Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (6 page)

An indication that greed reflects the
perception
rather than the reality of scarcity is that rich people tend to be less generous than poor people. In my experience, poor people quite often lend or give each other small sums that, proportionally speaking, would be the equivalent of half a rich person’s net worth. Extensive research backs up this observation. A large 2002 survey by Independent Sector, a nonprofit research organization, found that Americans making less than $25,000 gave 4.2 percent of their income to charity, as opposed to 2.7 percent for people making over $100,000. More
recently, Paul Piff, a social psychologist at University of California–Berkeley, found that “lower-income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth.”
¹
Piff found that when research subjects were given money to anonymously distribute between themselves and a partner (who would never know their identity), their generosity correlated inversely to their socioeconomic status.
²

While it is tempting to conclude from this that greedy people become wealthy, an equally plausible interpretation is that wealth makes people greedy. Why would this be? In a context of abundance greed is silly; only in a context of scarcity is it rational. The wealthy perceive scarcity where there is none. They also worry more than anybody else about money. Could it be that money itself
causes
the perception of scarcity? Could it be that money, nearly synonymous with security, ironically brings the opposite? The answer to both these questions is yes. On the individual level, rich people have a lot more “invested” in their money and are less able to let go of it. (To let go easily reflects an attitude of abundance.) On the systemic level, as we shall see, scarcity is also built in to money, a direct result of the way it is created and circulated.

The assumption of scarcity is one of the two central axioms of economics. (The second is that people naturally seek to maximize their rational self-interest.) Both are false; or, more precisely, they are true only within a narrow realm, a realm that we, the frog at the bottom of the well, mistake for the whole of reality. As is so often the case, what we take to be objective truth is actually a projection of our own condition onto the “objective” world. So immersed in
scarcity are we that we take it to be the nature of reality. But in fact, we live in a world of abundance. The omnipresent scarcity we experience is an artifact: of our money system, of our politics, and of our perceptions.

As we shall see, our money system, system of ownership, and general economic system reflect the same fundamental sense of self that has, built into it, the perception of scarcity. It is the “discrete and separate self,” the Cartesian self: a bubble of psychology marooned in an indifferent universe, seeking to own, to control, to arrogate as much wealth to itself as possible, but foredoomed by its very cutoff from the richness of connected beingness to the experience of never having enough.

The assertion that we live in a world of abundance sometimes provokes an emotional reaction, bordering on hostility, in those of my readers who believe that harmonious human coexistence with the rest of life is impossible without a massive reduction in population. They cite Peak Oil and resource depletion, global warming, the exhaustion of our farmland, and our ecological footprint as evidence that the earth cannot long support industrial civilization at present population levels.

This book offers a response to this concern as part of a vision of a sacred economy. More importantly, it addresses the “how” questions as well—for example, how we will get to there from here. For now I will offer a partial response, a reason for hope.

It is true that human activity is vastly overburdening the earth today. Fossil fuels, aquifers, topsoil, the capacity to absorb pollution, and the ecosystems that maintain the viability of the biosphere are all being depleted at an alarming rate. All the measures on the table are far too little, far too late—a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.

On the other hand, an enormous proportion of this human activity is either superfluous or deleterious to human happiness. Consider first the armaments industry and the resources consumed in war: some $2 trillion dollars a year, a vast scientific establishment, and the life energy of millions of young people, all to serve no need except one we create ourselves.

Consider the housing industry here in the United States, with the enormous McMansions of the last two decades that again serve no real human need. In some countries a building that size would house fifty people. As it is, the cavernous living rooms go unused, for people feel uncomfortable in their inhuman scale and seek out the comfort of the small den and the breakfast nook. The materials, energy, and maintenance of such monstrosities are a waste of resources. Perhaps even more wasteful is the layout of suburbia, which makes public transportation impossible and necessitates inordinate amounts of driving.

Consider the food industry, which exhibits massive waste at every level. According to a government study, farm-to-retail losses are about 4 percent, retail-to-consumer losses 12 percent, and consumer-level losses 29 percent.
³
Moreover, vast tracts of farmland are devoted to biofuel production, and mechanized agriculture precludes labor-intensive intercropping and other intensive production techniques that could vastly increase productivity.
⁴

Such figures suggest the potential plenty available even in a world of seven billion people—but with a caveat: people will spend much more time (per capita) growing food, in a reversal of the trend of the last two centuries. Few realize that organic agriculture can be two to three times more productive than conventional agriculture—per hectare, not per hour of labor.
⁵
And intensive gardening can be more productive (and more labor-intensive) still. If you like gardening and think that most people would benefit from being closer to the soil, this is good news. With a few hours’ work a week, a typical suburban garden plot of perhaps a thousand square feet can meet most of a family’s vegetable needs; double that and it can provide substantial amounts of staples too, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash. Is the vast transcontinental trucking system that brings California lettuce and carrots to the rest of the country really necessary? Does it enhance life in any way?

Another type of waste comes from the shoddy construction and planned obsolescence of many of our manufactured goods. Presently there are few economic incentives, and some disincentives, to produce goods that last a long time and are easy to fix, with the absurd result that it is often cheaper to buy a new appliance than to
repair an old one. This is ultimately a consequence of our money system, and it will be reversed in a sacred economy.

On my street, every family possesses a lawnmower that is used perhaps ten hours per summer. Each kitchen has a blender that is used at most fifteen minutes per week. At any given moment, about half the cars are parked on the street, doing nothing. Most families have their own hedge clippers, their own power tools, their own exercise equipment. Because they are unused most of the time, most of these things are superfluous. Our quality of life would be just as high with half the number of cars, a tenth of the lawnmowers, and two or three Stairmasters for the whole street. In fact, it would be higher since we would have occasion to interact and share.
⁶
Even at our current, gratuitously high rate of consumption, some 40 percent of the world’s industrial capacity stands idle. That figure could be increased to 80 percent or more without any loss of human happiness. All we would lose would be the pollution and tedium of a lot of factory production. Of course, we would lose a vast number of “jobs” as well, but since these are not contributing much to human well-being anyway, we could employ those people digging holes in the ground and filling them up again with no loss. Or, better, we could devote them to labor-intensive roles like permaculture, care for the sick and elderly, restoration of ecosystems, and all the other needs of today that go tragically unmet for lack of money.

A world without weapons, without McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box
stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life.

Part of the healing that a sacred economy represents is the healing of the divide we have created between spirit and matter. In keeping with the sacredness of all things, I advocate an embrace, not an eschewing, of materialism. I think we will love our things more and not less. We will treasure our material possessions, honor where they came from and where they will go. If you have a treasured baseball mitt or fishing rod, you may know what I’m talking about. Or perhaps your grandfather had a favorite set of woodworking tools that he kept in perfect condition for fifty years. That is how we will honor our things. Can you imagine what the world would be like if that same care and consideration went into everything we produced? If every engineer put that much love into her creations? Today, such an attitude is uneconomic; it is rarely in anyone’s financial interest to treat a thing as sacred. You can just buy a new baseball mitt or fishing rod, and why be too careful with your tools when new ones are so cheap? The cheapness of our things is part of their devaluation, casting us into a cheap world where everything is generic and expendable.

Amidst superabundance, even we in rich countries live in an omnipresent anxiety, craving “financial security” as we try to keep scarcity at bay. We make choices (even those having nothing to
do with money) according to what we can “afford,” and we commonly associate freedom with wealth. But when we pursue it, we find that the paradise of financial freedom is a mirage, receding as we approach it, and that the chase itself enslaves. The anxiety is always there, the scarcity always just one disaster away. We call that chase
greed
. Truly, it is a response to the perception of scarcity.

Let me offer one more kind of evidence, for now meant to be suggestive rather than conclusive, for the artificiality or illusory nature of the scarcity we experience. Economics, it says on page one of textbooks, is the study of human behavior under conditions of scarcity. The expansion of the economic realm is therefore the expansion of scarcity, its incursion into areas of life once characterized by abundance. Economic behavior, particularly the exchange of money for goods, extends today into realms that were never before the subject of money exchanges. Take, for example, one of the great retail growth categories in the last decade: bottled water. If one thing is abundant on earth to the point of near-ubiquity, it is water, yet today it has become scarce, something we pay for.

Child care has been another area of high economic growth in my lifetime. When I was young, it was nothing for friends and neighbors to watch each other’s kids for a few hours after school, a vestige of village or tribal times when children ran free. My ex-wife Patsy speaks movingly of her childhood in rural Taiwan, where children could and did show up at any neighbor’s house around dinner time to be given a bowl of rice. The community took care of the children. In other words, child care was
abundant;
it would have been impossible to open an after-school day care center.

For something to become an object of commerce, it must be made scarce first. As the economy grows, by definition, more and more of human activity enters the realm of money, the realm of
goods and services. Usually we associate economic growth with an increase in wealth, but we can also see it as an impoverishment, an increase in scarcity. Things we once never dreamed of paying for, we must pay for today. Pay for using what? Using money, of course—money that we struggle and sacrifice to obtain. If one thing is scarce, it is surely money. Most people I know live in constant low-level (sometimes high-level) anxiety for fear of not having enough of it. And as the anxiety of the wealthy confirms, no amount is ever “enough.”

From this perspective, we must be cautious in our indignation at such facts as, “Over two billion people live on less than two dollars a day.” A low cash income could mean that someone’s needs are met outside the money economy, for example through traditional networks of reciprocity and gifts. “Development” in such cases raises incomes by bringing nonmonetary economic activity into the realm of goods and services, with the resulting mentality of scarcity, competition, and anxiety so familiar to us in the West, yet so alien to the moneyless hunter-gatherer or subsistence peasant.

Ensuing chapters explain the mechanisms and meaning of the centuries-old conversion of life and the world into money, the progressive commodification of everything. When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave—one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival.

Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages
often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant.