Growth-based, capitalist economies propped up by fossil fuels strive for higher productivity at the expense of people and the planet we rely on

Employees at retailer Amazon are being stressed to their limits in the name of productivity, reports the New York Times. Meanwhile, in the UK the threat of strikes on the London Underground has hung over the capital this summer. In the face of funding cuts, management is trying to get more from less, extending the tube service by introducing night trains while making cuts to ticket office staff. Fearing a combination of a less safe network due to reduced staff at stations and more anti-social shifts for train drivers, a dispute is raging between unions and management.

There are usually as many different opinions in economics as there are economists. But, on the issue of raising productivity - getting more output from each worker – there is seeming consensus. It’s usually considered an inarguable objective alongside other political apple pie issues like tackling crime, terrorism, creating jobs and increasingly (thankfully) climate change. However, as the Amazon case and the tube strikes demonstrate, tensions emerge when you try to get more from less.

Productivity versus planetary boundaries

Beyond questions about the human sustainability of the relentless strive for increased productivity, there is a bigger challenge suggesting we may need to turn our ideas upside down. To share the benefits of employment equitably in a carbon and resource constrained world we may need more people working, probably with shorter working weeks, but producing less “stuff”.

Pushing Earth beyond its natural limits - in pictures Read more

Why should that be? In growth-based, profit-driven, capitalist economies, investors demand more from less to generate returns. For example, if a factory employing ten people produces 100 widgets in one year, the following year they might expect the same number of employees to produce 108 widgets, or 115, or 120, depending on the return demanded by the investor. Costs are kept stable by raising productivity, with each worker producing a bit more. It seems like a positive, uncontroversial aim.

But what if you come up against the ecological limits of planetary boundaries? That’s already happening in our steadily growing global economy, with the world entering ecological overshoot in 2015 six days earlier than last year.

If rising production and consumption – making more widgets – is not compatible with safe preservation of the natural world, producing 100 widgets has to be the work of only nine people, then eight, and so on to still get the expected return on investment.

In this case, an obsession with conventional productivity coupled with environmental constraints leads to unemployment if nothing else changes. Is productivity a rock on which the green, circular economy founders? How does it answer the challenge as we try simultaneously to lower resource consumption, create meaningful work and raise wellbeing?

Transition to a low carbon economy

In many areas of life, the opposite of typical arguments for productivity apply. In our healthcare services, having more professionals look after fewer patients leads to a better, more productive service in terms of successful outcomes – just ask any overstretched nurse or carer. Similarly in education, if a teacher with a class of 30 was asked increase her class size to 40, then 50 or more, you wouldn’t expect a better quality of education.

Small scale hydropower can provide stream of new jobs to rural regions Read more

Might the same be true for many other sectors as we transition to a low carbon, low material economy? The rise in personal services in wealthier economies – everything from personal trainers to dog walkers, cleaners and gardeners – has a similar dynamic to health and education in that there is an optimum beyond which the quality of the services declines. The classic green economic mantra of “repair, reduce, reuse, recycle” also conjures a more hands-on vision of an economy.

A circular, more service-based economy centred on maintenance and repair as opposed to mass manufacture and disposal is more employment rich, or “labour intensive” as economists put it, requiring an economy where more people are employed for every pound spent. The International Labour Organisation expects a huge growth in the global green collar workforce. The philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford, author of The Case for Working With Your Hands, extends this argument by pointing to the multiple benefits of doing more with our own hands, making and repairing where practicable like a legion of new, home-based, slow producers.

There are other powerful, potentially unavoidable new imperatives that could invert expectations of productivity. Petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimates that the boost to economic productivity given by our oil-based energy system is equivalent to a workforce of 22 billion carbon slaves. That means the current level of global economic output is buoyed by the use of fossil fuels which cannot continue due to climate change, and which ultimately cannot last either. Take the fossil fuels away and in some areas it will be human hands that catch the falling economy.



That’s starkly true in the business of putting food on our tables where productivity is an obsession and oil-based mechanisation has dramatically raised it. The proportion of the UK population involved in farming is at a historic low. But a shift to a much less fossil-fuel dependent agriculture would almost inevitably see that reverse with more extensive rather than intensive production. The author and founder of the Campaign for Real Farming, Colin Tudge, argues for a new agrarianism and transition to a more enlightened agriculture with a rural revival, re-skilling and a growth in the number of people working in farming, whether directly, or more part time and seasonally.

This endless quest for growth will see Greece self-destruct Read more

The pendulum has swung dramatically far away from most people having anything to do with growing and preparing their own food. But the rise in urban farming and growing, demand for allotment spaces and success of small farm producers suggests potential, if not for a full-scale “back to the land” movement, then certainly for a change in this trend.

Redefine productivity to mean producing the best possible outcome for the workforce and the society and environment around them, and instead of a bleak future of working longer, harder and later in life, real productivity might come to mean less really is is more.

