We clearly seem to be well into what Jim Kunstler calls "The Long Emergency," an extended period of economic and physical devolution that will change the fundamentals of the American experiment . With Peak Oil making everyday life more expensive, and with the overall tableau of financially-caused economic collapse rubbing salt in the exposed wounds of the American family, we're hard-pressed to see a way out, especially with the balance-sheet of the federal government taking on waves of red ink as far as the eye can see. The only way out, in the conventional view, is reinvigorated economic growth and increased consumption. But this is the deadly trap that we've talked about before, the horrible Catch-22 wherein our economic health is utterly dependent on a way of life that is actually decimating our planet and our individual psyches. 

In truth, what we need is economic contraction, and a new social-form vehicle to get us there. We need services, labor, and production pulled out of the money economy. And we need to drastically move our personal identity formation away from working/earning/consuming to a very different way of providing off-the-books life support to ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our friends. Again, I highly recommend the great short movie, "The Story of Stuff," which highlights the physical and psychological damage wreaked by excessive consumption -- www.storyofstuff.com). 

The algorithms that make up our economy and society must be transitioned to a place where economic transactions form far less of what is measured as "well-being." Currently, we are held hostage by the shackles of GDP, wherein every function, product, and activity is counted as a positive, as long as it generates a money transaction. More prisons? More lawyers? More money spent on cleanup of toxic waste? More missiles? More medicine for epidemic diabetes caused by obesity? More psychiatric sessions to treat chronic depression? More empty-calorie sodas? All of these transactions are counted as positive things for our nation's GDP, and are thus seen as contributions to our "success." Obviously, we can see that these have nothing to do with improving our quality of life. We need a better way to measure where we're at. We can't continue to base our public policy and general impressions of our economy on the outdated GDP methodology. It's a recipe for growing ourselves to death.

But how can we embrace contraction? How can we grab onto shrinkage as a positive thing? Well, it might start with getting a better measuring tool than GDP. If we can get alternative interpretations into the discussion, maybe we can point policy debates towards creative solutions to our predicaments (our Concentric Circles of Collapse, as I have called them elsewhere). Here are a couple hopeful places to begin. Last week, a new Canadian organization was launched, The Institute of Wellbeing. This nonpartisan institute has created a new indicator for better measuring the overall health and success of Canadian citizens: the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (first issuance available here). This measurement is a much more thorough treatment of social progress than the crude GDP. Aside from purely economic variables, the index also evaluates health standards, environmental quality, education and skill levels, the availability of leisure time, community vitality, democratic participation, and the state of arts, culture, and recreation. Pure GDP'ers will balk at this list, because it harbors quite a few value judgments: after all, who's to say what makes a vital community or a high skill-level? But the GDP yardstick harbors equally potent value judgments itself, by including something like increased funeral revenue from upticks in gun fatalities as a net positive for society (the gun purchase itself is also a positive). All statistics contain value judgments, based on what and how we choose to measure. Let's be up front with our biases, and build desirable things into the measuring methodology itself. 

Another great resource to check out, although its most recent report was from back in 2006, is the Genuine Progress Indicator (see www.progress.org/index.htm). Like the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, the GPI builds more value-laden variables into its front-end procedures: income distribution, non-monetary labor like housework and volunteering, crime prevalence, resource depletion, pollution, lifespan of consumer durables, defensive expenditures, and dependence on foreign assets. Regardless of its particular forms, we need these alternative measures so that we can see what actual work lies ahead of us. Why? Because it is crucial for the United States to create some kind of American model for dealing with life on the downslope of Peak Oil, since we are really the first large-population/large-land-mass country to come out on the other side of a maximum consumption lifestyle (European and East Asian countries are smaller both demographically and geographically). If we don't provide some kind of Post-Peak template that captures the imagination of the rest of the world, then China and India will charge headlong into the breach and create their own devastating versions of hyper-consumptive capitalism -- and then, it's End Game.