"To stitch the world back together again": an interview with Hazel Henderson - economist - Interview

FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, Hazel Henderson has consistently and convincingly challenged modem economic theory. Her razor wit, provocative style, insight, and self-studied economics perspective set her apart from conventional economists, as does her architecture for saner, more sustainable development strategies.

A visionary and alternative political economist, futurist, systems analyst; writer, and syndicated newspaper columnist Ms. Henderson has authored three books: Creating Alternative Futures (1978), Politics of the Solar Age (1981), and Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics (1993). She consults on alternative development for corporations, governments, and non-government organizations in more than thirty nations.

Born in England, she came to the United States at twenty-five and launched into community organizing thirty years ago, after bathing her daughter in her New York City home and finding she had to scrub extra-hard to get soot off her skin. She investigated New York's air pollution, and eventually got city figures on dirty air released on daily weather reports, now known as the Air Quality Index She then helped found Citizens for Clean Air, Inc.

Taking up economics after industry-backed economists challenged her anti-pollution proposals, Ms. Henderson rapidly became one of the most listened to voices of the environmental movement. The basis of her outlook is that the concept of development needs to be redefined as investments in people and in the restoration and maintenance of ecosystems. She has researched and promoted new economic indicators to measure progress on human development and protecting nature beyond "bottom-line" numbers. The notion of retooling our statistical basis for what constitutes a healthy economy has been adopted by the Clinton administration where Al Gore, long an advocate for such an evolution is helping the Bureau of Economic Analysis to incorporate the cost of pollution into a version of the Gross Domestic Product.

David Brower recently observed: "Hazel is more than a valuable gadfly: she's an astute, incisive, and prescient critic of the kind of economists who lie awake at night worrying about whether what works in practice can possible work in theory. Hazel takes economics back to first principles and anchors it firmly in human purpose."

Q: How would you describe what you do?

A: I'm trying to be a practicing social innovator. My goal, of course, is just to weigh in on the side of life in human evolution -- that's all. I don't really have any big pretensions about how much of a difference I'm going to make. I always knew I was unemployable, so I invented my own job and have been self-employed for twenty-five years.

Q: What progress has been made since you put forth your first economic theories?

A: A lot of the things I've been envisioning and working on since writing Creating Alternative Futures, I thought would never come to fruition until long after I was dead. That's a sort of English tradition, you know, that if you're a poet or a great playwright, or whatever, you are doing it for all future generations, and not just doing it for your own time. And so it's been a bit of a surprise to me over the past five years that suddenly all of my stuff is sort of clicking into place. I get slightly nervous that I'm not on the cutting edge anymore. I'm kind of like an ice-breaker and so in a sense the things that have come to fruition in the last five years urge me to move on.

Q: Toward?

A: A global debate and dialogue is now going on about what we mean by "development." I have been very much a part of this debate and it's moving much faster than I ever thought. That's so exciting to me. We shouldn't throw that word out. Human development has been what it's been about. And within sustainable limits of the earth's ecology and carrying capacity. We confuse means with ends. This shining goal of human development got lost; it became equated with the means, which the economists gave us: that is, economic growth. Now, allies very high up in the World Bank are saying: "We have to ask this question: How much does economic growth actually have to do with development?" We have to be multidisciplinary in our approach. The idea that one discipline, economics, could pre-empt this complex development was really offensive to my sense of balance. In Rio, I made a proposal at one of the first press conferences: that economists who were doing macropolicy -- macroeconomists -- would need to be retrained. They would need to go back to school and learn all those courses that they hadn't taken: ecology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, thermodynamics, and every other discipline concerned with human development. If they wanted to go on doing macropolicy targeted toward sustainable development they would have to be relicensed. Economists prescribe for whole nations, and get countries into a terrible mess -- and they have less accountability than doctors or lawyers. We are making conceptual progress, that "politics of reconceptualization" I was calling for in Politics of the Solar Age.

Q: Describe the politics of reconceptualization.

A: The core was going from what is popularly called reductionism to what is popularly called holism. I was tracing that through all of the disciplines and showing how we had reached a nadir of specialization and fragmentation. There was nothing else to do but to stitch the world together again. We need to pull back and take a w shot and see what the whole thing looks like. All of our colleges have buildings devoted to these boxes like geography and economics and all of the other separate disciplines. Today the problem is visible in capital cities like Washington, DC, where this fragmentation is all set in concrete. Buildings all over town that are named for departments of agriculture, labor, commerce, and other fragmented pieces of the agenda: they rarely talk to each other. These great capital cities are "the dinosaur's brain," the last place to get the message. Because they are constitutionally incapable. The good news is that there is a new force arising in the world which is going to be a real contender in the future. Today's world order consists of two basic players: mega-corporations and countries. As we discovered in Rio, the countries are losing sovereignty because of the global economy. They can't manage even their own domestic economies, let alone do all of these things that they promise their voters they're going to do, such as create full employment or deal with cross-border issues. The other great force in the world, the mega-corporations, are overlooked in the UN charter, never thought about -- just like the word 'environment" isn't anywhere in the UN charter, nor is "migration." Neither is "global finance" or "multinational corporation."

Q: So there is no particular leadership from these institutions? A: We cannot expect nation-state governments to lead, because of this loss of sovereignty; neither can we expect global corporations to lead. You'll find a few executives in these companies, and they'll try to do the best they can. But as long as they're profit-maximizing and accountable to their shareholders, we shouldn't expect any great leadership from them. So what we have emerging in the world is what my friend Elise Boulding dreamed of: a global civil society. This global civil society now is composed of a proliferation of citizens' organizations, of every form and stripe -- it was a marvelous thing to see them all in Rio at the global forum. And of course the United Nations still insists on calling them Non-Governmental Organizations, NGOs. I like to call countries and corporations and other great institutions Non-Civil Organizations -- NCOs. The global civil society and this proliferation of citizens' organizations are the social innovators.

Q: Made up of people operating on the fringe?

A: They come from the periphery of the society; you always expect that's where innovation comes from. It never comes from all those comfortable people who are running things -- they don't feel the need to innovate. We have this rich stew of social innovations and it's just wonderful to see them all on the Internet, the Well, Togethernet, Econet, Peacenet, and everything like that. We have also to go beyond these elite computer networks, because they shut out 90 percent of the human family. Good as they are, we have to go beyond this kind of narrow-casting to broadcasting. We have to be on radio, television.

Q: Describe barefoot television.

A: This is television where people in indigenous societies have Super 8 cameras and are documenting their own cultures. This is happening now in Sri Lanka and Malaysia and everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Native people are at last getting a crack at producing their own stuff and not having CBS or the BBC interpret who they are. There's this great new shift to multicultural alternative television which is now just below the surface. I have been involved with a consortium pulling a lot of these television resources together. The whole idea is that most of them are nonprofit, so instead of selling each other programs at enormous cost, they will barter programs, just like Ted Turner does with CNN's World Report. It is one of the cheapest news programs on the air because it's all bartered.

Q: You've noticed that barter is on the rise?

A: Actually, barter is where the action is. Barter is a sort of early warning indicator to me of a malfunctioning macro-economic Management. When a country is managing its affairs inappropriately, many local barter systems and local currencies and local computer exchange systems are flourishing in that country. For example, in my mother country, Britain, which is one of the worst-managed countries around and has been for a long time, you have two hundred LET systems (Local Exchange Trading) and people" are happily inventing money based on the name of the town that they live in: Bath money and Bristol money and Stroud money and Manchester money. It's very similar with what's going on in the US with Ithaca money [sidebar] and Time Dollars. People are beginning to understand of money has come to where we absolutely have what money is: a symbol system. Money isn't real. It's a tracking system, a scoring system, to keep track of people's transactions. The real resources are the human resources and the natural resources in these exchanges. We've gone from shells and barter to coins and paper money. Now we've gone to global electronic money. Suddenly people, are realizing the possibilities in the "local information society.

Q: For example?

A: For example, a radio garage sale (we have one in the town I live in) where all the farmers tune in on Saturday morning and one of them will call up and say, "I've got some tractor time. Who's out there going to exchange this for pepper seeds?" and all of that. When people can just do this on the radio or on pc bulletin boards, we're beginning to realize that we don't need bankers so much anymore.

Q: We're developing new forms of exchange.

A: Yes, and we can now visualize a society where, if you're a small business and you want to raise money, you won't have to do it even in the way that some of these local exchange systems work. If you need to expand your restaurant, you can do as a restaurateur in the Berkshires did a few years ago. He sold what he called Deli Dollars to local people who liked his restaurant. He sold the Deli Dollars for nine dollars and said that they would be redeemable in six months for ten dollars' worth of delicatessen food or meals. That was the way he funded his expansion, because the bank wouldn't give him a loan.... Already people are taking their business plans and uploading them to the Well and Internet. Bankers are suddenly starting to realize: "This really is The Death of Money" (to quote a recent book title). What has happened, as I've been predicting for many years, is that money and information have become equivalent. Often many, even bankers, prefer information because the information is traveling faster than money. People who want to fund their business plans need to understand all this. Dead capital lying around is far less important than the ideas it is chasing. So the ideas in a good business plan may be a hundred times more valuable than the money someone could put into it. These exciting things were in my Creating Alternative Futures vision. Many are now happening.

Q: Your views on health care?

A: This is another reconceptualization I've been working on for a long time that is also coming to fruition: the reconceptualization of health. In the US we have this absolutely colossal medical-industrial complex which costs a trillion dollars a year, employing one of every ten workers in the economy. It has very little to do with health outcomes. In fact, health outcome is far more highly correlated with secure jobs, and peace of mind, a good environment, good family relationships, safe streets, clean air and water. I was recently speaking to 2,500 executives of the medical-industrial complex who were dealing with how to downsize this industry. They must grapple with the whole idea that just like the military companies, they have to find their own conversion plan. All this restructuring is going on now, in obsolescent sectors based on too much energy and high technology use, and producer-driven rather than based on consumer demand. Being downsized is painful. These are necessary readjustments, driven by all these global forces that we've unleashed that have suddenly forced us into this interdependent world. It's forcing us into holism and reintegrating all of our thinking and strategies.

Q: You've been nurturing the notion of an alternative to the GNP as an economic guide, developing new quality-of-life indicators.

A: I have been proposing an alternative to the GNP for many years, one that would score the game a little more sensibly than GNP. People don't realize that because GNP doesn't differentiate between goods and bads and it all is added together as if the

COPYRIGHT 1995 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group