Sat, Mar 24, 2012 page8

• [ LETTER ]

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  Tigers turn into Hermes bags

  When your grandchildren ask one day: “What happened to all the tigers and orangutans?” you can answer them: “They were turned into Hermes bags and Lamborghinis.” According to an illuminating article on the super-rich of Indonesia, acquisition of such vacuous status symbols by greedy people running mining and oil palm businesses is financed through the destruction of Indonesia’s few remaining rainforests (“Indonesia’s unbalanced commodities boom fuels discontent,” March 17, page 9). Bummer. That’s where the tigers and orangutans live, but when Hermes brings out that new US$50,000 sky-blue handbag, it instantly becomes a “must-have” item because so-and-so on the social ladder of status already has one.

  While I do not want to delve into the emotionally stunted lives of people who acquire Hermes bag after Hermes bag, I want to make the point that if we want to save any of the commons (global atmosphere or biodiversity, or even our own local forests or city parks in Taiwan), we must realize that an economic model based solely on individual choices runs counter to society’s need for sustainable activity. One example is climate change, which is “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen,” according to the World Bank’s Nicholas Stern (www.econlib.org/library/Topics/College/marketfailures.html). Well, actually, our entire economic system is a market failure because it does not include the external costs of resource extraction and pollution.

  In his article “Nature’s role in sustaining economic development,” the economist Partha Dasgupta demonstrates how much of so-called economic growth is not based on improving quality of life, but on resource extraction and pollution, which harms other people somewhere further down the line. The total wealth of many of the world’s poorest nations is actually declining because of the destruction of their natural capital (eg, rainforests).

  So shall we go on rewarding the rainforest destroyers? Paul Hawken in The Ecology of Commerce proposes an entirely different economic model. Instead of rewarding those who destroy the atmosphere or the rainforest (and, in effect, steal from the less powerful and future generations), our economic reward system should be rebuilt to reward preservation, sustainability and long-term investment. Taxes would be levied not against “goods,” such as earnings or investments, but against “bads,” such as resource extraction and pollution. In a free-market system regulated by “green” taxes, businesses would quickly adopt sustainable practices and the most sustainable products would win out. Naturally, economic inequality is toxic to long-term sustainability, because poor people cannot afford such “green” taxes, while rich people keep buying too many Hermes bags.

  All this has been known for decades, as philosophers, economists and ecologists have laid out the framework for a truly sustainable society.

  However, in a last gasp of economic insanity, we seem to be hell-bent to convert whatever natural beauty is left in this world into pointless status symbols for the super-rich, thanks to all those economists who are still stuck in the world of two centuries ago, when the free market was surrounded by unlimited resources.

  Flora Faun

  Taipei
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