Counsel for Getting There - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 166

to move away from negatives. Trying to move away from a negative pre-
cludes people from saying what they really mean because they are focused
on what they do not want . As long as people express what they do not want,
it is virtually impossible to figure out what they do want .
To facilitate community visioning, therefore, let us construct an example
that involves a principle that is tacitly present in much that we have said,
but which needs to be reinforced: Bottom-up solutions are always preferable to
top-down control. Moreover, the cumulative effect of like-minded, little ideas
is to culminate in a big (systemic) idea, and big ideas are sometimes necessary
to promote big change . In an industrial, action-oriented culture such as ours,
many authors have insightful and erudite analyses of a problem of one type
or another. Certainly, there are many topics and articles on the problems of
the economy or the environment. But, feeling an unspoken challenge on the
part of the reader to present viable, systemic solutions, the author falls into a
common trap in response to the perceived: “I see the problem. What can we
do about it?” Then, more often out of habitual, symptomatic thinking than
anything else, the authors almost invariably produce a litany of top-down,
symptomatic measures, such as the following:
• Increase federal infrastructure spending
• Sign the Global Warming treaty
• Extend unemployment benefits
• Pass cap-and-trade legislation
• Fund national, high-speed rail
• Ban offshore drilling
Do not get us wrong. These may or may not be good ideas. Nevertheless,
such recommendations (or their opposite), however well argued and
defended, encourage people to proceed within the conventional mind-
set. The approach does not facilitate the kind of thinking outside the box
that we have attempted to promote with this work. In fact, we suspect
that many excellent works, based on outstanding research, simply join
the existing top-down debates on one side or another of important issues,
and ultimately serve merely to harden existing opinions and do noth-
ing to diminish existing political and cultural conflict, as the following
example elaborates.
Example: The Minimum Wage
Suppose we observe that a great many low- and moderate-income people
are working very hard in our system for extremely low wages and are thus
barely making ends meet, if that. They can sometimes scarcely pay the rent