Our Current Economic Path Leads to Disaster

We invent economic systems to facilitate production and distribution of goods, services and wealth, and to maintain societal stability. We’ve experimented with different forms over the course of human history, with mixed results.

Our current system — a form of hyper-consumer capitalism — evolved alongside the coal, oil and gas and automobile industries, with wars and an infrastructure-building boom topping up the coffers, especially in the United States and Canada.

These enterprises exemplify a rapacious form of capitalism: manufacture big, inefficient cars that wastefully burn lots of processed oil, and create car-centric cities, suburbs and infrastructure so polluting auto and fossil fuel industries can rake in enormous profits and the economy can keep growing. It’s not about efficiency, safety or better living; it’s about profit!

Even when we recognize that these industries have fuelled air, water and land contamination, global heating and wealth inequality, we get hypnotized into thinking this suicidal course is “normal” or “inevitable,” thanks to a system in which the obscenely rich can buy politicians and media voices and suppress dissent.

But people around the world are showing that better economic systems exist. From Nanaimo, British Columbia, to Tomelilla, Sweden, from Mexico City to Barcelona to Amsterdam, cities are integrating “doughnut economics” and “circular economy” principles into financial planning and decision-making.