Furthermore, according to Robert Costanza, this new model of development would be based clearly on the goal of sustainable human well-being. It would use measures of progress that clearly acknowledge this goal. It would acknowledge the importance of ecological sustainability, social fairness, and real economic efficiency. Ecological sustainability implies recognizing that natural and social capital are not infinitely substitutable for built and human capital, and that real biophysical limits exist to the expansion of the market economy.
Social fairness implies recognizing that the distribution of wealth is an important determinant of social capital and quality of life. The conventional model has bought into the assumption that the best way to improve welfare is through growth in marketed consumption as measured by GDP. This focus on growth has not improved overall societal welfare and explicit attention to distribution issues is sorely needed.
Real economic efficiency implies including all resources that affect sustainable human well-being in the allocation system, not just marketed goods and services. Our current market allocation system excludes most non-marketed natural and social capital assets and services that are critical contributors to human well-being. The current economic model ignores this and therefore does not achieve real economic efficiency. A new, sustainable ecological economic model would measure and include the contributions of natural and social capital and could better approximate real economic efficiency.
The new model would also acknowledge that a complex range of property rights regimes are necessary to adequately manage the full range of resources that contribute to human well-being. For example, most natural and social capital assets are public goods. Making them private property does not work well. On the other hand, leaving them as open access resources (with no property rights) does not work well either. What is needed is a third way to propertize these resources without privatizing them as professor Costanza pointed out. As the new president of the United States, I will make sure that several new (and old) common property rights systems that have been proposed to achieve this goal, including various forms of common property trusts be given a chance to be heard.
Last but not least, the role of government also needs to be reinvented. In addition to government's role in regulating and policing the private market economy, it has a significant role to play in expanding the "commons sector" that can propertize and manage non-marketed natural and social capital assets. It also has a major role as facilitator of societal development of a shared vision of what a sustainable and desirable future would look like.
As the new president of the United States I will encourage the adoption of these natural system principles to the operation of modern business organizations.
The Financial Sector
"It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country."
With regard to the financial sector as professor Clive Dilnot from the New School, USA, has insightfully pointed out , the events of Summer and Fall of 2008 have shown with stark clarity that the modes of accumulation pursued across the banking industries --not only, but particularly those of the US and UK--were so deeply flawed, so toxic in their consequences, that they call into question the fundamentals of the economics on which they were based. Yet to date there is precious little evidence of any fundamental rethinking, either in the industry or by the economics profession,--much of which still seems in denial about the character and gravity of the present crisis. With few exceptions, the argument from all sides--and from most in politics too--is for a return to business as usual as quickly as possible.
As the new president of the United States I will make sure that crises of this scale will not result in two contradictory impulses. The first is towards action. What was unthinkable may suddenly become, in heat of the moment, the applauded, bold and essential action of government. Such was, briefly, the response of the U.S. government to the threat of a complete collapse of the banking system. But hard on the heels of the impulse to act comes reaction, the adamant re-assertion that everything must, in the end--and preferably as quickly as possible--be just as it was before as Mr. Dilnot insightfully pointed out.
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