Recommended Reading and Viewing
References have been divided into the three categories shown in green clickable headings below: sustainability, sufficiency, and innovation. While items in these categories have some overlap, the separation has been made to facilitate research. You can also access these pages by clicking on the green headings below or passing your mouse over the Read and View heading in the menu bar and clicking on the desired page.
Economic, social, political and ecological sustainability is the objective we propose for economic activity. To achieve sustainability, we need a change in values away from more is better towards enough for all. Analysis of how to promote this value change is important for building political support for UBI and other public policies promoting sufficiency for sustainability. Ever since the marginalist revolution in economics, the focus has been on maximization of output rather than sufficiency and sustainability. Now concepts like degrowth and a steady-state economy are attracting more attention, especially from ecological economists. But how do we move these concepts into mainstream economic thinking?
Providing sufficient goods and services to meet the basic needs of all is a question of social justice but also a means to promote social and political conditions necessary to attain ecological sustainability while preserving and enhancing democratic institutions. Universal/Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is a public policy seen by many analysts at all points on the political spectrum as necessary to assure economic, social, and political sustainability. UBI also makes it possible to achieve the sufficiency objective by separating a basic income from the need to work as robotization and artificial intelligence advance at exponential rates and threaten to destroy jobs faster than they create new ones. In additional to UBI, other public policies, especially fiscal policies, are necessary to meet the sufficiency objective, finance UBI, and restrain over-consumption.
Innovation, especially innovation taking advantage of exponential technologies advancing at the pace of Moore's and related laws, can be harnessed to achieve sufficiency and sustainability objectives, though they may also pose threats unless guided by appropriate incentives and value change. Examples of such technologies are clean and renewable sources of energy (e.t. wind and solar power), robotization, artificial intelligence and information and communications technologies that underlie rapid advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. In principle such technologies easing the constraints on production of goods and services without exceeding ecological constraints. Others debate this. This is a controversial field, but one worthy of careful analysis.
You can also read posts from associates made through 14/07/2017 on our S4S Forum. As of 15/07/2017 the Sufficiency4Sustainability Forum is a group on LinkedIn. Click "Forum"below to go there.