Poverty, Wealth and Money In The New Green Age (Principles of the Green Age #1.1)

This is the second article in my “Principles of the New Green Age” Series. You can read the first, here.

The first principle was

“Do as thou will, so long as you increase biodiversity and biomass, reduce pollution and heat, and replace any resources used.“

In the real olden days of civilization, in the Fertile Crescent (which really was fertile before most of it was turned into desert) there was a dual currency system: there was grain and there was silver (and what amounted to certificates of deposit on both, along with usurious loans.)

This worked well because, to oversimplify slightly, grain was produced in Mesopotamia and silver wasn’t. If you wanted to buy something else produced in Mesopotamia, you bought with grain. But if you wanted to buy something imported, you paid in silver.

Since silver could only be gotten thru trade, this meant that import and export flows were more or less in order: there could be no massive trade deficits outside the fertile crescent, at least in principle.

Though they didn’t do it, even better would have been that certain things could only be bought with internally produced grain: property, for example. That way your country’s productive ability couldn’t be bought out from under you.

In Green Age ideology there will be more than one type of money, probably three. The first is money based on renewable resources: it will be usable only to buy and sell renewable resources. The second will be based on non-renewable resources and will be strictly controlled. There may also be as pollution based based money, or rather one based on cleaning up pollution, or people may be rewarded with the other two types of money for doing so.

Though we haven’t gotten there yet, one of the Green Age principles will have something to do with taking care of everyone, and part of that will be making sure everyone has food and shelter.

Since there is a societal effort in making renewables actually renew, part of every country’s surplus will be distributed as what amounts to basic income to individuals. That amount, in most countries, certainly all countries with a renewable food surplus, meaning they produce enough food and are not degrading the land to do so, will be sufficient to feed recipients for a year.

Likewise everyone will have a home: one that works out to be pollution neutral when taken in context of the supporting infrastructure. That home will either be given, purchased or leased, with strict controls, and probably mostly long leases, similar to how Singapore works) because it is possible to build houses with materials entirely domestically sources in many countries, though we’ll have to figure out how to electrical wiring sustainably or put it into the unsustainable bucket.

Society is made up of everyone and one of the principles must be that everyone benefits from society’s successes. Even the rich and powerful (who will be kept strictly under control, with the richest have a multiple, perhaps 4x, what the lowest have), must know that for them to do better, everyone must do better and that the environment must do better. This sort of genuine alignment of interests is necessary for any society to function well, and absolutely necessary in any purpose driven society, which Green Age societies will need to be.

So if you’re a member of a green age society created along these lines: the government will make sure you have a home and food. Either you’ll get enough renewable money to get them for yourselves, or there’ll be a non-market mechanism.

In effect, based on how many renewable resources the society produces, you’ll have an income relative to how well society is actually doing. Everyone will. This will pay for things like food, housing, water and anything the country can produce and renew. Since everyone gets this money, there will be strong incentives to create as much out of renewable resources as possible, similar to, but far more healthy than, the great middle class consumer production boom of the post-War period.

If, on the other hand, what you want requires non-renewable resources, well, you’ll need the second type of money, and that will be far harder to come by.

A Green Age society cannot afford the obscenely wealthy, because such people always tend to psychopathy and acting against the common good. It also cannot afford the poor, either, for the same reason: everyone needs to be connected to the successes and failures of society and have a stake in them.

This doesn’t mean a society where there’s no individual or group income. Limited liability companies will go, because people need to be liable for polluting and for not renewing, but there will be organizations and many of them will, at least somewhat, run on money. But somewhere between one-third and a half of your income should be based on how society as a whole is doing, and that income should be enough enough to keep you decently housed and fed, with access to medical care.

Sayings like “a rising tide lifts all boats” aren’t expressions of natural law when they come to social matters: we need to make them true.

If we want to clean up the environment and live in a sustainable society, we’ll have to make it happen, and part of that involves making sure no one can avoid either the positive or negative effects of their actions on the environment.

No obscene rich, no poor.