I have a brief version of his CV -

Richard Douthwaite, a former economic advisor to the government of Montserrat in the Caribbean, has lived in the west of Ireland for the past 22 years.

His thinking has evolved in response to the declining economies and population loss there. Accordingly, his most recent book:

looks at ways in which communities can build thriving local economies which are largely independent of what he sees as an increasingly unstable and exclusive world system.
His previous book "The Growth Illusion" (Green Books 1992) showed that allowing the market to determine the direction of economic growth was impoverishing large numbers of people and damaging society and the environment.

Douthwaite's main research at present is the economic characteristics of a sustainable economy. He is actively involved in the launch later this year of an independent currency for rural Scotland which, as it will not be created by borrowing, does not demand continuous economic growth.

He has helped the Irish Green Party develop its economic policies and was one of its four candidates in the 1993 elections to the European Parliament.

Economist Richard Douthwaite will be in New Zealand from 14th - 28th October 1997, after attending the World Futures Conference in Australia where he is a keynote speaker. He is in New Zealand to start the research for the Australasian version of his book "Short Circuit - Strengthening local Economies for Security in an Unstable World". (publ. Resurgence books; you should ask your bookseller to get it in, but not all of them can get Resurgence books.) Few people have managed to get his book so far, although some have ordered them in. He will bring as many copies as he can carry.

TUES 14 OCT Arrive from Brisbane in Auckland 1700 hrs. Fly to Wellington. Depart Air New Zealand NZ467 at 7.20 pm arrive 8.20pm.

WED 15 OCT Day for briefing, for politicians and the media Organiser Deirdre Kent 04 802 4640

THURS 16 OCT Day of activities in Wellington. Organisers Alan Fricker 04 589 1575 (email: frickera@actrix.co.nz) Diana Unwin 04 389 4063 and Afternoon John Cody 04 237 5531(john.cody@vic.ac.nz) at Porirua Evening public meeting at St Johns cnr Dixon and Willis $10 7.30pm

FRI 17 OCT Wellington keynote speaker at launch of two new ethical investment funds. Organiser Ton Van Der Meer 06 835 7138 (email: prometheus@xtra.co.nz). Attends the rest of this small gathering as a participant/observer.

Lunch time public meeting St Andrews on the Terrace Church 12-2.

Afternoon back to ethical investment meeting. Evening fly to Christchurch Flight Air New Zealand NZ445 dep 5pm arrive 5.45pm Chch

SAT 18 OCT Christchurch day programme organised by Kura Geere-Watson of Commact , home phone 03 384 0220 (Email:kjprocom@chch.planet.org.nz)

SUN 19 OCT Fly to Wellington.Depart NZ 422 8.40am, arriving 9.25am Wellington Deirdre drives them to Napier during afternoon

MON 20 OCT Day/afternoon/ evening seminar in Napier. Organiser Sylvia Gibbons of the Prometheus Foundation ethical investment and credit union. Phone 06 835 7138w or 06 878 3559 h

TUES 21 OCT dep. Napier (Intercity bus) 8.30am via Taupo to Rotorua arr. 11.50am. Afternoon sightseeing

WED 22 Oct Morning sightseeing. Dep.Rotorua for Thames where the organisers are Rosalie Steward and Jeanette Fitzsimons MP ph 07 8686511 Evening public meeting ?

THURS 23 Morning in Thames, Intercity bus 2.55pm from Thames railway station to Auckland arriving Sky City, Hobson St 5.25pm where host is Rebecca Pottts phone 09 372 6579. Speaking in the evening at the normal monthly meeting of the Alliance

FRI 24 Morning see Waipareira Trust and Auckland Peoples Resource Centre. Catch 2.15pm bus to Whangarei. See Bridget Allen?. Stay the night there?.

SAT 25- MON 27 To Hokianga, as guests of Judy Reinken phone 09 405 8758 and Janine McVeagh and the Hokianga

TUES 28 Catch 9.20 am bus from Whangarei to Auckland, as flight leaves 1840 hours (or come back to Auckland the day before)

 Deirdre Kent
 
 Deirdre Kent -lobbying consultant, trainer, researcher
 Trading as Gateway Lobbyskills
 
 PO Box 24-124, Manners Street, Wellington, New Zealand
 Phone/fax 04 802 4640  E-mail: deirdre.kent@xtra.co.nz 

From: Keith Rankin 
To: David MacClement 
Subject:  next  postings,  and  Richard Douthwaite
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 12:47:31 +1300

Hi David,
	I'll send my next posting tomorrow ...
I enjoyed Richard Douthwaite's lecture last night. I'll mention it next
posting, and comment more in a later posting.
bye Keith

Keith Rankin
1/24a Grange Road
Mt. Eden, Auckland, New Zealand
tel. +64-9-623-1956 (fax. by arrangement)
email: keithr@ak.planet.gen.nz or keithr@pl.net
www.oocities.org/Athens/Academy/1223/KeithRankin.html

Some letters to the Sustainable Economics seminar that Richard Douthwaite lead, February '98:

Message-Id: <199802181923.TAA19603@mail.iol.ie>
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 19:23:56 GMT
From: Richard Douthwaite 
To: SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS  
Subject: 
Is growth still making us better off?

Tom Lyon argues that growth has made 'the average Joe' better off. If by this he means that the majority of people living in industrialised countries have many more material possessions than their forebears did 500 years ago, he's obviously right, though whether these possessions can continue to be produced indefinitely is another question. If, on the other hand, he thinks that the average person is happier now, I doubt if this could be proved. All we can do is make a personal, subjective judgment to the effect that if we had to live as our ancestors did it we would be thoroughly miserable but this does not mean that they were. They had different norms.

There is no hard evidence that, above a certain level, the absolute level of a population's income or wealth has any effect on its happiness. However, we do know that changes in relative income or wealth affect people's happiness and health significantly. If the gap between our income and those of the groups above us in our society narrows, we tend to feel better about ourselves. If the gap widens, we feel worse. So if we want to make people better off in the sense of being healthy and happy, we should move towards a more equal world, just as Bernadette O'Regan suggests. Instead, however, as I argue in the paper 'Good Growth and Bad Growth' which you can find on the web site, the present methods of achieving economic growth have widened the gap between rich and poor both within nations and between them. Economic growth is therefore making millions of people feel worse off, even though some of them might have more money and possessions because of it.

But even my argument in the two previous paragraphs misses my main point. Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that past economic growth has enabled people today to lead fuller, richer lives than would otherwise have been possible. This does not mean that the growth we are currently generating is making the majority of people's lives fuller and richer still. As Herman Daly wrote in a recent paper 'Uneconomic Growth: Conflicting Paradigms' economic theory predicts that as a result of diminishing returns, at some point the costs of achieving growth will outweigh the benefits we get from it. I argue that the Indices of Sustainable Economic Welfare produced for several countries show that they have already reached the point at which their further growth destroys more benefits than it creates.

So why then, do these countries allow growth to continue? There are two reasons. One is that the people who are generating growth are benefiiting from it, but at the expense of the environment and almost everyone else. The other reason was touched on by Mike Nickerson: it is that our economic system collapses catastrophically if it cannot continue to grow. Politicians therefore feel that they have no alternative to allow growth to go on because widespread unemployment and misery would result if they stopped it.

So my hope is that this seminar will discuss, amongst many other things:

1. Whether economic growth is still proving beneficial in wealthy countries, and,

2. How we can re-configure the economic system so that, if we decide at some point that it is no longer beneficial to continue growing, we can stop without causing a catastrophic collapse.

Richard Douthwaite

Message-Id: 
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 1998 11:26:45 GMT
From: Richard Douthwaite  (via Dara Molloy)
To: SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS  
Subject:
Questions still to consider

In fact, our exchanges - I don't think we can call this a seminar - have effectively compressed into four days the intellectual journey I took six years to make. This is encouraging as it shows just how quickly a broad, and yet very radical, consensus on the causes of the present crisis and a plan for action to deal with them is developing internationally, at least amongst a certain group. (We most not forget those in this discussion are scarcely typical.)

So where do we stand now, and what are some of the remaining questions we should try to resolve in the remaining days? Most participants accept that there are limits to the level of physical production that the natural environment can tolerate without being degraded and that we have already grossly exceeded these limits in some areas. However, very few of us seem to share Jim Cobbe's view that the global market works well enough to change, via price signals, the technologies used by the economic system before our excesses do irremedial damage. We know that the market did not protect the ozone layer and that there was no way it could have done. International agreement was required instead.

And yet - and this has surprised me - very few people have expressed any confidence that we can put international agreements into place - and effectively enforce them - before appalling damage is done. I think we were right to reject this possibility but perhaps we should have explored the reasons for our rejection more thoroughly than we did. My own view is that if a country's prosperity depends on its international competitiveness, governments are bound to collude with companies operating within their borders to get round externally -imposed restrictions on the way they operate which subject them to extra costs.. International enforcement measures might be tried to counteract this, but they have not stopped Saddam Hussein doing things the whole world thinks undesirable.

So, without really discussing the prospects for international remedies for a global problem, we have jumped to the conclusion that national or local solutions are required. Looking at the national level first, I think we need to see if we can agree whether or not national governments still have the powers to take the radical measures necessary to force the economic system to transform itself. Can they restructure the whole basis of taxation, moving, perhaps, from taxes on labour to ones on resource use, without multinational corporations and investors revolting and bringing about a financial crisis?

At the local level we need to explore ways in which we can create the circumstances in which a community can use more of its resources to meet its own needs directly and less of them on satisfying those needs by the conventional indirect way of producing goods and services for an external market and then using the money this generates to buy the things it needs from wherever in the world they can be bought most cheaply. In my second book, ' Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World" (Green Books, Totnes, England, distributed in the US by Chelsea Green) I argue that communities which want to become more self-reliant should create a local 'financial micro-climate' which enables them to do many more things than would be possible if external prices and interest rates ruled unchallenged. How? By issuing their own currencies and establishing their own banks.

If a community does not have its own currency, when one neighbour wishes to buy something from another but has nothing of equivalent value to give in exchange, he or she is forced to hand over money to complete the purchase which either they or someone else in their community originally obtained by selling their goods and services to the outside world. In other words people in communities without their own currencies have to trade with the outside world just to be able to do business among themselves. Greater self-reliance requires that this link be broken. LETS systems, which have already been mentioned several times in this seminar, are a step along the way. However, much more powerful local systems are also possible and one, the Wirtschaftsring, has been operating successfully in Switzerland for over sixty years. It now has 60,000 members, all small and medium-sized businesses. Five systems modelled on the Swiss example will start trading in Europe later this year, two of which plan to print their own currency notes.

When the British and the other colonial powers took over a new territory, their first action would frequently be to impose a tax on every hut which had to be paid in the colonialists' money. This not only forced the native peoples to work for the new rulers in order to earn the money, but it broke down local self-sufficiency. Today, as contributors have pointed out, the majority of money is not issued by governments, but by banks, who charge for its use. The significance of local money is that it is issued by the people who use it and they pay no charge to anyone else. In other words, money creation has been democratised.

In Short Circuit I suggest that each community should try to produce its basic necessities for itself on a sustainable basis, from its own resources, so that it can trade with other communities and with the rest of the world generally out of choice rather than necessity. That way, it can never be exploited to the extent that its sustainability is destroyed.

Of course, urban communities are going to find it impossible to produce their basic necessities for themselves. How do we handle this? The development of most of the world's major conurbations is surprisingly recent, the result of the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. Isn't, as the title of one recent article asked, a sustainable city an oxymoron? My approach to this is that we should try to halt the flow of population from rural areas and work towards reversing it. Some contributors have already mentioned this flow. It is only by building greater rural self-reliance that we can stem it.

So, in the time remaining to us, I hope the discussion moves on to looking at local economies in more detail - how they might work, how they would control the technologies they used, how they would prevent individuals exploiting their ownership of a scarce resource or a particular piece of machinery. Would they permit capital to flow in and out, for example? Would they eventually reach the point at which they had made all the investments that gave a worthwhile return, so that the rate of interest tapered off to almost nothing?

What I'd like this seminar to have done by the time it is all over is to have enabled each of us to have developed a vision for the way our own community might be a generation into the future. Will it be a community which is constantly forced to change by the winds of world market forces? Or will its resources and production base be under local control and its people able to determine their own destiny? In particular, will they be able do decide that their local economy has grown - and developed - enough and be free to turn their attention to other more personal forms of development?

Richard Douthwaite

Message-Id: <199802231211.MAA24494@mail.iol.ie>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 12:11:08 GMT
From: Richard Douthwaite 
To: SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS  
Subject:
Will we be ready when the crisis comes? 

The crisis has its roots in the changes in the labour market mentioned by Margaret Hampton. As I've already stressed, the past few years have seen a significant shift in the distribution of national income in favour of the better-off in most countries around the world. In general, wage-earners (and potential wage earners who are unemployed) have lost out from the increased international competition, while big companies and those investing in them have done very well.

The better-off save a greater proportion of their incomes than the poor, and so in almost every country a higher proportion of national income has been invested each year rather than being spent on consumption. This increased investment has to generate a return which can only come from selling goods and services so who will buy the extra goods and services the investments produce? The government will take some. It will be pressed to spend on more roads and other forms of infrastructure to cope with the increased output levels. Subsequent investment projects will also provide a market, enabling the investment boom to feed on itself.

But sooner or later, the public is going to have to be able to take up most of the additional output and if they can't do so because almost all the extra income generated by growth has gone to the wealthiest 10% of population, the bubble will burst. Prosperity will vanish, just as it has done in Korea and elsewhere in South East Asia. The new factories, shopping centres and office blocks will lie empty and the system will begin to run in reverse, because those who have lost their jobs building new factories or producing machinery for them etc., will be unable to spend as much as before. The rich will be uneasy and cut their spending too. And so consumption demand as well as investment demand will drop, costing more people their jobs, and the economy will enter a downward spiral with one set of cuts leading to further ones.

In the 1930s, Henry Ford realised that workers had to be able to buy their products and mounted a campaign to encourage his fellow employers to increase their employees' wages to help the US get out of the depression. Many of them followed his advice and a study of the period shows that they put themselves into debt to do so. Today, or course, no employer would suggest such a thing because the extra wages would leak out of the country concerned and help revive factories elsewhere. This, and the loss of local production capacity, is the reason why I think that the crisis which is developing week by week will be worse than in the 1930s. It will certainly be more intractable.

So when Robert Gale asks whether people really want LETS systems and local banks, my answer is that so long as the international economy works well, they won't but as soon as it leaves them and their neighbours without wages, they will. However, I should stress that, as Mike Rowbotham suggests, LETS systems are not even a half-adequate replacement for the current money system. They are essentially small-group systems which rely on social sanctions to make people abide by the rules, and they would break down if they had more than perhaps a thousand active members. Systems which rely on the law to keep members in line are needed to cope with large numbers, and the best example of such a system, the 60,000-member Wirtschaftsring system in Switzerland, shows that they are capable of being used and trusted by conventional, conservative businesspeople. It's true, as Rowbotham says, that the Wirtschaftsring has not led to the contraction of the mainstream Swiss banking system. Vested interests were too strong for that but at least the WIR, which was born in the crisis of the 1930s, has prospered in more normal times and may demonstrate its true value in times to come.

Future Plans

I also feel that there are still several macro-level questions we haven't adequately explored and I plan to suggest what these are later today - if other participants haven't done so first - so that we can cover them more fully before we close.

Richard Douthwaite.

Message-Id: 
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:58:12 +1300
From: deirdre kent 
To: SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS  
Subject: local economies

Hi everyone.  I have joined in this discussion late, and can't say I have
read everything, but nonetheless here is my contribution.  I am a long time
political activist. 27 years ago I was a candidate for the NZ Values Party
one of the first Green parties in the world.  I now edit a newsletter on
Green Economics in New Zealand, and last year organised Richard
Douthwaite's New Zealand tour. This year I am also involved in
parliamentary reform.

So being neither a professor of ecological economics nor a distinguished
author like many others in this impressive discussion, and having been
greatly influenced by Richard, I find myself in daily dilemmas.

Here they are:

Will I get involved in promoting wellbeing in my street by working towards
a car cooperative or where we pool our tools or organise a small green
dollar system or will I get involved in national green politics?  Will I
try to set up a local source of electricity, given that I live in central
Wellington and we are currently witnessing New Zealand's economic capital
Auckland having its central business district be without power for a week
at least due to neglected maintenance of cables after privatisation?  Will
I work towards a family health insurance scheme or a family credit union
for our family reunion?  Where should I bank my money? In a NZ owned bank
or in a big one which might not go under when the global economy collapses?
Do my investments need rearranging?  Will I spend time on my relationships
or on writing my next newsletter?

Will I join the Greens in their meeting on local body elections, given that
two of the three Greens on the council have voted for high rise apartment
buildings on a key waterfront site when the majority of citizens want a
full park?

I am constantly astonished how the Green movement neglects the issue of
healing the monetary system.  Green councillors have not publicly
questioned why our citizens should pay huge interest rates to private
banks, when they could be working to set up a local currency to pay local
workers to develop a park.

Will I work towards getting myself elected as a green MP in two years, or
is it more important to pay attention to my grandchildren and to spend time
ensuring the quality of food and water that goes into my body?

So being a convert to Richard's ideas on local currencies and local banking
makes me rethink my personal life.  And I am pleased about it.  I feel
really happier about it.

If this seems a bit off the planet and earnest for this discussion, then so
be it!  Integrating one's personal behaviour with one's beliefs is to me
becoming important.

Kia kaha!  Be strong.

Deirdre Kent  PO Box 24 124  Manners St  Wellington  NZ



Message-Id: <199802250933.JAA01511@mail.iol.ie>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 09:33:16 GMT
From: Richard Douthwaite 
To: SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS  
Subject:
Unanswered Questions

Although this seminar has covered a lot of ground, it has inevitably left unanswered questions and the problem of how cities can be made sustainable, which several people asked, is one. No-one even ventured a solution. Why? Was it because there are no answers if cities remain as big as they are and maintain their current consumption patterns? The Sustainable London Trust has shown that London would require most of the land area of Britain to achieve sustainablity in energy and food, leaving little or nothing left for the UK's other conurbations.

What we mustn't do, I think, is say that because we can't see any solution which maintains the cities as they are, there's no way of achieving sustainability at all. A friend, Gilles MacBain, Ireland's deepest 'dark brown' thinker, sent me a letter a few days ago after seeing the film 'Titanic'. "People who cannot grasp the notion of the global economy, or the biosphere, can picture the big liner: it floats, it travels, we are all in it together" he wrote. "Can the global economy go down? The popular attitude is that it cannot

"What is more, at this moment - February 1998 - when 'full steam ahead' is the global policy, the lifeboats - LETS schemes, small farms and local businesses, peasant economies - are all still riding on the upper decks of the big boat, not truly self-sufficient."

Gilles' analogy suggests three ways of dealing with the unsustainability of the global system which we have already identified in the course of our discussion. These are (1) that we should build many more and better lifeboats and (2) we should not only try to slow the ship down (ie reduce its raw material use) but (3) cease to allow the direction it takes to be determined solely by market forces which, amongst other things, are confining an increasing proportion of the world's population to steerage class.

Can the ship be kept afloat? I hope so, even though it has already been seriously holed. However, making it genuinely unsinkable requires massive structural changes which the first class passengers will have to be bribed to make. What I mean by this is that a sustainable world economy requires a very different infrastructure and range of capital equipment to the present one and heavy investment will be needed to provide these. If we keep within the market system (and I don't see any possibility of scrapping it), investors are going to have to be given attractive financial inducements to put up the funds for the transformation.

National governments have for years been subsidising investments in unsustainable systems - a 1997 Greenpeace report showed that between 1990 and 1995, EU governments subsidised fossil fuels and nuclear energy to the tune of 14.9 billion US dollars, seven times more than they spent on renewable energy subsidies. It seems obvious that governments should now subsidise sustainable systems sufficiently to ensure that market forces bring the necessary investments about and, as several people have written, massive popular pressure should be applied to bring this about.

My fear, however, is that governmental freedom of action has become too circumscribed by international bodies like the WTO and the need to remain competitive in international markets for them to respond. If true, this is tragic because, as my posting 'Why small could be beautiful' explained, there are several things which are necessary to bring mature sustainability about that sub-national units cannot do but which nations could. Preventing a net flow of capital into or out of an area is one. Such flows are equivalent to massive volumes of seawater slurping from one watertight compartment to another. Left unchecked, they are likely to sink the ship, as the problems they have created in South East Asia show.

I want to be quite clear. Sustainability is best achieved by international agreement and by working at a national level - provided that's possible. The idea of becoming sustainable in a local area is very much a second best. As Gilles said, it is a lifeboat solution. Such lifeboats are going to be very uncomfortable and inadequate if the world ship goes down. But they may be all that we have.

 
                                *       *       *       *

I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to do much more with the resources we use but any savings we make should be used to reduce our overall impact on the planet rather than being swallowed up by increased investment and consumption. I'm not against growth in principle. That would be ridiculous. However I am against growth now. Our first priority has to be to stop reducing the long-term carrying capacity of our Earth and this means reducing resource - and particularly fossil fuel - use.

As all human activity involves some use of resources, the 'advanced' nations are going to have to work out how their people can live better while producing less. This is the only way that I can see in which resources can be released to make lives more comfortable elsewhere.

                                *       *       *       * 

A second reason why growth isn't the answer is that the process of generating it uses resources which could themselves be used for safe water supplies and other desirable projects. What this means is that the need to maintain a high rate of growth to stop the economic system collapsing, to preserve each country's international competitiveness and to re-employ people who have lost their jobs because of the technological changes previous rounds of growth have brought about is stopping us going straight ahead and doing the things we really want to do. Quite simply, if we can so order things that we do not need to grow, we can invest less and free up the means to achieve our true objectives.

A third reason is that economics is all about making choices. Saying 'we must have growth to do such and such' is an irresponsible way of avoiding choosing how resources are to be used. If you accept that humanity's demands on the planet have already exceeded safe, sustainable limits, choices are unavoidable.

                                *       *       *       * 

Over the next few days I plan to re-read everything that was submitted, paying particular attention to those long and detailed arguments which, unfortunately, we had to decide we could not pass on to the whole list. In his closing message, Don Roper explains how you can read these too. There's surprisingly little rubbish amongst the uncirculated material and I've seen the gold, too.

Thank you very much.

Richard Douthwaite, Cloona, Westport, Co. Mayo, Ireland.

Message-Id: <199802250610.XAA11446@spot.Colorado.EDU>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 23:10:53 -0700 (MST)
From: Don Roper 
To: SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS  
Subject: Closing

Dear Seminar Participants,

It has been a pleasure for CSF
	Communications for a Sustainable Future
to host the forum with Richard Douthwaite on the issues raised
in his excellent book, The_Growth_Illusion.  
 ...
Not only are the web archives at
	http://csf.colorado.edu/sustainable-economics
searchable, but, for anyone interested, I can make a 900k file 
available (for ftp download) of the messages that did not make 
it into the archives. 
 ...
Thank you Richard for sharing your knowledge and thoughtful
perspectives.  The positive spirit that you and others have brought
forward during this discussion has generated the greatest sense of
common purpose that I have seen on a listserv of this size.

thanks to everyone for a great discussion --
there will be more seminars and there will be social change :)

don roper

Since the early 1970s the world economy has become somewhat "out of control", according to Richard Douthwaite in his most recent publication entitled "Short Circuit - Strengthening Local Economics for Security in an Unstable World". A new paradigm has to be established with community action at its centre. To arrive at the new economic order and become more self-sufficient in the process, Mr Douthwaite proposes the establishment of local currencies; surely the very antitheses of what the EMU is all about? Generating and conserving energy locally is another key strategy in this overall plan. Collaboration, empowerment and taking charge by local communities is no doubt the way forward but "letting go" of power by the present stakeholders is the key to a process difficult to get underway in the short-term.

This publication is most interesting and rightly challenges the many economic "sacred cows" well established in our society. We need creative thinking of this nature to move forward but we need many more answers and, most of all, we need to engage the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

- Review by Denis O'Brien

(Lilliput Press, ISBN 1-874675-60-0, pp386, IR£14.99)

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