Insecurity and the Economy

Our community is experiencing severe housing and food insecurity. The increasing numbers of people living in tents and depending on food banks indicates that action by the government is essential and urgent.

Homeless in the Ball Park

 

The 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity, feature filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor who explains how society runs on insecurity and how we can change it. The lectures are also available as a book, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, from House of Anansi Press.

Taylor takes a deep dive into the history of capitalism and explores how, paradoxically, the ways that we’ve been encouraged to achieve security — purchasing health and wellness products, buying life insurance, acquiring property — actually work against us.

She also looks forward at the ways we might be able to achieve true security, using collective action. 

But today, we also live in an era of manufactured insecurity, imposed on us from above. Consumer society, Taylor argues, capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, making us all insecure by design.

How we understand and respond to insecurity is one of the most urgent questions of our moment — nothing less than the future security of our species hangs in the balance. (Taylor, 2023)

Agnieszka K. Wielgosz serves as a vocal sustainability/ regenerative wellness advocate. She is the woman behind CEI Collective, serving the creative needs of wellness professionals, regenerative & green living brands to grow and make a dynamic impact.

When we consider the phenomenal speed at which the USA ramped up industrial production during the Second World War, or the efficiency with which developed nations are able to respond to natural disasters, we see that notions of “money” and “the economy” quickly fall by the wayside.

If only we allocated the same amount of resources and effort into the health of our global community!

It’s a well established fact that modern societies with advanced levels of technology could easily provide all the resources required for their citizens to live in ample comfort and safety, without having to resort to money, credit, bartering or worst of all, debt.

With shared responsibility and co-owned resources, humanity would quickly overcome the artificial boundaries that currently separate us, leaving us free to pursue a better way of living whilst caring for our shared environment. (Wielgosz, 2020)

A report by Lars Osberg tracks Canadian income inequality through 75 years of growth and recessions and speculates about the post-COVID-19 future. 

Although the Keynesian consensus on the importance of full employment to balanced growth and social stability enabled growing real wages and stable inequality, it was replaced, after a surge in inflation in the 1970s, by Neo-Liberal policies that emphasized budget balance and low inflation. But slowing growth and the concentration of income gains at the top produced widening income gaps, increasing discontent and political instability—even before COVID-19 hit. In the post-COVID-19 era, the Green New Deal emphasizes social and environmental sustainability, and is reflective of the economic policy changes that likely lie ahead. This report has contrasted the balanced growth and stable inequality of the Keynesian consensus era, 1946–1980, with the unbalanced growth and increasing top-end income shares of the Neo-Liberal years that followed. It has also contrasted the policy choice facing both past regimes—how to share the gains from growth—with the possibility that a post-COVID-19 world will be dominated by a more depressing choice: how to allocate the costs of contraction. As always, future policy choices will be conditioned on prior experiences. The era of Keynesian consensus decision-making saw full employment and the sharing of the gains from economic growth as central issues because that generation had experienced the costs of social instability. And although they could not solve the problem of inflation, they left a social insurance system and a history of stable inequality to their Neo-Liberal successors, which muffled initial discontent with the high unemployment, stagnant middle-class wages and increasing inequality of Neo-Liberalism. Neo-Liberalism solved the inflation problem but could not produce a fair distribution of the gains from economic growth—and that matters. When social insurance protections are dismantled and top-end incomes grow faster than middle-class incomes, inequality and insecurity increase over time. So the legacy of Neo-Liberalism includes the populist political reaction of those who were left behind in the Neo-Liberal decades and those who were, and will be the casualties of the COVID-19 years. The legacy of Neo-Liberalism also includes a global climate crisis. Those failures of Neo-Liberalism will condition Canada’s responses to the challenges of the post-COVID-19 world. (Osberg, 2021)

Prior to the Keynesian consensus era, 1946–1980, Crown Corporations, including Wartime Housing Limited built thousands of homes in Canada.

Klein, Seth. (2020) A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. Toronto, ON:ECW Press.

Wartime Housing in Halifax

 

The abstract from the Masters Dissertation of Jill Wade (1984) entitled Wartime Housing Limited, 1941-1947 : an overview and evaluation of Canada’s first national housing corporation asks the question of why did the federal government not reconstitute WHL as a permanent, low-rental housing agency.

Between 1941 and 1947, a federal crown corporation called Wartime Housing Limited (WHL) successfully built and managed thousands of rental units for war workers and veterans. At the same time, an Advisory Committee on Reconstruction study (the Curtis report) described the enormous need for low and moderate income shelter throughout Canada and recommended a national, comprehensive, and planned housing program emphasizing low-rental housing. Instead, in 1944 - 1945, the federal government initiated a post-war program promoting home ownership and private enterprise; it neglected long-range planning and low income housing. Thus, an interesting question arises. Why did the federal government not reconstitute WHL as a permanent, low-rental housing agency (Wade, n.d.)

The evidence of stagnant middle-class wages and increasing inequality is seen in the growing numbers of homeless people and the increasing importance of food banks and soup kitchens in our community.

Feed Nova Scotia essential for food security

The role of the government to protect the health of Canadians was essential during the Covid 19 emergency. Government Action, similar to wartime programs, to guarantee the right of Canadians to adequate housing and access to healthy food is urgently required now.

References

Klein, Seth. (2020) A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. Toronto, ON:ECW Press.

 

Osberg, L. (2021, March 2). From Keynesian Consensus to Neo-Liberalism to the Green New Deal. | Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Retrieved November 21, 2023, from https://policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/75-years-of-income-inequality-canada 

Taylor, A. (2023, June 16). The Age of Insecurity. 2023 CBC Massey Lectures. Retrieved November 21, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor/lecture-1-curas-gift 

Wade, J. (n.d.). Wartime Housing Limited, 1941-1947 : an overview and evaluation of Canada's first national housing corporation. Open Collections. Retrieved November 21, 2023, from https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0096317 

Wielgosz, A. K. (2020, October 20). A New World is Possible: An Introduction to Resource-Based Economies. Agnieszka K. Wielgosz. Retrieved November 21, 2023, from https://agnes-wielgosz.medium.com/a-new-world-is-possible-an-introduction-to-resource-based-economies-5def63e87e2a 

New economic direction after Covid

 Some recent articles in mainline publications point to the opportunity to use the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic to rethink how we respond to the climate emergency through possible realignment of the macro economic policy followed by the government.

 Starting over again - The covid-19 pandemic is forcing a .... Retrieved September 30, 2020, from https://www.economist.com/

Douglas Broom Senior Writer, Formative Content with the World Economic Forum reports that an overwhelming majority of people want real change after COVID-19.

The survey also asks if people agree or disagree with the statement, “I want my life to change significantly rather than returning to how it was before the COVID-19 crisis.” And at least two-fifths of adults in the Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, the US, UK and Canada say they want their life to go back to how it was. But globally, it seems, people are ready to see a significant change. Across the 28 countries surveyed, 72% say they want their lives to change significantly after the crisis. This sentiment is strongest in Mexico, Colombia, South Africa and Peru.1

Robyn Urback, writing in the Globe and Mail, is of the opinion that it’s not too late to sell Canadians on a climate-focused pandemic recovery. 

So while this is a government that likes to situate its policy promises in the lofty space between big dreams and butterscotch candy, there is a down-to-earth, pragmatic and persuasive way for it to justify ramping up climate-change mitigation measures now: by reframing them around better planning. We need to try to mitigate seasons of hotter, longer and larger forest fires that threaten to destroy communities in British Columbia and Alberta. We need to redraw outdated flood maps (a project the federal government has indeed undertaken) or risk leaving Canadians literally underwater. We need to be cognizant of how changing temperatures and precipitation patterns can increase the incidence of waterborne pathogens and the spread of disease. We need to heed the warnings from experts before it is too late, or risk paying massively for it – both economically, and in lost lives. Canadians are living through – and can therefore easily understand the consequences of – poor planning. The federal government would likely opt for different wording, for obvious reasons, but there’s arguably no better time to emphasize the importance of disaster preparedness than in the midst of a disaster. That is, as long as it’s about issues more immediately consequential than the nostrils of beleaguered sea turtles.2

The Economist briefing explains how the Covid-19 pandemic is forcing a rethink in macroeconomics. In the form it is known today, macroeconomics began in 1936 with the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”. Its subsequent history can be divided into three eras. The era of policy which was guided by Keynes’s ideas began in the 1940s. By the 1970s it had encountered problems that it could not solve and so, in the 1980s, the monetarist era, most commonly associated with the work of Milton Friedman, began. In the 1990s and 2000s economists combined insights from both approaches.

 Starting over again - The covid-19 pandemic is forcing a .... Retrieved September 30, 2020, from https://www.economist.com/

The rethink of economics is an opportunity. There now exists a growing consensus that tight labour markets could give workers more bargaining power without the need for a big expansion of redistribution. A level-headed reassessment of public debt could lead to the green public investment necessary to fight climate change. And governments could unleash a new era of finance, involving more innovation, cheaper financial intermediation and, perhaps, a monetary policy that is not constrained by the presence of physical cash. What is clear is that the old economic paradigm is looking tired. One way or another, change is coming. 3

Perhaps, in the wreckage left behind by the coronavirus pandemic, a new era is beginning.

 

References

1	(2020, September 18). People around the world want real change post-COVID-19 .... Retrieved September 27, 2020, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/sustainable-equitable-change-post-coronavirus-survey/
2	(n.d.). It's not too late to sell Canadians on a climate-focused .... Retrieved September 28, 2020, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-its-not-too-late-to-sell-canadians-on-a-climate-focused-pandemic/
3	(2020, July 25). Starting over again - The covid-19 pandemic is forcing a .... Retrieved September 30, 2020, from https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/25/the-covid-19-pandemic-is-forcing-a-rethink-in-macroeconomics