Tim Jackson, who among other things is the UK government’s advisor on sustainable development, raised an important issue at TEDGlobal this week in Oxford.  At least I thought so, because it struck at one of the central things on my mind these days (outlined in a recent blog posting here).

Jackson makes two points, one obvious and the other less so.  The first is that economic growth is fundamentally constrained by the resources of this planet.  Our way out to date has been a blind faith in our ability to improve efficiency and build technology, but the reality is that we can’t keep going on like this forever.  We need to stop looking to economic growth as a proxy for human prosperity.  We’ve grown our economies so much already that we risk undermining the very prosperity we seek.  

His less obvious point is the one I find fascinating and critical.  The institutions we’ve created – capitalism in particular – has negative implications for our culture, values, and norms.  As he put it so eloquently, which was instantly met with applause from the audience and retweeted widely:  

 
“We spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.”
 

Why do we do this?  Jackson says that human beings experience tension between values in two dimensions: novelty-seeking behavior vs. tradition / culture preservation and self-regarding behavior vs. other regarding behavior.  Our institutions, however, encourage us to operate in only one quadrant of ourselves: the self-regarding, novelty seeking one. Taking this into account, he says that addressing our issue of unsustainable economic growth isn’t about changing human nature, it’s about changing out institutions to better reflect the full spectrum of human nature. It’s not about overthrowing capitalism, but broadening it to more fully reflect our values.  


Unfortunately Jackson didn’t have time left in his 18 minutes to elaborate much on what these institutions would look like, but I’m looking forward to reading his book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (anyone want to read it with me?).  From what I could glean, he’s talking about social enterprise.   

I think one of the central challenges in shifting institutional structures is the enormity of the information asymmetry and the reality of the human mind.  Put simply, do we really think that people can access all of the relevant environmental and ethical information about the products they buy?  And even if they could, do we actually think they could process it all?

Usually when consumers can’t possibly assess such things, the government comes to the rescue.  This is why lawyers must pass the bar, doctors are board certified, and the food and drug administration exists.  These organizations protect us because we can’t possibly make informed decisions ourselves.

So I’m curious how Jackson addresses these challenges when it comes to shifting institutions.  There will certainly be more posts on this topic as I read his book in the coming weeks.