Macroeconomics—Is It Still Helpful in an Age of Scarcity? - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 113

We offer a caution, as the Capitalist Scenario implies this will, in all likeli-
hood, result in lower salaries to workers. After all, they are the superabun-
dant resource. But we have already pushed the world past any distributional
option for equitable “high salary/high consumption” by allowing the human
population to dramatically exceed any reasonable planetary carrying capac-
ity. This has precluded any alternative involving an average, worldwide stan-
dard of living that is anything close to the current U.S. or European levels.
We have not obeyed nature's biophysical principles, and nature bats last.
People, as a species, will need to learn to live with less, but our planetary
home will survive.
This seemingly harsh set of ideas offers a platform for launching us into
the concluding part of this topic. Might the end of the consumer society be a
happier world? We think that it can, provided we make adjustments in our
thinking that might support appropriate changes in the dominant paradigm.
Endnotes
1. Neo-conservative. www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Neo-conservative
(accessed on December 11, 2010).
2. Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . Metropolitan
Books, New York. 2007.
3. John Perkins. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man . Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco,
CA. 2004.