely count. They represent a kind of Cinderella economy that sits neglected at the margins of consumer society.

Yet people often achieve a greater sense of wellbeing and fulfilment both as producers and as consumers of these activities than they ever do from the time-poor, materialistic, supermarket economy in which most of our lives are spent. And here perhaps is the most remarkable thing of all: because these activities are built around the exchange of human services rather than the relentless throughput of material stuff, there’s a half-decent chance of making the economy more sustainable.

In short, achieving a green economy may be less to do with ‘sustained growth’ and technological utopianism and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of human labour to its rightful place at the heart of the society.

Tim Jackson is an author and is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey.

Issue 275

Resurgence & Ecologist

51