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NEW ECONOMY based on NEW SYSTEMS

The role of human agency is an essential element of the authors of this new books analyses, evaluations, and prescriptions. If humanity is to live in harmony with itself, with other creatures, and in balance with the planet’s ecological systems, then we must be clear about what we can and cannot do, and what we ought and ought not to do. We still hope to successfully deal with climate change, produce a far more socially and economically equal world, and meet other challenges such as COVID. We can only do this by recognising that most of our problems are due to the way human economic, technological, social, and political systems have operated in the last two hundred or so years. Humanity must acknowledge how it has changed planetary ecosystems and how it ought to affect future changes safely, regeneratively, and wisely. Humanity must work with rather than against nature. This necessarily will involve deciphering how ecological and social systems interact, how change occurs and how both voluntary and involuntary human actions contribute to such change. A systems approach applies trans-disciplinary perspectives that encompass the methodologies, insights and practices of Earth systems science, philosophical speculation, ethics, radical economics, human social development, technology and (democratic) politics. This is the kind of ‘big picture’ thinking that the Schumacher Institute promotes and supports. We cannot stop the world and get off, but we can, hopefully, fashion a better world on which all living creatures can flourish peacefully and equitably. For this to occur, radical systemic change is essential.

The good news is that movements all over the world are developing, experimenting, and innovating all kinds of elements for the New Economy New Systems – we already have so many of the ideas and resources that we need to explore further in this book. Our capacity and motivation to share and learn from each other in this field has got a powerful boost from our common global experience of the pandemic – although this affects countries differently. We now must turn this human disaster into a success for humanity and the best way for this is through collaboration and mutual learning. Recent research by Rutger Bregman (2020)amongst many, demonstrates that we are wired to cooperate and therefore must revise our view of human nature and rethink how we organise our politics, social services, democracies, and businesses based on compassion.

Edited by John Blewitt, published by the Schumacher Institute, and with contributions from Inez Aponte, Hugh Atkinson, John Blewitt, Jenneth Parker, Kristin Vala Ragnarsdottir and Ian Roderick, New Economy, New Systems: Radical Responses to Our Sustainability Crises calls for “a radical re-set of the sustainability agenda to recognise the full extent of the changes needed and their urgency.”

What can Sustainable Development do for World Heritage Sites like Cromford Mills?

‘Why bother?’ – if you have never thought about sustainability in terms of heritage and education, or have only touched on it, there are several reasons to engage, or engage further:

– Public interest: Society is in a state of rapid change not least about rising energy costs and more generally the cost of living. There is evidence that, increasingly, young people are expecting educational and other institutions to address sustainability-related issues. Since 2010, around 80 per cent of university students have said that they want their institutions to be doing more on sustainability, and around 60 per cent want to learn more about it. And first-year students said that the environmental credentials of their university were important in selecting a place to study, and just under 40% believed that how seriously their university took global development issues was important. (https://www.sos-uk.org/research/sustainability-skills-survey )

As this report(https://www.historicenvironment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationId=c6f3e971-bd95-457c-a91d-aa77009aec69 ) sets out the existential threats of climate change is the fastest growing global risk to many of the World’s Heritage (WH) Sites. Many WH properties around the world are already experiencing significant negative impacts, damage, and degradation. These and many others are vulnerable to climate impacts, including those from rising temperatures, sea level rise, extreme precipitation, flooding, coastal erosion, drought, worsening wildfires, and human displacement, and will be at risk in the future. Recently observed trends are expected to continue and accelerate as climate change intensifies.

– Relevance: Sustainability and heritage education can be helpful by introducing immediate context (local, regional, global and ‘in the news’ relevance) to public lectures, renewal of and diversity in heritage related events, and better motivation among staff and volunteers. It can make a major contribution to professional development planning and building the kinds of values and attributes that UNESCO and other professional bodies currently aspire to.

– Community links: are a rich source of potential for both students and volunteers undertaking placements, work experience and voluntary activity, and links between schools and universities and the wider community including businesses or industry (local or national). The war in Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis has led to a renewed interest in Community Energy. This and the climate emergency has put a much greater policy priority on energy security and its impact on escalating energy prices and the cost of living. Consequently, the future of energy is renewable, zero-carbon, flexible, smart, and local. Community energy is also key to delivering an engaged citizenry who will participate actively in these changes and in how energy is generated and used. The importance of and diverse services provided by community energy have been recognised at the highest levels in government.

Here in Derbyshire, there is a growing collective vision of a stronger, better informed, and capable community movement well able to take advantage of their renewable energy resources and address their energy needs in ways that builds a more localised, democratic, and sustainable energy system.

Derbyshire Dales Community Energy Ltd (DDCE Ltd) is seeing growing evidence of interest and motivation of people and groups in community energy willing to contribute to averting climate catastrophe, coupled with a desire to bring about community benefit. We believe that failure to harness this capacity is to plan to fail to achieve our collective net zero targets.

Community energy grew exponentially, more than doubling every year between 2014 and 2017 but for the last 5 years policy changes have mostly thwarted the sector such that community energy now struggles to make a business case to get active at all. This is fast changing with the advent of new and innovative financial ideas which this business case develops further later.

Policy changes include the removal of ROCs, the Feed-in Tariff, Export Tariff, the Urban Community Energy Fund and Tax Relief, punitive business rates on roof-top solar, planning constraints on on-shore wind and increasing VAT on solar panels, batteries and ‘energy saving measures’ from 5% to 20%.

This threatens to waste a dynamic, community-embedded army of potential supporters who would be a vital ally if they were enabled to get active – which would produce multiple economic, environmental, social and community returns on investment that would far outweigh the upfront government investment. The Friends Provident Foundation, leaders, and pioneers in investing in social change, have said, “There is nothing that provides higher social and environmental returns on investment than community energy”

Ethics, reputation, and quality agenda: There is a growing interest in the links between the quality agenda and sustainability and heritage education, and the potential of it to raise performance and profile and help to develop innovation.

– Sustainability performance marketing and reputation: many organisations are more than ever before striving to improve their sustainability credentials and performance as measured by many different types of league tables-like the People and Planet Green League ( http:// peopleandplanet.org/green league) and environmental and social responsibility schemes such as Learning in Future Environments (http://www.thelifeindex.org.uk/).

– Employers’ views: There is growing evidence that employers are seeking employees with ‘green’ and ‘sustainability’ skills (BITC 2010) in relation to the low carbon economy, and uncertainty in socio-economic conditions. Green skills are the building blocks of the green transition and the key to unlocking the human capital that will power it. We need more opportunities for those with green skills. We must upskill workers who currently lack those skills. And we need to ensure green skills are hardwired into the skillset of future generations. Green-skilling is needed to fuel greener jobs.

– What is sustainable development? ‘Sustainable development’ describes the processes and activities that help ensure social, economic, and ecological wellbeing, at any focus – local, regional, global – where these three dimensions are seen as systemically interdependent and inseparable. By contrast, unsustainable development has a deleterious effect on at least one of these dimensions of wellbeing. Sustainability is at the heart of the Earth Charter Initiative, an international declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. Its mission is to: … promote the transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework that includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. (See: http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/) .

Most people in the world today have an immediate and intuitive sense of the urgent need to build a sustainable future. They may not be able to provide a precise definition of sustainability … but they clearly sense the danger and the need for informed action. World Heritage sites like Cromford Mills offer practical examples of low carbon industrial practice and can contribute to helping visitor interest in sustainability by providing tangible and symbolic and culturally important examples. Interest and activity in sustainable development is driven by rising concern in public life and wider society as people in all sectors become increasingly aware of the negative impact and threat of sustainability issues – such as climate change, economic vulnerability, social inequity, resource depletion and biodiversity loss in conditions of increasing global population – as well as of positive opportunities to develop more sustainable lifestyles and economic activities like the growing adoption of renewable energy for homes and businesses and in new forms of low carbon transport. A recent report by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) highlighted the ‘immense ‘and ‘untapped’ potential for cultural heritage to spur action on climate change and support a transition towards resilient and low carbon pathways (https://www.wmf.org/blog/cultural-heritage-changing-climate ).

Key point: In essence, sustainability is about trying to ensure a society whose economy and ecology are viable and durable now and long-term. Evidence suggests we may be on the cusp of very different patterns of social and economic organisation, in response to the end of cheap energy and the threat of climate change – necessarily towards low carbon, low waste, resource efficient, and possibly more localised economies. Such changes are increasingly reflected in government and business rhetoric. There is growing awareness that we need to rethink and re-evaluate many historical patterns of economic and social organisation if we are to assure the future.

Raising Public Engagement in Derbyshire

In January 2021, the United Nations Development Programme and University of Oxford’s Sociology Department published their survey report on what is described as the largest every public opinion survey on the climate and ecological emergency. Some 1.2 million citizens in 50 countries covering half the world’s population were interviewed. Globally, over two thirds of respondents said climate change is a global emergency requiring greater action to tackle the emergency. In the UK, this was the view of 81% of those surveyed.

In November 2021 IPSOS MORI Issues Index research revealed that worry about climate change is the biggest concern for the British public, with the issue recording its highest-ever score. Fieldwork was conducted from 5-11 November, covering the end of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Significantly, concern about Covid 19 came second behind climate change.

Despite overwhelming public consensus in the UK, this concern is not being translated into widespread direct public action or indirect activism and lobbying of authorities to tackle the climate and ecological emergency, either individually or collectively. This is although in April 2021, an IPSOS MORI UK survey found that only 3 in 10 respondents think the UK government had a clear plan to tackle the climate emergency.

This lack of public engagement exists despite an almost daily stream of scientifically evidenced authoritative reports appearing in news and other media highlighting the impacts of climate breakdown already. And a widely predicted alarmingly dystopian future the level of public action and activism appears very low, including in Derbyshire. Clearly, this is a challenge that World Heritage sites like Cromford Mills can address by making their role and purpose more directly related to the growing interest in sustainability.

Incontrovertible facts, data, statistics and predictions from the IPCC and other authorities evidencing the now imminent existential threat of the climate and ecological crisis have failed to shock many people into acting at an individual level or collective level.

Locally, this is clearly apparent. Since February in Derbyshire where despite the Just Stop Oil action group leafleting around 5,000 homes in each location at Belper, Matlock, Derby and Chesterfield inviting residents to attend public meetings to discuss the climate crisis and options for action, the largest audience so far was just 15 people, an attendance rate of around 1 resident in every 300 households not auger well for the future. Albeit the meetings convened by Matlock Town Council and DDCE Ltd on community energy have involved between 40 to 50 residents and directors of local businesses. In addition, we have held successful online meetings with U3A groups in Belper and Darley Dales.

Many high-profile commentators such as Jonathon Porritt contend that mobilizing public engagement on climate change requires an alternative to the narrative of fear and impending disaster. Public engagement and then mobilization requires the creation of a story or stories that paint a vision of a far better future for everyone and their families in a decarbonized future.

This positive framing of the climate issue enables citizens to see the potential upsides to themselves. Self-interest is a powerful motivator.

This potential of self-interest to catalyze climate action across a much wider population than the very small activist community could be triggered by applying the aggregate purchasing power of Derbyshire residents as consumers rather than as potential climate activists. Community energy supported solar power (solar PV) provides the potential to do this immediately and at scale. Other more technically complex and expensive renewable energy schemes like hydro, wind and geothermal-could come later.

CULTURAL HERITAGE in a CHANGING CLIMATE

March 21, 2022 | by Adam Markham

Climate change is the fastest growing threat to heritage sites across the world, and as such it was chosen as one of the themes for the 2022 Watch. As a member of the independent panel that gathered (remotely) over three days to make the final recommendation of sites for inclusion, I was impressed by the number of nominations we reviewed that had started to grapple with the complexity of the climate issues they face. Most that cited climate change were concerned with the current and future impacts of climate change, including coastal erosion and flooding, and extreme weather events and hotter environmental conditions, but several also addressed the role of cultural heritage as models for climate resilience.

Perhaps the 2022 Watch site under the most immediate threat is the Koagannu Mosques and Cemetery in the Maldives, where sea level rise threatens to inundate not just this important place but also much of the rest of this low-lying island nation in the Indian Ocean. Sea level rise is also the main concern for Hurst Castle in the United Kingdom, since erosion has already caused a major part of its wall to collapse. English Heritage, the national agency that manages Hurst Castle, hopes to use lessons learned there to help inform future management of other at-risk coastal properties.

Another site picked this year is Nuri in Sudan, an extraordinary collection of pyramids and other funerary monuments, the earliest of which date
from the eighth century BCE. Nuri sits in the Nile Valley and its underground chambers in particular are susceptible to flooding as the water table rises in response to climate change and poorly planned dams.

Understanding how to manage water resources in a rapidly changing climate is increasingly important as rainfall patterns change and extreme events, including droughts and storms, become more intense. There is much to learn from ancient water management systems, and two of this year’s World Monuments Watch sites may provide lessons that can be used for improving climate resilience in other places. In Nepal, the network of hitis (water taps and fountains) of the Kathmandu Valley have been supplying clean water to communities for more than 1000 years, and in addition to being a unique element of the region’s cultural heritage, they will be crucial to water security as the Himalayan climate continues to warm and glacier meltwaters change.

In Peru the Watch project for the Yanacancha-Huaquis Cultural Landscape aims to restore a pre- Incan water system consisting of small dams, canals, and agricultural terraces. These ancient water management technologies can tell stories of how people have adapted to climate changes in the past. In the archaeology and intangible heritage of the biologically unique islands of Yemen’s Soqotra archipelago, a World Heritage site in the Arabian Sea, there are also lessons to be learned about how communities have adapted to harsh climates and environments.

Although I have highlighted here a few of the Watch sites for which responding to climate change was a central element in the nomination, it is likely that almost all the monuments selected will be affected in some way. Whether the threat is from more frequent wildfires, coastal erosion, flooding, changed rainfall patterns, or impacts of changes in heat and humidity on building materials, understanding local climate impacts will be critical for the preservation and management of pretty much all monuments in the future. Cultural heritage itself is crucial for creating and maintaining climate resilience, and this too is reflected in the 2022 World Monuments Watch.

NO MORE FAIRY TALES

Research by Dr Denise Baden shows that stories which introduce climate change solutions in the context of an otherwise mainstream story are more likely to inspire greener behaviours than catastrophic tales of climate change. In her guest blog she introduces the latest Green Stories anthology No More Fairy Tales—Stories to Save Our Planet.

Blog by Denise Baden

No more fairy tales—Stories to Save Our Planet

As the climate crisis becomes ever more urgent, eco-anxiety continues to rise. While often hard to bear, a recent article by psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary suggests that anxiety can be beneficial to help us prepare for the worst. It can also lead to avoidance and denial—not irrational responses in the circumstances one might argue.

To further constructive engagement with and action on climate change, the Green Stories project is taking a solution-focussed storytelling approach. We run writing competitions and other projects to create a cultural body of work that presents positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like and how we can get there.

This year, Green Stories has been working with Herculean Climate Solutions and the Climate Fiction Writers League to compile an anthology of climate solutions wrapped in short stories. Published in time for COP 27, we are targeting a wide audience. The aim is to harness the eco-anxiety most of us feel (in varying degrees) towards constructive actions.

For each story we have prepared to a carefully curated information page that allows the reader to delve deeper on the details of the solutions presented in each narrative. We want to inspire readers to take action and make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Research from the last green stories publication, Habitat Man, provides solid evidence that stories aimed at a mainstream audience with green solutions embedded can affect behaviour. Findings revealed that 98% of readers adopted at least one of the green solutions mentioned. These included practices such as wildlife gardening, composting, and even changing their will to specify a natural burial.

We hope to gather similar learnings from a survey aimed at readers of the new anthology: No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet. This time, as well as asking if the stories changed readers’ behaviour, we are also interested to see if there were any effects on eco-anxiety. Our hope is that by tying issues directly to solutions, we can help reduce eco-anxiety by increasing a sense of agency.

The process of working with a range of climate experts and climate fiction authors to compile the anthology has also revealed much about the divergency of preferred approaches. The engineers love the big, bold, audacious solutions, the more impossible the better. ‘Glaciers melting? Well let’s just refreeze them! Need to build up seawalls and capture carbon? Just plant mangrove terraces.’ This outraged some nature lovers and ecologists who would rather we stop destroying mangroves in the first place (substitute forests, peat, kelp forests, seagrass etc.as needed). The nature lovers abhor the geo-engineering approach, while the engineers claim that we’re geo-engineering all the time anyway in the name of development, so why not do it on purpose and more thoughtfully? Nature lovers claim greenwash and the engineers and techies claim green hush! The social scientists query the point of pouring resources into carbon drawdown projects if we’re still consuming as fast as we can in the name of economic growth.

As editor it’s been a challenge reconciling all these viewpoints. Each story was written by a professional writer and then honed by climate experts. The stories I co-wrote myself as a social scientist, with Steve, a chemical engineer and Martin a comedy writer were an amusing but educational wrangle to determine which aspects got priority. With my social scientist hat on I was keen to ensure that the point about consumption got top position.

I would highly recommend CUSP readers to have a look at the collection. You might especially like The Assassin which imagines eight people in a citizens’ jury debating climate solutions all based on reducing consumption (repair, sharing economy, personal carbon allowances)—only, one of them is an assassin. Similarly, The Award Ceremony addresses the issue of how scriptwriters implicitly promote excessive consumption as an aspiration via characters who fly in private jets, drive fast cars and wear a different outfit each day. Both these stories also promote the idea of switching from the GDP to a well-being index as a way to change the conversation from what’s good for the economy to what’s good for us.

Judge for yourselves if we got it right. Please see the Habitat press website to buy a copy, and we’d love you to complete the survey at the end so we can return to share our findings on whether we were successful in translating eco-anxiety into positive action.

Link

The collection includes short stories from Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Sara Foster, Andrew Dana Hudson, Brian Burt and others. Further details about the anthology and accompanying material can be accessed via the Habitat Press website: https://habitatpress.com/no-more-fairy-tales/

IS UNESCO STILL THE CONSCIENCE OF HUMANITY ?

According to a recent and challenging publication there are growing concerns that UNESCO might be being influenced by the prevailing neoliberal ideology( as neuroliberal) to the extent that its distinctive role as the conscience of humanity is being compromised :

(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057925.2022.2129956)

As the paper argues UNESCO came into existence at a particularly prescient utopian moment bracketed by the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. As outlined in Article 1 of its Constitution, the organisation’s raison d’être is “ … to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the UN.”

It is widely regarded as the intellectual agency of the UN; UNESCO has provided an intellectual arena within which inter alia the human rights movement could be advanced. It also remains a major architect of international standard setting instruments on various problems confronting humanity, resulting in the diffusion of human rights norms and principles within its member states.

UNESCO’s global mandate post war remains the quest to advance a new form of “humanism.” Key pillars of this humanistic “tradition” or “ontology” include: a belief in universalism, a recognition of the “intrinsic” value of education and its role in realising human potential and human emancipation, dialogue and international cooperation, a commitment to equality and democracy and to the advocacy of “unity in diversity,” and a belief in human agency and human beings’ responsibility to contribute to the betterment of society. The agency’s role as the moral and intellectual “conscience of humanity”–was an expression attributed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at the ninth session of its general conference in New Delhi in 1956.

Author Audrey Bryan argues persuasively that contemporary appeals to the historical positioning of UNESCO as the arbiter of humanity fundamentally supports and reinforces the agency’s sense of identity, authenticity, and distinctiveness. However, in this paper she suggests that this designation is becoming increasingly untenable as the agency increasingly aligns itself with neoliberalism and digital pedagogies in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). According to the author these developments have resulted in the agency’s loss of “epistemic legitimacy” because it espouses fundamentally opposing ideological perspectives on the purpose and value of education -one which privileges the intrinsic value of education and its role in enhancing prospects for peace, social justice, and sustainable development, and another which promotes unfettered economic growth, marketisation and private/corporate interests.

The central tenet of this argument seems to rest on the fact that UNESCO has adopted what she terms the “neuroliberally-infected” conscious brain approach to the implementation of the SDGs-which is signified by the slogan SEL for SDGs. And this social-emotional learning(SEL)distorts the agency’s approach to social and global justice by using this as a so-called flag of convenience and hence compromising its role as the conscience of humanity.

Whilst, there may be substance to this well-argued opinion piece it seems to me as someone who has worked closely with the UK National Commission for UNESCO and its HQ in Paris these potential distortions do not detract from the significance and prominence of its voice in promoting ways of implementing the global goals.

Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world

The word has become a rhetorical weapon and an ideological political meme, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human. And its most recent admirer Liz Truss our much-reviled former PM became a celebrated maleficent proponent of this ideological myth. So, what are its origins and how did it become a manifestly disturbing party-political echo chamber in the 1980’s and 90’s? Set out below are a few chosen quotable sections from a Guardian piece in 2017 which opened my eyes to its seemingly appealing narrative along with some comparable but much more appealing thoughts on humanism as reflected in the life and writings of Gandhi:

In a world torn apart owing to ruthless domination and violence, the Gandhian principle of Ahimsa is ever more relevant. Some 20 million lives have been lost in war and insurrections since Gandhi’s passing. In a dismaying number of countries including his own, governments spend more for military purposes than for education and health care combined. Gandhi believed that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

His Ahimsa is not an isolated concept. It is very much intertwined with Satya or truth. No dictionary imbues ‘truth’ with the depth of meaning Gandhi gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate but what was just and therefore, right. The truth could not be obtained by untruthful or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one’s opponent. The power of Gandhian non-violence rests in being able to say,“ to show you that you are wrong, I punish myself.”

To describe this method, Gandhi coined the expression of Satyagraha, literally meaning “to hold on to the truth.” He disliked the English term ‘passive resistance’ because Satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive; you had to be prepared actively to suffer.

Gandhian philosophy does not restrain itself from state and statecraft. He also stipulated his thoughts on the economy. The 21st-century world is a world of consumerism and market capitalism. Capitals are concentrated in a few hands; laborers lack works and industries are capital intensive. He predicted such a scenario long ago and formulated a solution. He believed in the equality of every human being and an equal share of work and resources. He firmly vouched for small scale cottage and khadi industries so that everybody can work and contribute in his own way. The Gandhian economy is more of a self-reliant village-based economy. This model could solve most of the world’s problem of economy.

Gandhi’s idea on environment precedes the concept of Sustainable Development defined by the United Nations Environment Program in 1992. His idea that “nature has enough to satisfy everyone’s need, but not satisfy anybody’s greed” can be a guiding light to modern environmental activism. He famously said, “the earth, the air, the land, and the water are not an inheritance from our forefathers but on loan from our children. So, we must hand over to them at least as it was handed over to us.” The concept of Sustainability is very much in tune with this assertion of Gandhi.

“Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere, or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course, the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But “neoliberalism” indicates something more than a standard right-wing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world

Still peering through the lens, you see how, no less than the welfare state, the free market is a human invention. You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. You see the extent to which a language formerly confined to chalkboard simplifications describing commodity markets (competition, perfect information, rational behaviour) has been applied to all of society, until it has invaded the grit of our personal lives, and how the attitude of the salesman has become enmeshed in all modes of self-expression.

In short, “neoliberalism” is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.

The American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote to the originator Friedrich Hayek(he set out the idea in 1936) of what we now call neoliberalism , saying: “No human mind has ever understood the whole scheme of a society … At best a mind can understand its own version of the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to a man.”

It is a grand epistemological claim – that the market is a way of knowing, one that radically exceeds the capacity of any individual mind. Such a market is less a human contrivance, to be manipulated like any other, than a force to be studied and placated. Economics ceases to be a technique – as Keynes believed it to be – for achieving desirable social ends, such as growth or stable money. The only social end is the maintenance of the market itself. In its omniscience, the market constitutes the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the market converts them into prices, or objective facts.

Markets may be human facsimiles of natural systems, and like the universe itself, they may be authorless and valueless. But the application of Hayek’s Big Idea to every aspect of our lives negates what is most distinctive about us. That is, it assigns what is most human about human beings – our minds and our volition – to algorithms and markets, leaving us to mimic, zombie-like, the shrunken idealisations of economic models. Supersizing Hayek’s idea and radically upgrading the price system into a kind of social omniscience means radically downgrading the importance of our individual capacity to reason – our ability to provide and evaluate justifications for our actions and beliefs.

As a result, the public sphere – the space where we offer up reasons and contest the reasons of others – ceases to be a space for deliberation, and becomes a market in clicks, likes and retweets. The internet is personal preference magnified by algorithm; a pseudo-public space that echoes the voice already inside our head. Rather than a space of debate in which we make our way, as a society, toward consensus, now there is a mutual-affirmation apparatus banally referred to as a “marketplace of ideas”. What looks like something public and lucid is only an extension of our own pre-existing opinions, prejudices, and beliefs, while the authority of institutions and experts has been displaced by the aggregative logic of big data. When we access the world through a search engine, its results are ranked, as the founder of Google puts it, “recursively” – by an infinity of individual users functioning as a market, continuously and in real time.

The awesome utilities of digital technology aside, an earlier and more humanist tradition, which was dominant for centuries, had always distinguished between our tastes and preferences – the desires that find expression in the market – and our capacity for reflection on those preferences, which allows us to form and express values.

Hayek was Barry Goldwater’s favourite political philosopher and was said to be Ronald Reagan’s, too. Then there was Margaret Thatcher. To anyone who would listen, Thatcher lionised Hayek, promising to bring together his free-market philosophy with a revival of Victorian values: family, community, hard work.

Hayek met privately with Thatcher in 1975, at the very moment that she, having been named leader of the opposition in the UK, was preparing to bring his Big Idea off the shelf and into history. They huddled for 30 minutes on Lord North Street in London, at the Institute for Economic Affairs. Afterwards, Thatcher’s staff anxiously asked Hayek what he had thought. What could he say? For the first time in 40 years, power was mirroring back to Friedrich von Hayek his own cherished self-image, a man who might vanquish Keynes and remake the world.”

He replied: “She’s so beautiful.”

NEW REPORT LAUNCHED TODAY UK’s PROGRESS IN IMPLEMENTING THE GLOBAL GOALS

Launched today, the Global Compact’s Measuring Up 2.0 report reveals how the UK is performing on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their 169 Targets, the wider policy context, and the historical trends that affect us achieving the Goals.

The report highlights that the UK is only performing well on 17% of the Targets relevant to the domestic delivery of the Goals. Although there has been a marked shift in engagement across the business sector, the report suggests that both government and business are missing an opportunity to use the holistic framing of the SDGs to address systemic challenges.

It highlights the Government’s continued lack of progress towards meeting its commitments to deliver the SDGs and calls on Prime Minister Liz Truss to place responsibility for the SDGs in her own office to ensure they are fully integrated across government.

Download the report and register to join us at our upcoming event here.

Measuring Up 2.0

FESTIVAL OF THRIFT

The Festival of Thrift has been going for 10 years and, with little sign of the cost of living crisis easing, this year it seems more relevant than ever especially since convenience is the scourge of sustainability!

Recycled paper to be used for business cards and leaflets.Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian

It is the UK’s only national celebration of sustainable living and the core message remains the same, says the festival’s creative director, Stella Hall. “We have never lost that starting point which is thrift, make do and mend, keeping things rather than chucking them into landfill, fixing things rather than throwing them away, swapping things rather than putting them in the dump.”

Over two days there will be food, music, art, interactive entertainment and a blizzard of workshops on how to make your own wildflower bombs, beeswax food wraps or clay mindfulness totems.

The festival will take over the village of Kirkleatham, in the borough of Redcar, for two days. If visitors don’t wish to make things, there are free tips on basic budgeting by the Darlington Building Society and lessons in Japanese “boro”clothes-mending techniques.

A plan of the festival in the village of Kirkleatham. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian

Hall, one of the festival founders, recalls how tricky it was in the early days to find sponsors. “One company said they would like to get involved but said ‘we’ve talked to our staff and they think it’s a bit too hippyish’. But, of course, everyone came with their families and they had a fantastic time and so the next year the perception had changed.”

The organisers expected perhaps 5,000 visitors in the first year and about 25,000 people came. “We realised we had hit a zeitgeist. There were people wanting to learn old skills and share their knowledge and their stuff.”

Last year, with very little time to organise the event because of the pandemic, there were close to 50,000 visitors.

Do Universities Teach Critical Thinking?

This recent report from the OECD makes some important points especially on learning outcomes. Timely given the headlines in this week’s THES. A few paragraphs from the OECD report -Do Universities Teach Critical Thinking?: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/cc9fa6aa-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/cc9fa6aa-en

“Higher education contributes immensely to economic growth, social progress, and overall quality of life through the skills students and graduates acquire. Qualifications awarded by higher education institutions are valued because they are perceived to signal the skills required by labour markets and broader society. Employers use these qualifications as ways to identify and select job candidates who master essential and requisite skills. Higher education is trusted by employers and society to the extent that there is an equilibrium between skills supply and demand.

However, there are signs that the skills supply of graduates no longer matches skills demand in the labour market. Quantitative qualifications mismatch is turning into a severe issue in many countries, compromising productivity, growth, and the continued increase in prosperity. Even more significant is the qualitative mismatch between the skills demand generated by the economic and social reality in labour markets and societies, and the supply of skills by higher education institutions. Employers and economic organisations express with increasingly louder voices that they are no longer confident that graduates have acquired the skills needed for the 21st-century workplace generic skills such as problem solving, communication, creativity, and critical thinking.

Whether perceived or real, skills mismatch poses a serious risk to the trustworthiness of higher education. What is needed is more transparency about the skills students acquire. Unfortunately, this has not been a strength of most higher education systems. Transparency tools such as international rankings are quite good at capturing research-related measures or input measures in education quality but do not provide any insights into students’ actual learning outcomes. The few available measures, for example, provided by the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), are far from sufficient and invigorate the demand for more and better metrics.”

“There’s no way that any one specific assessment can measure all of critical thinking,” acknowledged Doris Zahner, CAE’s chief academic officer and the co-editor of the new report.

“What we do really well is measure a specific, well-defined component of critical thinking: namely, analytical reasoning and evaluation and problem-solving,” she said.

“That includes data literacy, understanding quantitative information, being able to gather information from various sources and then making a decision based on this and crafting an answer that supports your argument and refutes the opposite – that’s what the assessment does.”

The results of the tests, published by the OECD on 30 August in the book Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically? are stark: on average, only 45 per cent of tested university students were proficient in critical thinking, while one in five demonstrated only “emerging” talent in this area.

What’s more, the “learning gain” of students between the start and the end of their courses was found to be small on average, while there were big discrepancies between courses, with those studying fields closely aligned to real-world occupations – such as business, agriculture, and health – scoring the worst.

What is ‘transparent solar energy’?

Transparent solar is a cutting-edge technology that gathers and uses light energy through windows or any glass surface, regardless of the angle. It has the potential to be a game-changer in terms of broadening the scope of solar.

In terms of engineering, researchers have created several means of transparent solar technology. Most generally though, most of them function more as a transparent solar concentrator, which means they are made to absorb specific UV and infrared light wavelengths that aren’t visible to the naked eye and transform them into energy capable of powering electronics.

This technology is also called photovoltaic glass, and it’s manufactured to provide a ranging level of transparency. In 2014, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) developed an entirely transparent solar concentrator, which could convert almost any glass sheet or window into a PV cell.

And by 2020, scientists in the United States and Europe have achieved 100 percent transparency for solar glass, bringing us one step closer to the goal of a sustainable future that does not rely on the grid or the fossil fuel industry.

See-through solar panels are incredibly important as, in modern society, glass is practically everywhere. Ranging from the screen of your phone to skyscrapers, it’s estimated that there are 5 to 7 billion square meters of glass surfaces in the United States. Imagine the sheer amounts of electricity that could be generated if we could tap into that power.

With that in mind, it should also be noted that conventional solar panels necessitate a wide setup area as well as a significant initial cost. Because of these constraints, it is difficult to install them in metropolitan locations. Transparent solar panels, on the other hand, can be installed in these areas, paving the way for net-zero energy buildings and help cities meet climate goals and targets.

Transparent solar technologies are already being installed in a number of high profile locations around the world.

For example, the Copenhagen International School’s design utilizes 12,000 hued but clear solar panels all over the building, producing 200 MWh of energy annually — that’s apparently more than half of the energy the building consumes.

Last year, the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building on the campus of Michigan State University was upgraded with the installation of 100-square-feet transparent solar glass panels which were situated above the building’s entryway. They will generate enough electricity to power the lighting in its atrium.

However, there are some obstacles standing in the way. Before the technology can be scaled up, scientists need to enhance its efficiency, as there is an efficiency/transparency trade off. The more transparent the panel is, the less efficient it is, which is why see-through panels are not expected to exceed or replace the standard solar panels we’ve grown accustomed to. Either way, the technology could potentially help humanity get to a truly sustainable and greener future faster.