Hazel Henderson Interview. September 9, 2003.

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How is the field of economics dealing with technological change?
This is the interesting thing. Part of the thesis in most of my books critiquing the traditional economics is that they missed the most important driving variable in the whole economic process -the evolution of technology and the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution itself. Which is really all about change. Economic theory considers technology as a given. This is why economics, I’ve always said, is backing into the future looking through the rear view mirror.

Both Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Sterling have said that a good futurist is one who can predict the present. Do you agree?
I think that’s a good way of saying it. There’s another thing about being a futurist, and it relates to personal responsibility for the future. In other words, we are all making the future every minute that we live, by way of our collective and individual decisions. If we think of it like that, everybody is really a futurist.

Tell me about your Layer Cake With Icing.
This is one of my earliest diagrams. I use a layer cake as a metaphor for a total productive system of an industrial society. If you can visualize it, the icing on the top is the private sector, which rests on the layer below, the public sector. These top two layers are the only ones economists typically measure. But in my analysis, there are two lower layers that are non-monetized and invisible to economists, but which are really supporting the whole thing. These include the Love Economy - unpaid productive work like raising children and maintaining the household, serving on the school board, do-it-yourself housing, rehab - and Mother Nature, the vast wealth of biodiversity that keeps our air and water clean and provides all the food and fibre and resources we need to sustain life, which go completely uncounted. When an economic system doesn’t take into consideration these two vital lower layers, which support the official money economy, then both the society and ecosystem get kind of cannibalized. Wall Street and the financial community all over the world are really living in a fool’s paradise.

How much will it cost for every country in the world to shift to sustainable development?
It was estimated at the summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro that it would cost somewhere around $650 billion. But the thing is, right now those same governments are spending well over $1 trillion dollars a year on unsustainability, which subsidizes fossil fuels and nuclear power - high tech approaches to agriculture. If governments would simply stop subsidizing unsustainability, we could move to sustainability and have about $350 billion left over each year.

Would it require a massive overhaul of global infrastructure?
No, it isn’t really an overhaul of infrastructure so much as a removal of the suppressive political influence on the economy. Take the regime change in Brazil, for example. President Lula is interested in sustainability and so you see Petrobras, the big oil company, suddenly developing hydrogen, wind and solar divisions. The same thing is also happening with BP and Shell. Even OPEC is beginning to realize that its future is not so much in oil as it is in investing in these new technologies.
The pharmaceutical industry is another interesting sector undoing change. It is beginning to realize that it cannot extort these enormous prices for its antiretroviral drugs in countries like South Africa or Brazil. In Brazil, they simply make their own; they have their own industry, and that’s why they’ve done a much better job with dealing with HIV/AIDS than countries that have to rely on costly pharmaceuticals from the big companies.

More than the big companies, it seems that NGOs are increasingly harbingers of social change. Why is that?
Because they don’t have these vested interests. The NGO movements around the world, as I have known them over the past thirty years, start up as a result of being on the receiving end of all unsavoury social impacts. As long as companies are permitted to externalize the social and environmental costs from their balance sheet, NGOs are going to organize and try to push those costs, quite rightly, back onto the corporate balance sheet.

It reminds me of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, in which he introduces this notion of a producing consumer. How are corporate goals changing as a result of the “prosumer”?
Many corporations have admitted that if the NGO groups didn’t challenge and push them, they couldn’t make certain changes because Wall Street and the financial markets expect them, according to the old model, to maximize shareholder returns. We’re all trying to move towards the stakeholder model, away from the stockholder model. In other words, a company really has responsibility not only to its investors and shareholders but also to its consumers, its employees, the community, the environment, and future generations. This conversation is alive and well and a lot of corporate groups feel the pressure to change. And frankly, I’d like to increase that pressure.

What is the significance of barter?
Because I focus on the non-money side of production and transactions in my books - all the cooperative, unpaid activities that are the bedrock of all of the world’s economies - I’ve naturally been interested in explaining barter. In the world today, where we have six billion people sharing the planet, there are still about two billion people that will never see the inside of a bank or even get a micro loan from Women’s World Banking or ACCION or the Grameen Bank or any other of these micro lenders. And so, barter is so important because it allows communities that are completely sidelined from traditional banking and economic networks to match their own needs and resources, to create sustainable livelihoods outside of the money circuits. I am involved in a start-up in London right now that provides barter and exchange services to NGOs at www.via3.net.

You once described a scenario where two big freightliners passed in the night, one from Tokyo heading to the U.S. and the other leaving the U.S. heading to Japan. Both were carrying cars. It seems absurd, no?
Absolutely! I think most countries in the world would be better off creating homegrown economies. Anything that they could produce in their own society, they would develop domestic markets for. And only those things that really were unique in terms of minerals or whatever would be part of world trade. What makes sense to trade internationally, of course, are ideas. Famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said it was much better to ship around recipes than it was to ship around cakes and biscuits. This, to me, is the future, where we have a globalization system based on being able to savour all of the world’s best ideas - the world’s best music, food, art, recipes and clean, green technologies. This is the direction I think we should be heading in world trade.

What are the positive potentials of globalization?
Well, I think mostly that we can globalize human rights; we can globalize more transparent and democratic societies. We can globalize the equality of women. We can globalize environmental protection. We can globalize safe work places. We can reorganize all of the new forces - and this is a transition that is now going on, as we’ve noticed, with NGOs, the United Nations and many of its humanitarian and development agencies, and the ILO (International Labour Organization) and the WHO (World Health Organization). Together these make up a new global force in the world. Without question, the new world superpower is world public opinion. When that’s linked to mass media, I think we can end run a lot of these old structures and transition more effectively.

Hazel Henderson is an independent economist, futurist, author, and consultant on sustainable development internationally. (www.hazelhenderson.com)

Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.

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