Being Is Enough: Collective Self-Help for a Sustainable World

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Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Editorial Reviews Review [Continuing] the excellent work begun in [his book] Insatiable is Not Sustainable , this time focusing on the stress we cause ourselves and the world around us by accepting a "have all you can have" and "be all you can be" culture…Brown brings fresh insights…and proposes specific reforms needed to democratize our economy. Professor Brown has been teaching courses in macro and microeconomics and comparative economic systems at NAU for twenty years after having completed his Ph.

Product details File Size: March 21, Sold by: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 1 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Doug Brown is the only economics book that I finished reading in only two days.

Once picked up, it's a difficult book to put down. Brown writes in an engaging non-technical style. So, by tackling the problem of an insatiable "be all you can be" culture from an economic perspective, Brown is taking the bull by the horns. He shows that solutions can be compatible with economic self-interest, which in our civilization, represents "the bottom line".

However, we will have to revolutionize our understanding of self-interest along sustainable lines. For ecologists, sociologists, activists, and victims of globalization who oppose the economic system's inherent injustices will only achieve marginal success until they can demonstrate that the most reasonable economic philosophy necessitates a change in the system's core perception around sustainability.

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Collective Self-Help for a Sustainable World - by Doug Brown Doug Brown continues the excellent work begun in Insatiable Is Not Sustainable, this time focusing on the stress we cause ourselves and the world around us by accepting a "have all you can have" and "be all you can be" culture.

Writing with extraordinary simplicity, economics professor Brown brings fresh insights to our situation, and proposes specific reforms needed to democratize our economy. Although these reforms would doubtless be opposed just as unionization and Social Security were , we can be assured that "Profits are not going to go away" as a result of these reforms.

What needs to happen, and can happen, is that these mechanism of capitalism have to be reshaped and redirected to serve new goals--sustainability and social justice, sufficiency and simplicity, tranquility and equality. The radical reforms will do this--on one condition. A cultural revolution must take place--changed minds. If we can make that happen, the rest will be easy.

Such is not the case for The Tipping Point, which has been a bestseller for four years now. I recommend it because it affirms in ways I could not have done the power of incremental change. Realistically speaking, most of us are limited to doing "little things," and many are disheartened by this. Exotic and Unseen Costa Rica - by Jack Ewing, with a foreword by Daniel Quinn If you enjoy having arcane and even possibly useful information especially about exotic wildlife , then Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate is a must read for you.

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Being Is Enough: Collective Self-Help for a Sustainable World

Troubled by bats in the attic that simply can't be kept out? Install a boa constrictor. GPGs thus tend to suffer from two types of failure. They suffer from market failure, which means that individuals whether single persons, families or firms are reluctant to voluntarily contribute their own money towards public goods. And they suffer from state failure, which means that at the international levelstates are motivated by particularism or national interests, which are semi-private interests.

States are especially reluctant to enter into any obligation requiring them to make major, long-term financial commitments. Most international agreements therefore typically remain silent on how to meet the financial implications of their recommendations. And there are many such cases, because we live in a world of growing disparity and inequity. For example, countries whose populations still have low life expectancy might consider reducing health challenges a higher priority than combating climate change.

Thus, the GPGs we encounter during crises typically have significant distributional problems. They tempt states to shirk responsibility and not to contribute their fair share. By contrast, well-provided GPGs tend to be those with a relatively even spread of net benefits.

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Examples are the global transport and communication networks. Public goods of this type, whether national, regional or global, are also often referred to as goods in the public interest. But the lack of effective multilateralism may not only reflect international collective action problems like easy riding.

GPGs are not, or at least not merely, foreign affairs, that is, matters beyond national borders. They are global affairs, matters that straddle national borders, that are 'out there' as well as 'in here'.

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Addressing them might need the involvement not only of foreign affairs ministries but also that of other government entities, including sector or technical ministries such as agriculture, defence, the environment, health, finance or trade. GPGs are not merely foreign aid or development assistance issues either, matters exclusively dealt with by aid agencies. Rather, they concern industrial and developing countries, as well as emerging economies. Effectively responding to GPGs therefore often requires cooperation among several sector ministries plus the foreign affairs ministry and the aid agency.

Communicable disease control, for example, could call for the involvement of health officials at different levels of government, as well as government entities concerned with international trade, intellectual property rights and foreign aid, not to mention the possible need to forge public-private partnerships. Though many policy issues today have a global dimension, global affairs departments are not yet a common feature, neither in sector ministries nor in foreign affairs ministries. So it is not surprising that different government entities can be found quibbling about which ministry should lead a government's international negotiating team or take primary responsibility for following up on international commitments.

Money is often a major point of contention. Which government entity should pay for the costs involved?

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Easy riding between national ministries thus adds to states' easy riding internationally. The growing challenge of providing GPGs occurs at a time when international patterns of decision making are also changing due to the rise of new or re-emerging economic and political powers like Brazil, China, India and South Africa.

Conventional powerhouses like the Group of Eight are progressively losing clout. They find it increasingly difficult to define global norms and rules in line with their interests. Even the less advanced developing countries now claim a more effective say in how to address global challenges, because all too often they have been adversely affected by how GPGs were, or were not, provided. As a result, important global issues, especially those deemed important by the major powers, are now being increasingly discussed either bilaterally, in consultations between China and the United States, for example, or in more informal groups at the levels of heads of state or government, like the Six-party Talks on North Korea and the Group of Twenty G meetings.

Although the G includes the major emerging markets, it nevertheless is a forum where the conventional powers can feel more confident that their views will count — more so than in larger multilateral bodies, like the UN. Efficacy is often cited as a reason for using such bilateral and limited multilateral approaches. Smaller groups are more efficient at making decisions and correcting problems, so the reasoning goes, especially if they include economically and politically powerful nations that have the resources to cost-share global initiatives.

As a result, however, the global mismatch between stakeholders and decision makers has been widening. So far, the G has focused only on financial and economic issues, and has done so with relatively limited success. And again the focus has mainly been on those issues that interest industrial countries. Other negotiations on global challenges are limping along.

Just think of the Doha Development Round of multilateral trade negotiations. Or imagine where the issue of climate change would stand if civil society advocacy had not so actively pressured states and markets. Not surprisingly, complex GPGs like climate stability, which have important distributional consequences, are among the issues that suffer most. Old policy approaches and instruments have lost their effectiveness and new ones are not yet firmly in place.

Moreover, international finance has more powerful and vocal constituencies than issues like global climate change and poverty reduction. Otherwise why would the current financial and economic crisis receive such extensive attention from the G, as opposed to global climate change, which is likely to have an impact on the survival of this planet as we know it?

Much of the current debate on global governance is aimed at the international level, most notably at reforming multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. These organizations have good reasons to reform as well. But international reform efforts may not go far enough to generate the necessary changes if they are not first made at the national level.

The lesson we need to learn is that in terms of GPG provision, state behaviour often facilitates and compounds market failure. Therefore, the key to less crisis-prone globalization is to strengthen states' willingness to engage in transborder cooperation.

Being is enough : collective self-help for a sustainable world - University of Missouri-Kansas City

They need to recognize that many GPGs cannot be efficiently and effectively provided by any one nation alone, however powerful it may be. Five kinds of reforms are needed to break the current spiral of global crises. The first three deal with correcting state free riding, the fourth seeks to disentangle the current conflation of foreign affairs, aid and GPGs at the national level, and the fifth addresses how international decision making can better reflect actual global power relations.

Most importantly perhaps, a principle of responsible sovereignty needs to be established. It is already being discussed in a UN context. If states fail to assume this responsibility, the international community should intervene and help protect deprived citizens see also the interview in issue 19 of The Broker with Doris Mpoumou, director of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect ;and see the blog on The Broker website about the responsibility to protect. States' external responsibility is to ensure that other nations are not being unduly harmed by spillovers from their jurisdiction that they could reasonably be expected to internalize.

But how can states and governments ever be persuaded to accept such a principle? Viewing sovereignty as a special brand of freedom might help. Notions of freedom emphasize the importance of respecting other people's freedom when pursuing one's own. Sovereignty can be seen as a nation's freedom to pursue its policy concerns without external interference. So it can be argued that nations would strengthen, not weaken, their sovereignty by respecting the sovereignty of others and refraining from beggar-thy-neighbour policies.

The notion of responsible sovereignty implies a remodelling of the role of the state. States would need to act more as intermediaries between external and domestic policy demands, and less like conventional Westphalian nation states. They would need to take the outside world into account when formulating national policies and defining national interests.

Many states have already begun to adjust their behaviour accordingly, often in response to emerging opportunities, such as becoming members of the WTO or obtaining a good sovereign credit rating. Alignment also happens in response to a global exigency like global warming or an international terrorist attack. The change in the role of the state has been incremental and, under pressure, often unintentional and barely noticeable. The electorate therefore often wonders who policy makers actually represent.

Are politicians really listening to them or more to actors on the international market, global civil society or other, perhaps more influential, nations? But more balanced globalization is hardly conceivable without states performing this role of mediation between national and external concerns. This means that a major burden of adjustment falls on the general public, the electorate.

They must vote for politicians ready to play the required modern role of an intermediary and engage in international cooperation in enlightened national self-interest. If states define their national self-interest — in the case of GPGs — from a purely national viewpoint and pursue it vigorously, international negotiations tend to break down. International cooperation has to be voluntary and has to benefit all concerned parties. Studies on underprovided GPGs have shown that prolonged inaction on global challenges is often much more expensive than prompt corrective action based on mutually beneficial international bargains.

The net benefits of decisively dealing with a crisis are often quite significant, not only for the world at large but for individual countries or groups of countries as well. Put differently, the best way of pursuing national self-interest in terms of GPG provision is through international cooperation based on fair win-win strategies.

The fourth change concerns differentiating between foreign affairs, foreign aid and GPG provision, because conflating them may hamper the effectiveness of all of them. Foreign affairs strategies tend to be driven by power politics and geopolitical interests. This can also be said of foreign aid, although according to official statements, development assistance is motivated by altruism and global equity concerns.

Yet like the provision of pure national public goods, GPG provision usually takes into account allocative efficiency, or how best to enhance national well-being with limited resources. GPGs bring more economics into the international cooperation realm. In their case, national engagement in international cooperation is motivated mainly by self-interest.

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