Societal change is an unavoidable constant. The totality of humans, other species, and physical earth systems constitute a single economy (the Inclusive World Economy) that is continuously evolving. This global process of change is driven by the constant flow of energy from the sun. Energy must do what it does: change the materials it interacts with and change the forms in which it presents itself. Materials must do what they do: interact with the flows of energy, be changed, and facilitate the transformation of energy forms into different energy forms. As part of this enormous configuration of processes I call the Inclusive World Economy, the world of work must continuously become different and we must become different in dynamic association with this process — but not necessarily in the ways or at the speed we expect or want.
We humans are among the vast array of material instruments through which the flow of solar energy drives change. Work is the primary way in which we are instruments of change. In the last several centuries we have vastly expanded and continue to expand the human role in the processes of change in the Inclusive World Economy. We did this by borrowing solar energy from the past (stored as fossil fuels) and adding it to the flow of solar energy that daily fuels earth’s myriad systems.[1] This dramatic daily increase in the flow of energy through the Inclusive World Economy accelerated and continues to accelerate the global processes of societal and earth systems change, has changed and continues to change the way societal and earth systems change takes place, and has transformed and continues to transform us and almost everything about our planet.
We already know that we can’t keep increasing the use of fossil fuels to augment the daily flow of solar energy. We have to dramatically limit our borrowing from past solar energy income. More unsettling is the possibility that we must learn to share the budget of current solar energy flow with other species and with various earth system processes – such as cleansing water through solar powered processes – to a much greater extent than we now think. We just do not know how much solar energy we can divert from other species and processes in the Inclusive World Economy without generating a new round of system level changes that are both massive and destructive to human wellbeing.
In a large, complex, and dynamic system, system level change can remain evolutionary even while subsystems are going through deep and far reaching change and components are being created and destroyed at a rapid pace. This is what is now happening in the Inclusive World Economy. Species are being destroyed; whole communities of people are losing their ways of life; institutions that have been central to our wellbeing are losing there effectiveness and new institutional arrangements are popping up; planetary threats that we have never encountered before have emerged. The effects of climate change, species loss, limits to vital resources like fresh water and arable land, and conflicts over these things are multiplying and coming faster and faster.
Not surprisingly, the world’s institutional arrangements, which we took for granted only a few decades ago, are becoming dysfunctional in various ways and being subjected to mounting attacks from various quarters. This is happening to the world of work, where big changes are under way and conflicts over these changes are growing. The pay and benefits associated with high end jobs are disappearing; protections against harmful work environments are being weakened; more and more jobs involve the work of repairing the damages inflicted by climate change, wars, and illegal business operations. The world’s stock of wealth (including its people) is growing older, forcing us to devote much more of our work activity to fighting the ordinary ravages of time.
Everything in the Inclusive World Economy is connected, so this is a very dynamic situation. No one can escape this global upheaval, so everyone is or will be forced to respond to and manage the specific forms in which these massive and life-altering global crises visit us. As we take actions to respond, every other part of the Inclusive World Economy will change in response to our actions. Ironically, as we do more to respond to the crises by exerting more technological control over other species and earth systems rather than adapting our own activities to the laws of the universe as they operate in the Inclusive World Economy, the more we accelerate the intensification of the crises. Unwittingly and carelessly, we have pushed the Inclusive World Economy into a new and dangerous era of change.
In this increasingly hostile global environment, many of us are already struggling with life-altering consequences of these global crises. Where this is happening, working people are experimenting with old and new ways of making a living and old and new ways of protecting their work opportunities. They have no choice. But, some of these efforts only work for the short term because they propagate effects through the dynamic processes at work in the Inclusive World Economy to intensify crises and create new ones.
The future of work is uncertain, but at the moment bad outcomes look more likely than good outcomes. Rising support for authoritarian governments that divide the world’s workers into categories and help one category by taking from the others is accelerating the destruction of the very institutions we need to respond to global crises effectively. Much more importantly, though, the world’s leaders continue to strongly embrace the idea that the economic growth “miracle” of the last two centuries has no end in sight. If only we make the right policy choices, they continue to claim, the material riches of the world can continue to grow, everyone can enjoy a share of those riches, and the crises will wither away like so many storm clouds.
From the perspective of the Inclusive World Economy, the end of the material growth miracle is right in front of us. The era of fossil fuel energy is coming to an end, the world’s material riches are beginning to diminish, and the world of work is changing quickly. A shift to solar energy, no matter how successful and complete, will not sustain the material wealth miracle created by massive fossil fuel energy flows. The only choice before us is how we make the shift to a world of less. For now, a democratic and equitable shift seems very out of reach, but an authoritarian and inhumane transition is not inevitable. An inclusive perspective, attention to the limits of a solar future, and hard and careful political work can move the world in the direction of a much more desirable future than the one now looming darkly on the horizon.
[1] In economics we borrow from future income to augment current income. In the case of energy, however, we can borrow from past solar energy income.
IWE WORK FUTURES 