Capitalism versus Communism Continued - Towards a Better Economics

To come back to the subject of capitalism versus communism, the real extreme, the true opposite polarity, would be between flat-earth economics and a new economics, round-earth economics. The latter not only assumes the earth’s capacity as a source and sink to be limited, but incorporates these limits as directly relevant and determinative in every sphere of economic life.

The great human leap forward that moving to such an economics would represent is comparable to that when it became generally accepted that the world was indeed a sphere rather than a flat disc; or to that which took place with the development of quantum and relativistic mechanics to supplant the Newtonian or classical mechanics that had served for two centuries.

In that case, the Newtonian mechanics was not entirely wrong and served as a valuable foundation for later structures, but it was incomplete, failing to explain or predict ever more phenomena as the physical sciences developed.

Similarly, current economics is not totally wrong and contains many useful concepts and relations which can be incorporated, albeit modified and renamed, into the more highly evolved economics of the future. Current economics is just increasingly inadequate to explain, predict or manage economic affairs in this ever more crowded, complex world economy.

The task of environmentalists must be to develop and move the world towards this new economics. To this end, the environmental movement must be its own self, hold its integrity, subsume other movements and warp them to its own ends, cut across increasingly irrelevant barriers between “right” and “left”.

The process whereby round earth economics can develop has been suggested earlier in the Foreword under “Evolution, not Revolution”.