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How much money is enough? | Vicki Robin

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Vicki Robin: We talk about the old roadmap for money, and the old roadmap was born really out of the industrial revolution.
It was born out of the sense of the “wild west,” of “anything is possible,” of manifest destiny, of American exceptionalism, whatever you want to say.
Or you can go back even further to capitalism itself. But the roadmap is: “growth is good, more is better, whoever dies with the most toys wins.”
It’s a materialist roadmap, and the part of the roadmap is not only that; it’s an empty world.
“Uh oh, there were people here before the white people came. And, you know animals. There was already a living mature society—“ “No, no, no. It was empty.”
And then the other part of it is that one of the essential ingredients of it that still people, even if intellectually they understand it they do not get it, is that in that roadmap the economy can grow forever and the Earth is like just sort of a toy chest. You just keep reaching in there and pulling out resources, reaching in and pulling out resources. So the economy can grow infinitely because the Earth is an infinite cornucopia of resources.
The fact of the matter is that the economy is a fabrication, our economy is a fabrication, a set of rules inside a finite planet.
There’s a way to measure. There’s a way to measure the human impact, the impact of human consumption on the Earth. It’s called the ecological footprint, and they can measure every little scintilla of, you know, my watch and my eyeglass. Everything I have, everything we sit in, everything we walk around on, they can measure that in terms of the amount of the planet it took to develop that.
So we have measured the amount of planet we have and humans are consuming more than the amount of planet we have every year (that can be regenerated) ever since 1986.
That, to me, that data about overshoot has been a central feature of my life. When I learned that, it was just sort of one of those things that’s obvious, like, “certainly we want to change.”
So the old roadmap this idea that the Earth is a set of infinite resources, and the economy can harvest those resources every which way from Sunday in order to produce economic growth.
That’s fundamental and then it trickles down to the human as: “More is better.”
And part of that is as the economy grew, as industrialization permitted more products to be produced with less human labor there was a sort of a peaking out of consumption around the 1920s and it became a problem, like what are we going to do?
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