Disclaimer: I am an ordinary member of the Scottish Green Party and the Green Party of England and Wales, and though I'm blogging about Green policy, I'm writing on my own behalf, not the behalf of either party.
I’m fascinated by the image of the economy as an immeasurably complex and interconnected series of domino effects. It’s a huge, living system of cause and effect. Billions of actors perform incalculable numbers of individual actions all the time, and each action and reaction influences the whole in some way.
This is the butterfly effect on a dizzying scale.
We live or die based on the health of this vast network of interactions. This is true at a global level - no one is unaffected. Everything and everyone is interconnected to a greater or lesser degree, and the vast systems that arise from this interconnectedness require management. In a sense, that management is in the hands of all of us, though in practical terms, it’s the job of governments to guide and improve the real-world outcomes that arise from these complex systems.
After reading Grace Blakeley’s Vulture Capitalism, I understand that the economy as it exists today is not the inevitable result of an organic process. Economic activity between people and nations exists within a tangible framework of regulation and convention. Interactions between the legislative power of government and the wide-ranging and flexible influence of concentrated capital shape that framework, and it’s not hard to see that the economic, social, and environmental outcomes of the economic status quo are unacceptably bad for the majority of people. We - and I mean “we” in the broadest and most inclusive sense - can do much, much better.
Green economic policies are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in the coming years. Economic policies will be a key part of electoral success, and they will also be a key part of success in government. A rock-solid Green economics helps people who need it on day one, then sets about systematically addressing the root causes of economic insecurity, building resilience and prosperity in the long term.
That long-term view is hugely important. The economic status quo is responsible for vast harms, and even if we can change course, the scars of those harms will be with us for generations to come. Green policy is holistic policy, interconnected policy, policy that embraces and acknowledges the complexity and scale of the economics we all rely on. Green economics seeks to address current problems and stop future harms, and it also seeks to address the harms that have been caused, and heal those scars.
The successful implementation of Green economic policy does not involve surprises, dramatic actions, or sweeping, radical changes. Rather, a successful Green economic policy platform will be clearly communicated, forensically detailed, carefully costed, and demonstrably resilient; a pathway to short-term relief of suffering and to long-term, sustained economic prosperity, developed in the open, democratically, and in partnership with as many stakeholders as possible.
Any economic policy that deprioritises the short-term interests of private capital will be framed by critics as anarchic, unrealistic, and likely to precipitate market shocks. In reality, the implementation of a detailed, well-planned, and carefully costed Green economic policy platform will create the prosperity and growth needed for economic stability by centring the wellbeing of the population, investment in infrastructure, a just transition, and long-term resilience.