The only exit from the ‘polycrisis’ is a corridor of sufficiency between meeting need and avoiding excess.
Celebrating excess: West 57th Street in New York, unofficially known as Billionaires’ Row (rblfmr/shutterstock.com)
Recent crises have raised questions about the purpose of the economy and the nature of value. The pandemic forced governments to prioritise ‘core’ sectors of production and ‘essential’ workers. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis in Europe resulted in emergency measures to determine priorities in allocations of gas. Both crises raised questions about which activities have value, being essential to survival, reproduction, wellbeing and justice—and which are harmful, wasteful or destructive.
Conventional neoclassical economics is of no help here. It has no place for the idea that some preferences are better or worse, that some forms of labour are more essential or harmful or that some levels of income, wealth or consumption are undesirable. The dominant stance remains value neutrality—‘De gustibus non est disputandum’ (there is no arguing about tastes).
A world of flourishing
We require a different standard of value, one of sufficiency. ‘Sufficiency’ contrasts with ‘efficiency’ as a goal to a means: efficiency focuses on ‘how’, sufficiency on ‘to what end’. The core idea is of a space between a floor of meeting human needs and a ceiling of ungeneralisable excess. The latter has become more urgent with runaway global heating and ecological crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recognised its centrality, defining sufficiency as ‘a set of measures and daily practices that avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water while delivering human wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries’.
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The vision of a sufficiency space can be applied to various domains of the economy as well as human wellbeing: income and wealth, consumption and production (Figure 1). Sufficiency is not simply meeting basic needs. It envisages a world of flourishing, moderate incomes, comfort goods and everyday production—up to the ceiling of excess, riches, luxury and waste.
Figure 1: sufficiency space
WellbeingWealth/IncomeConsumptionProduction ExcessRichesLuxuriesWaste, excessCeiling SufficiencyFlourishingModerate incomesConventional goods‘In-between’ productionNeeds metDecent minimumNecessitiesFoundational productionFloor DeprivationPovertyLack of necessitiesWeak/absent foundational economy
Floors and ceilings entail objective and universal limits: human needs and planetary boundaries. Human needs, commonly including health, autonomy and social participation, are prerequisites for avoiding harm. Planetary boundaries ultimately rest on biophysical tipping points—thresholds where environmental systems undergo a non-linear transformation which is likely to be irremediable.
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Both however require human thought and social action to determine their limits in real-world contexts. Human needs are met via a vast network of contextual need-satisfiers; to gauge these requires collective dialogue in recurrent democratic fora. The route from planetary boundaries to actual ceilings also requires a collective determination, based on scientific knowledge about secure policy routes coupled with political discussions, to achieve a normative agreement—on what is to be reduced, for whom and in what form.
This is now recognised by the IPCC: guaranteeing decent living standards within limits entails prioritising human needs over consumer preferences in some circumstances. Therefore, ‘minimum and maximum standards of consumption or sustainable consumption corridors’ and ‘a distinction between necessities and luxuries’ are required to realise the potential of living well within limits. This idea has been developed by theories of a ‘consumption corridor’, leading over time to a sustainable consumption space.
Our goal here is to construct a parallel ‘production corridor’. To focus solely on demand and consumption is in danger of neglecting the power of industries and corporations in shaping consumer behaviour and practices, leaving production and its prevailing power relations largely untouched. It understates the link between production in a capitalist economy and excess—the production of over-consumption. Moreover, tackling production directly can be ecologically more effective than detouring through ‘end of pipe’ consumption.
Thus we envisage a strategy for transition to a sufficiency economy, which must progress very rapidly, starting now. Paralleling the contributions on consumption corridors, this transition aims to establish production floors (to guarantee need satisfaction) and ceilings (to shrink forms of production that endanger planetary boundaries and need satisfaction).
Identifying production floors
To identify production floors, we draw on the history of the ‘reproduction debate’—from Karl Polanyi and feminist political economy to, more recently, the ‘foundational economy’. This has looked behind Karl Marx’s concept of the capitalist ‘mode of production’ to its ‘background conditions of possibility’, especially the (decommodified) public economy and the (uncommodified) reciprocal economy of communities and households. These furnish healthy and educated workers, as well as public infrastructures, to the commodified economy but they are also essential to satisfying human needs. Yet unpaid labour in the domestic and communal domain, however essential for social (re)production, remains subordinate and mainly undertaken by women. These debates have in common a recognition of what we call the essential zone of the economy.
The pandemic drove governments across Europe swiftly to produce lists of essential occupations entitled to protection and benefits during the lockdown. These included healthcare and emergency services, food/agriculture, energy, water and waste, communications, transport, core retail, media, defence, care services, education and core finance. The European Parliament estimated the share of essential workers in the European Union to be about 42 per cent of the employed population.
Of course this omitted the vast numbers performing unpaid care work. Nevertheless these lists demonstrated that in times of crisis the state could step in and evaluate occupations and sectors using different metrics to those of the labour market. The share of essential work in the economy must be greatly expanded—to meet needs and to achieve fair decarbonisation.
Yet essential production will itself need to be transformed to meet the imperatives of climate mitigation. Not all labour directed to reproducing a wasteful capitalist economy will be essential in a sufficiency economy, including activities in sectors such as crop and animal production, manufacture of food and beverages, electricity and gas supply, construction and land transport. Even health services are not unproblematic in terms of fossil-fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.
More research and democratic discussion is needed to evaluate this pathway but enough is known to outline directions of travel:
‘Universal basic services’:there is a strong case to transfer some essential services (such as water, energy, platforms, care services, housing and transport) to public ownership and/or effective public control. Co-ordinated public infrastructure and services strengthen the floor of necessity for all (a commodity becomes a right) and can secure substantial savings in ecological resources.
Prevention: there is a strong case for moving government intervention from ‘downstream’ compensation or cure to ‘upstream’ prevention of ill-health or social ills. This can again increase satisfaction of needs while reducing resource use and emissions.
Social licensing: for that part of the foundational economy currently market-provided and likely to remain so, such as retail and banking, ‘social licensing’ provides an important tool. In return for a territorial franchise, private providers should, as quid pro quo, be subjected to eco-social obligations.
Production ceilings
To address excess production we can again draw on a long intellectual history. First, Marx distinguished productive labour in the production process from unproductive labour in the circulation process. In the 1930s, in a different way, Kuznets initiated the ‘production-boundary’ debate and distinguished intermediate costs and final output. The financial sector was initially conceived as an intermediate cost, yet over time was upgraded to a final output in the System of National Accounts: by the 2008 crash the system regarded almost the entire FIRE (finance, insurance, and real-estate) sector as part of the productive economy. This recognised and aided the unprecedented rise of financial capital over the past four decades.
Secondly, Marx distinguished production of the ‘means of production’ and wage goods from that of luxury goods. These latter did not re-enter the cycle of reproduction, being consumed by the capitalist class. Thirdly, the concept of ‘guard labour’ draws on Marxist antecedents to refer to employment that reinforces the power exercised by private economic actors to enforce property rights and pursue distributional advantage. It comprises at least some supervisors, monitors, police, prisoner officers, public and private guards, and military personnel. From an anthropological perspective, ‘bullshit jobs’ refers to those jobs that workers themselves regard as ‘pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious’.
While the entire fossil-fuel industry must disappear in a sufficiency economy, these debates allow us to identify further activities that need to shrink, notably luxury production, finance and the military. Shrinking the excess economy is critical to achieving a sufficiency economy. It eliminates a substantial share of wasteful production and associated emissions and frees up labour which could be usefully employed elsewhere.
Much of contemporary finance—its sheer scale in the world economy immense—is unjustifiable from a human-need perspective. And much research documents the harmful impact of financialisation on the foundational economy, the welfare state and nature itself, extracting value while undermining the satisfaction of human needs within planetary boundaries. Radical options must thus be considered to reinstate democratic control over monetary provision and to mobilise sustainable production.
As regards luxuries, the income elasticity of goods and services can provide a useful marker. High-carbon luxuries include almost all aspects of production that underlie personal transport, not only the obviously decadent such as private yachts and jets but also frequent flying, sport-utility vehicles and ocean cruises. Between 2010 and 2018, SUVs were the second-largest contributor to global carbon-dioxide emissions, behind only the energy industry. Policy recommendations for sufficiency would embrace taxation, elimination of public subsidies, regulation and bans.
Finally, military spending absorbs vast sums of public money and supports a powerful ‘military-industrial complex’ in some countries, while entailing immense yet largely unmonitored CO2 emissions and ecological destruction. Our perspective of eco-social transition is not utopian: we assume continuation of the world system of nation states and thus militaries and armaments production. Within that, however, an above-average share of military expenditure and production can be defined as excessive.
In-between economy
The in-between economy is that part of production sandwiched between necessary and excess production. It employs a significant share of the paid labour force in contemporary economies, from services such as hair salons, gyms, music and artistic production, artisan manufacturing, and restaurants to a vast range of household goods including furniture, renovations, decoration, entertainment and so forth.
Within this space, the moral case to respect market provision remains strong: preferences for specific ‘want-satisfiers’ will differ in a wide array which decentralised markets are better able to furnish. Intervention would however be required to overrule consumer and producer preferences, led by wants and the profit imperative, where these conflict with universal needs. For example, there would be a pressing need to reduce and control advertising extensively, as well as to impose a duty to repair allied to regulation to ensure long-lasting products.
A sufficiency economy would guarantee sustainable production by strengthening, transforming and decommodifiying essential zones, shrinking excess production and enabling sustainable market provision in the ‘in-between’. This is not dissimilar to Nancy Fraser’s threefold conception of the economy under socialism: ‘No markets at the top’ (referring to democratisation of the allocation of social surplus), ‘no markets at the bottom’ (provision of basic needs as of right), but ‘possibly some markets in the in-between’.
Our approach additionally suggests the need to reduce wasteful or unnecessary labour across the whole economy, including the essential sectors. Together, this transition can reduce pressure on the environment, meet all essential needs and mark a decisive step toward the freedom of working people to participate in democratic decision-making. Figure 2 summarises some core features of a production corridor towards a zero-carbon, eco-social economy.
Figure 2: core features of a production corridor
CommodifiedDecommodifiedUncommodified DomainCapitalistPublicHousehold/ communalExcess productionConceptualisationLuxury production; extractive finance; excessive militaryExcessive military; extractive finance, infiltrating the decommodified domain Eco-social goalsShrinkShrink The ‘in-between’ productionConceptualisationRemaining production for market Eco-social goalsDecarbonise; regulate; experiment; shrink unnecessary labour Essential productionConceptualisationFoundational economy (commodified)Foundational economy (decommodified)Core economyEco-social goalsTransfer to public ownership and/or control; decarbonise; shrink unnecessary labourExpand universal basic services; decarbonise; intervene upstream; shrink unnecessary labourPartly shift to public to foster a universal right to care; redistribute caring responsibilities
Overcoming capitalism
The profit and accumulation imperatives are not only inherent to capitalism but also drivers of social-ecological crises and so need to be overcome in the long term. In the medium term, continuously strengthening the non-capitalist domains in our economies while downsizing the excess economy would foster a decisive shift towards meeting needs within limits.
This is undoubtedly radical. How are producer and consumer preferences to be challenged in the name of needs and limits? Who will determine the ceilings and floors? An essential requirement is more robust, scientifically-informed, deliberative democracy. One European survey found that citizens’ assemblies proposed a significantly higher share of sufficiency policies than national governments. Another essential requirement is limiting corporate power.
The envisaged strategy is reformist in that, in the medium term, it does not per se undermine capitalism as an institutionalised social order. Yet it has revolutionary potential in that it strengthens the non-capitalist foundations of further contests against the reified power of capital. Hence, the continued effort to implement production corridors constitutes a critical element in the long-term struggle to overcome capitalism.
Richard Bärnthaler (r.barnthaler@leeds.ac.uk) is an assistant professor in ecological economics at the University of Leeds Sustainability Research Institute. He is a member of the board of the European Society for Ecological Economics.
Ian Gough (I.Gough@lse.ac.uk) is a visiting professor in the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion and an associate of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, both at the London School of Economics, as well as professor emeritus at the University of Bath.
