As an antidote to the recent posts on the Great Mistake of the Myth of Perpetual Economic Growth, I recently “cashed in” on various investments I made in the past and reaped truly enormous rewards but before I get on to the huge returns, what is this economic growth our glorious leaders keep banging on about and how do they measure it?
It is getting more mention these days, as a partial, flawed, irrelevant, distorted, inadequate, pointless, poor, destructive or otherwise inaccurate measure of the success or failure of a country, the increasingly maligned Gross Domestic Product or GDP, previously known as Gross National Product, or GNP.
Put over-simply, its the sum total of all money earned in the entire country over a given period, balanced against all expenditure. Bet that's easy to work out...not, of course and depending on how you work it out (there have been different methods over the years), you can make your country richer or poorer with the stroke of a pen, or the click of a spreadsheet. It means a lot, as on this magical number will depend, among other things, your country's credit rating and whether you get to join the G7 or the G20 or the G-all-the-rest-of-the-world.
Of course, lots of stuff doesn't get a mention in the GDP, like parenting and unpaid care work, or whether you like where you live or how content or happy you might be, etc. etc.
It also has odd consequences, such as the UK Government being happy to dole out money to child minders so a parent can go out to work, because both the child minder's income and that of the working parent's increase the GDP but they won't just give the same money to a parent to stay at home and bring up there own kid. Why not? You guessed it, because those two incomes will vanish from GDP.
I''m going to put in a longish quote here, because it says a lot. Some of you may be familiar with it, or parts of it. I'll tell you who, when and where at the end, although some of the references will give you good clues anyway. Here it comes:
“that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts...the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages...It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
This was Robert Kennedy speaking way back in 1968, in Kansas and his words must have come as a shock to many at that time of sustained economic growth; its perhaps no surprise he was murdered, just a few weeks after making this speech- another tragic waste.
And here's another quote, this time from David Fleming's Lean Logic Online, whch I mentioned last time. This is from David's entry for Home which I think is beautifully expressed;
“The household is by far the most productive part of our political economy. It makes people. It teaches near-perfect grasp of a language. It creates and makes in us the essential skills of conversation, listening, looking at the person who is talking to you; it transmits humour, loyalty, love, manners, reciprocity; it builds confidence and identity; it enables its members to discover which sex they are; given a chance, it arranges its own food, cooks it, serves it up and sustains a conversation while it is eaten; it is a library and reading room, a first aid centre, a support service for the new-born, and a source of comfort for the elderly and dying. For its friends, it is a provider of food and drink, comfort and conversation, bed and breakfast. It is the building block from which society is made. It is self-regulating and self-sustaining; it provides its services free, and renews membership indefinitely.”
We would do well to consider this when thinking about resilient communities of the future. He goes on to say;
“The unpaid, informal work done at home contributes nothing measurable to Gross Domestic Product and makes it invisible to a society with eyes only for money. Individualism and ideology have abandoned the home as obsolete. The post-war story has been a long goodbye, leaving home to those whose competitive aspirations have come to little.”
A sad indictment of the Thatcher regime's “get on your bike” policy.
There is today increasing criticism of GDP as a means of measuring the success of a country and various groups and governments are attempting to reform it or at least enlarge it to measure some of the other, non-tangible things, like well-being and happiness.
This will probably be key to unlocking the chains that bind us to the idea that perpetual economic growth as measured by GDP is vital, for as we enter the time of stagnant and contracting economies, we'll need something to measure that will make us feel that we're actually going in a good direction, in fact, going in a much better direction; better for us, that is, rather than corporate bankers and the super-rich.
So maybe the following will give us some idea.
At last! On to the truly massive returns on my investments!
Here's the first one- a greater than 10,000% return after just five months!
Some time ago now, my old friend and colleague Steve Read gave me some seeds, including a Bretton climbing bean. A magic bean, you ask? Well, yes, though only in the sense that all beans and seeds are like magic, in that if we pop them in some soil and add water, they turn into solar-powered, self-replicating, matter transformers, producing a vast range of diverse goods, that are the source of life and sustenance for both the human and non-human populations of our world.
I planted the bean at the beginning of April and by the end of August in the same year it had multiplied to well over 101 more beans! Of course I planted more than one, ate loads and still had dozens to plant again the following year, and so on, and so on. This is not unusual for beans of various types. Runner beans can give even greater returns. I chose the figure of 101 because it makes the maths easier: that's a return of 10,000% in just five months! Eat your hearts out, corporate bankers!
Here's the second example coming in with an even greater return of 100,000,000% after 30 years. Aaarg! That's ridiculous!
Okay, here's how it goes, another old friend, Dai Bryn, gave me some seeds to try (magic again, of course); they were from a Monterey Pine (pinus radiata). I started these off in about 1988 and finally felled the most monstrous one of them in 2018 after it started slowly falling over; this was due to me raising the water table through the use of fascine causeways on a different part of the site (another story). The rise in the water table started off a new spring line, right where the Monterey was growing; unintended consequences, again. Oops!1
By weight, the return is in the region of 0.1 gram seed (overestimated) to 1000 Kg (underestimated); that's 1,000,000 grams. The tree was a good 60cm across at the stump and 21 meters in height, though it sounds better in the Old Imperial when you say it was very nearly 80 feet tall. It has provided half our firewood each year for the last four years and there's still half of it left.
Of course we need to factor in some of my time, say five minutes to sow the seed, fifteen minutes to plant and mulch the sapling and maybe three maintenance periods of about fifteen minutes each over the first few years until it was big enough to start shading out the grass by itself. The figure of 100,000,000% is a rough underestimate after taking these factors into account (to be honest, I'm not sure if this is correct as the numbers just got too big for me, so if anyone can check it out for us, I'd be grateful!). Again, I planted more than one Monterey.
They (the Monterey pines) are unruly beasts, living up to their Latin name, radiata, in that they produce radiating side branches at regular, short intervals up the trunk that extend out to ridiculous lengths (easily 6 or 7 meters) in odd curves and bends and thicken to 30cms or so, given the chance. It would take considerable effort and a very long ladder to high prune these wonders if you wanted to grow them with clean trunks.
This brings us to the third example, for which the maths are completely beyond my pay grade, made much more difficult as the variety, quantity and quality of product, output and benefits are simply far too complex to measure. So we can safely just choose a vast return, say a few trillion percent over thirty years or so.
This refers to Argel, the natural re-vegetation project (rewilding) begun in 1986. The investment was one of time as I simply repositioned an existing fence to exclude grazing animals from a two thirds acre patch of rough grazing and then stood back. This equated to so say one day's work (overestimated).
The figure given here cannot hope to convey the vastness and huge complexity of the annual returns. I did try to quantify some and you can find the details on my web site, here but this does not include things like increased water trapping, storage and cleaning, soil building and nutrient cycling, increased diversity, habitat, carbon sequestration and so on, and so on.
So this site now absorbs something like three tons of CO2 per year, measured as tree growth, stores thousands of litres of additional water in the increased humus as well as providing me with a perfect classroom for teaching the ecological principles of permaculture design. When I used to do guided tours, this was the place where I spent most time with a group (one hour out of a three hour tour) and hence earned most money- far more than you could have got from sheep grazing.
The point here is that investing even small amounts of time and resources in nature can provide huge returns that dwarf anything a bank or the financial industry can offer. Get those seeds in now peeps and prepare to reap rewards in five months, five years or annually for life!
And remember your own home, as the foundation of any resilient community to arise in the future.
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Thanks to all my subscribers- there will be some dividends appearing for you, you loyal lot, in a few weeks time. Bet you can't wait!
I know, I know, the pictures are of a larch I felled, not the Monterey; I'm afraid I failed to find my pics of the monster radiata, duh! Sorry. So this will have to do- you get the idea anyway.
I planted quite a few larch as they grow fast and hence are a 'harvest in your own lifetime' tree, as David Holmgren says. We agreed that roughly a third of the trees you plant should be such, for you, another third as long-term trees for the grandchildren (high pruned oak, walnut etc.) and the final third as support species for the first two thirds, nitrogen fixers, soil conditioners or just nice trees and the like.
I started felling all my larch in advance of the phytophthora ramorum plague which really likes them. Natural Resources Wales were slow to realise what was happening but have now felledmany coupes in Cymru, or stem injected the larch to kill them before the disease gets to them and spreads from them to other trees.
Its a sad fact that we will probably not be able to grow large in Cymru again.