[P2P-F] Fwd: “STEERING SOCIETIES FROM GDP’s 7 DEADLY SINS

Thu Sep 26 13:30:40 CEST 2019

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Hazel Henderson <hazel.henderson at ethicalmarkets.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 25, 2019 at 1:37 AM
Subject: RE: “STEERING SOCIETIES FROM GDP’s 7 DEADLY SINS
To: Larae Long <larae.long at ethicalmarkets.com>

*“STEERING SOCIETIES FROM GDP’s 7 DEADLY SINS *

*TO SDGS AND THE GOLDEN RULE”*

September 23, 2019

by Hazel Henderson©, author of

“Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age: From Economism to Earth
Systems Science (2014)

As so many of us watch our representatives meeting at the United Nations
(UN) this week, many of us, particularly in the USA,  yearn to restore
norms of behavior we learned as children from caring parents and teachers:
the simple guidelines of the GOLDEN RULE: treat and respect each other as
we wish to be treated.

This GOLDEN RULE is also at the core of most of the world’s great religious
and spiritual traditions.   Yet in the rush to industrialize and grow as
economics textbooks taught, by growing according to the money-based GDP and
all its market statistics about maximizing “efficiency” of production,
this omitted all the dis-economies, dis-services and dis-amenities to those
in the rural, unpaid and voluntary service “Love Economies“, while ignoring
the fundamental life-supporting services of Nature.

Economists ruled the world with their pretensions to scientific exactitude,
even lobbying the Nobel committee to set up the phony Bank of Sweden Prize
in Memory of Alfred Nobel, now rejected by his descendants in today’s Nobel
family.

Yet the view of  economic textbooks was wrong: equating human nature as
fundamentally selfish, competitive and individualistic, with all loving,
voluntary unpaid activities in the other half of these caring sectors all
societies was designated as un-economic and ignored, while declaring that
the world was dominated by scarcity, which drove people to anxiety, fear,
competition and conflict.  In other words, the GDP, economic growth model
is based on the 7 Deadly Sins; greed, selfishness, hoarding resources,
pride, envy, competition dishonesty and conflict!  Yes, humans have these
temptations and traits, but the glass is also half full of kindness,
caring, respect for others and Nature and all we were taught as good
behavior, as in the Golden Rule!

The economists are wrong in believing we inhabit a fundamentally scarce
world. We actually live it a world of abundance!   Our  planet Earth
receives a daily shower of free photons from our Mother star, the Sun,
which we are now learning from plants, how to  harvest successfully in
solar panels, wind generators, and the life-supporting technology of
photosynthesis which plants invented to turn those free photons into
carbohydrates --- providing humanity with our foods, fiber, wood and all
the materials we need to live well and sustainably.  When as creative
caring individuals we also practice collaboration, sharing information,
volunteering and focusing on our communities and the common good and the
future of our children, we assure an abundant future for all in healthy
soils for plants and trees and a life-giving biosphere.

So, let’s incentivize our best behaviors and dismiss the economic advisors
from our decision-making!  Most economic models and incentives still
reflect the 7 Deadly Sins of GDP-growth now revealed as malfunctioning
source-code that crept onto the hard drives of our societies’ operating
systems and now must be de-bugged, replacing GDP growth with the more
systemic view of human development expressed in the SDGs!

Let’s release ourselves from the dominance of money and the price system
which holds back our global SDG model and the global green transition
beyond fossilized industrialized production, since market prices are always
history and a reflection of human ignorance and our financial markets have
become global casinos.  Steering by GDP and economists’ statistics is like
flying over a country at 60,000 feet, with little idea of what is actually
happening on the ground in what they call “flyover country“!

Whenever creative new social and collective actions are proposed to clean
up our environment and include everyone in our common future implementing
the SDGs, always challenge any economist or politician who asks, “Where’s
the money coming from?”  This is a false model, or they are simple
ignorant!  Money is just one form of information we create in various
currencies including cryptos, which are actually information-based social
protocols resting on various electronic and social platforms and traded on
forex exchanges, whose prices rise and fall based on network effects of how
many people trust and use them.

This is the 21st century Information Age and we all live in “Mediocracies
and their Attention Economies”
<http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/mediocracies-and-their-attention-economies/>,
while we are learning the politics of money-creation.  We can create our
own local currencies and learn how central banks operate and how our money
is printed and credit allocated to control peoples’ incentives and behavior!

Data is not only the new “oil” but actually the rocket fuel
driving our societies, feeding our computers, training them and our
algorithms with human personal information (bias in-bias out is the new
watchword!).  We need new rules embodying the Golden Rule for our social
media, which can no longer be allowed to be driven by money, greed and the
7 Deadly Sins!   When we awake to these new realities, we have all the
technological tools and can honor our social skills which created the SDGs
guide to a sustainable, equitable and knowledge-richer common future for
all. I discovered all this as an environmental and social activist and
wrote about it  in 1978 in “Creating Alternative Futures: The End of
Economics“
<http://4a5qvh23tbek30e0mg42uq87.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2017/07/Creating-AF.pdf>,
an underground best-seller of that time and now a free download at
www.ethicalmarkets.com, with all our other research in our Green Transition
Scoreboard ® reports and TV series “Transforming Finance”.  Let’s all
choose to evolve toward the SDGs and the emerging Solar Age.

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

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