Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

It's interesting to read this book just days after finishing Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy. I would say, definitely skip this book and read The Value of Nothing instead.

McKibben bothers me because he takes a truly mediocre stance on changing our lives to prevent climate change, and there are many problematic themes in this book to that effect.

Firstly, McKibben dedicates an entire chapter to food and local agriculture vs. giant megacorps, and never mentions that a vegan diet would help immensely to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing dependence on the megacorps that grow subsidized soybeans and corns for animal agriculture.

Also, McKibben mentions that we only have two show more economic options: capitalism or communism/socialism. This false dichotomy ignores many of the intermediate and alternate economies and governmental forms that can work for large groups of people. (See: Mindful Economics) It also ignores the fact that communism wasn't what was going on in the USSR, but fascism.

I also find it incredibly problematic how McKibben addresses the third world without addressing the reasons that they are poor, undernourished, and living in (according to a first world perspective) dire predicaments. Never are the effects of colonialism or global capitalism or free trade really explored in detail.

Finally, McKibben always ends with a message that revolves around personal change instead of radical action. It's easier to swallow his message that if people in the US just acted more community-oriented and less individualistic then global climate change could totally solve itself! But that's not really going to help anybody in the long run. He completely misses the big picture, that global capitalism is screwing things up, not individual people. Voting with my dollar, or at the ballot box, won't change anything if the people in power aren't disrupted in wreaking havoc for an extra buck. show less

As a long time fellow traveler of communitarians and the author of a little known/read book on libraries and community, McKibben hit my sweet spot. I guess any book dedicated to Wendell Berry has me from hello.

McKibben starts with familiar ground (Americans use up too much of the world’s resources / we are mining most resources) and adds some excellent perspective (pre-1970 houses were the size of today’s garages).

He moves on to look at perpetual growth as a trailing indicator of happiness and a poor definition for success. He is not in some mystical world here, but looking at the economics of the matter. If you are hungry, more food keeps you alive. If you are full, more food shortens your life instead of prolonging it.



Next he show more reports on his attempt to eat locally for a year. Those of us in areas that get snow know that this will be a challenge, though our grandparents though nothing of it. Almost all their food came from the surrounding farms, dairies and ranches. Economically, it makes a great deal of sense to support the people of your community by buying locally, since their purchases in turn support you. This means more than just McJobs at WalMart. The box stores are like strip miners and agribusiness – they leave everything poorer than they find it. If it makes sense for Wisconsin to import potatoes from Idaho, it won’t when the cost of transporting them rises. Add in the shared costs of pollution and exhausted energy supplies and local food makes good economic sense.



In a chapter titled All for One, or One for All, McKibben looks at hyper-individuality. As recently, the though of walling oneself off from society was considered a sign of either divine spark or insanity. Now I’ve got mine is the motto of the Republican Party, gated communities abound and people don’t even know their neighbors. But this is not just kvetching – he has a plan for turning the tide. It involves again focusing and funding the local as much as the mega. It involves shopping as a member of a community, not as just an individual.

In The wealth of communities, McKibben argues that communities are the real measure of wealth and gives examples of real projects that are operating in the sweet spot between too big and too small.

Finally, in Durable future, he looks at the very real problem of global poverty and globalization. He does not see it even physically possible for China to become the US in terms of consumption. There just isn’t that much oil as a start. How can we build a future that will work? Progress, if defined as the American way of life, is not a long-term option. It is already too costly for many Americans just in price, not to mention the long-term cost. Again, he gives worldwide examples of people building a future that actually has a future.

This is another book that has the power to change your life. If it doesn’t, I hope it at least widens your viewpoint. show less

Don't be put off by the title. This is a tremendously readable journey through the hope and terror of our times (um, not Terror with a capital as in suicide bombs, but lower-case terror as in the world going to hell in a handbasket). It was only great self-restraint that stopped me from constantly regaling companions or passers-by with tidbits.

The subtitle more or less says what the book's about: it challenges the single minded preoccupation with growth as the supreme indicator of economic success, and the 'hyper individualism' that that preoccupation involves; and a durable future as opposed to the likely outcome if things keep moving in the current direction with the current impetus. It's a passionate, research-based argument for show more renewed -- or brand new -- attention to the local: in food production and consumption, and in all other economic activity. It piles up examples of the loss in human terms caused by the ruthless pursuit of economic 'efficiency' but it also accumulates a persuasive number of counter-examples, of people forgoing large profits for the sake of the common good.
Intuitively, to this uneducated mind, the prevailing view that permanent growth is the only way forward looks like a recipe for disaster. Here is a substantial, reasoned, systematic move towards an alternative way of thinking about these things. Not that Bill McKibben is trying to pass himself off as a brilliant innovator; his brilliance lies not only in his throng of memorable stories to flesh out his argument, but also in the mass of telling quotes from an army of researchers, experimenters and thinkers. show less

In Deep Economy, Bill McKibben triangulates a range of world problems of disparity of wealth and access among three common factors: capitalism/consumerism, the global economy, and global ecology. He argues that productions’ pursuit of efficiency has essentially crippled itself in the long term by being unsustainable. Furthermore, the requirement of extreme efficiency in order to be competitive in the global economy has widened the wealth disparity gap: large and successful corporations in developed nations have the capital, personnel, and image to continue to build their wealth and better their production; small businesses or developing nations have none of the above, and their chances of competing against more capable show more mega-corporations shrinks as the global economy gets ever larger.

We currently know the sum difference between bottom-line production costs and ability to maximize profit as the ultimate measure of efficiency – the highest good of capitalism. But measuring ‘goodness’ of a system by only these two simply quantifiable values disregards the more qualitative, delicate values affected by the system. Quality of life for workers, long-term sustainability, and overall impact on the environment. So here is Bill’s ecological and sustainable proposal:

���I’m not suggesting an abrupt break with the present, but a patient rebalancing of the scales. The project will not be fast, cheap, or easy. Fast, cheap, and easy is what we have at the moment; they are the cardinal virtues upon which our economy rests (and if they also happen to be the very adjectives you don’t want attached to your child, well, that should give you a little pause). The word we use to sum up these virtues is ‘efficiency,’ and on its altar we have sacrificed a good deal….But the time has come to throw some grit into the works. To make the economy less efficient, heretical as it sounds.”

It is heresy to American capitalism, no doubt. But as we become more aware of the interconnectedness and ultimate damage American capitalism has done so far both environmentally and economically, such heresy could be a prophetic and necessary voice. show less

Deep Economy reads as a response to two very influential economic works: Adam Smith's The Weath of Nations (alluded to in McKibben's subtitle: The Wealth of Communities) and Thomas Friedman's much more recent work, The World is Flat. McKibben argues that economic theory and political doctrine valuing growth above all has led us to debase the environment. Moreover, since increasing wealth provides diminishing returns, we are not even becoming happier through this destructive growth. In fact, people in developed countries (particularly America) are becoming less happy. McKibben's urges us to return to community values and local economies. Doing so, he says, is the only way we can regain happiness and avert environmental disaster. show more Actually, he presents the latter as all but inevitable and asserts that we will need to rediscover local economies because working together in communities will be the only way we will be able to survive the effects of global warming and environmental degradation.

The most interesting thing about this book for me was the conscious dialogue McKibben had with the field of economics. He is very consciously responding to the religion of economics that he traces back to Adam Smith. Importantly, his argument is not with Smith's book itself. He notes that Smith believed that community structures would enable markets to function properly. Smith assumed, for example, that people would know the merchants selling them their goods, and this would prevent dishonest behavior and prevent consumers from making uninformed choices. Today, however, as McKibben argues, markets have gotten so big that they no longer work in our best interests. His most compelling arguments probably center on food. He demonstrates that the food we eat increasingly travels immense distances to reach us, and he argues that this is the result of the economic doctrine: it is less expensive to have one farmer manage a huge monoculture crop than to have many small farmers. The tragedy is that those many small farmers would grow crops in a more environmentally sustainable manner, they would grow a greater variety of food (thus supporting the varied tastes of local consumers), and small farms would actually grow more food per acre. show less

This is a book of journalism, not political or economic analysis. It does a great job of bringing the reader's attention to the links between the environmental and moral limits to endless capitalist growth, and the essentially social or psychological impulse to reconstruct society on a smaller, more personal scale. But as none of the factors McKibben suggests we need to balance are conveniently measurable in dollars (pretty much the only universal measurement left), he's left with examples, stories, anecdotes. If they echo your experience, you'll probably accept his larger thesis; if they don't, you'll probably complain about the book's lack of rigor, as though that makes its points moot.

I'm already on board with these ideas, so for me show more it was a quick read, giving me more examples and variations of the kind of thinking needed to sustain civilization globally and locally at something approximating its current standards. Where I live, this is the stuff of everyday life and casual conversations. Reading the book just filled in some of the background I'd missed.

Worth noting: I was surprised as I read by how little the book was affected by the experience of the economic crises and political changes of the last five years. In a revised edition I'm sure McKibben would point to them as examples to support his thesis, but it's actually nice that the book as-is allows the reader to supply the updates from his or her own experience. show less

This book is old now, written in 2007, but the main points are true as ever.
1) We really need to push against the idea that money is the only measure of value. The cheapest way of doing things is (definitionally) the most efficient in terms of money, but it is catastrophically wasteful in terms of energy use, human wellbeing, and the state of our ecological systems.
2) Local economies are more sustainable, resilient, community-building, and satisfying. They are also (definitionally) particular to their place, which means that they are different from one another, which is just more interesting than one global menu that is the same everywhere you might go.