From the Vienna University of Economics and Business, last Tuesday, Clive Spash came to Manchester to deliver a talk on the environmental school of economic thought. After the recent, strikingly bizarre bout of flooding across the UK, nothing could really be more relevant than a discussion of how Economics, note capital E, economics as a discipline, ought to deal with an environment that spirals out of control in response to humanity’s very own development.
Spash problematised environmental economics in the context of an academic struggle. For the dominant, neoclassical school he explained, perceives environmental issues such as pollution, toxic radiation fallout and rising sea levels to be mere ‘one-offs’, ‘externalities’ that pop-up occasionally as a product of market prices. In doing so, the neoclassical school has no way of explaining environmental problems as an inherence of our current economic system, as something that arises almost inevitably out of society’s methods of organising production and distributing resources.
Spash went on to argue that an economics that can actually explain environmental issues as something more than mere anomalies absolutely needs to stand in direct opposition to neoclassical economics, in order to be able to truly confront and attack these issues rather than being coopted and diluted by the neoclassical hegemony, reduced once more to a sideshow, a picture on the wall for people to look at once in a while when searching for profit has become a bit boring.
Mr. Spash talked of the global 1%, a minority of people that own 38.5% of the world’s wealth and questioned the intergrity of an academic Economics, neoclassical economics, that fails to directly address this inequality, and burdens us all with the system’s ‘big lie’, that everyone can have everything.
The talk finished in a flourish of intent, insisting that we need an economics of ‘degrowth’, that questions the very need for a an-ever ticking Geiger counter of GDP, and that considers the imperial essence of economic growth in the developed world, forever purging materials from developing nations with no regard whatsoever for the environment. Amen to all that, Mr. Spash.