Towards a Sustainable Economy: The Need for Fundamental Change

An analysis of the economic system that explains why a few people are getting richer, most people are getting poorer and why we are all heading for a global catastrophe. Mass poverty and hunger, unemployment, under-development, waste, armed conflict, resource scarcity and environmental destruction are all caused by the flaws in the economic system. This work shows how economic growth is seriously mistaken since it ignores finite resource and ecological limits, thereby promoting violence and injustice as well as ecological calamity. Having invalidated both "free enterprise capitalism" and "big state socialism" as viable long-term economic systems, the author puts forward an alternative, a Third Way "conserver society" that includes some of the best elements of the other two. His argument is that an economy for a sustainable world order must involved simpler living standards, a high degree of local economic self-suffiency and therefore much less transport and travel, a much smaller cash sector of the economy, more co-operative arrangements such as town banks and working bees, and many free goods from Peramculture-designed "edible landscapes".