On June 2nd, The Elephant Meets... Katherine Trebeck, on the new economics of love and solidarity that can follow Coronavirus
Next week's Zoom public discussion/forum, with members of the Alternative UK's next-system group The Elephant is with… Katherine Trebeck (5.00pm-6.30pm, Tuesday 2 June, sign up here).
Katherine is currently the Advocacy & Influencing Lead for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, which has four national governments on its list (New Zealand, Iceland, Scotland and Wales).
Kate’s great expert passion, as the article below makes clear, is to define our collective direction as defined not by heedless “growth”, but by a steadily flourishing “wellbeing” - which will be good for our personal health, our societies and the planet. What are the new measurements, and new instruments, that can steer the system in this direction? How can we feel out the shape of this elephant in the room?
Kate has over eight years experience in various senior policy roles with Oxfam GB, and she is currently Honorary Professor at the University of the West of Scotland and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde.
Her book The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown Up Economy (co-authored with Jeremy Williams and published by Policy Press) was published in early 2019, and profiled on here.
Below is a blog that Kate has written exclusively for her The Elephant Meets…session. We look forward to seeing you there!
Katherine Trebeck: The Most Remarkable Act of Global Solidarity
At the beginning of the UK’s lockdown, someone posted this online:
the mysterious poster…
When you go out and see the empty street, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself “it looks like the end of the world”
What you're seeing is love in action. What you're seeing, in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, for the immuno-compromised brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet.
People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you're out on your walk, or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love.
Let it fill and sustain you. It isn't the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness
I don’t know where that huge poster has been unfurled– on what wall, in what city. I haven’t been able to find who wrote it (if you are aware, please do let me know!) [We’re investigating, Kate…and see tweet at the end of this post.—Ed.]
But the sentiment has been a bit of a treasure for me these last few weeks. I’ve been forwarding it to folks who seem a bit overwhelmed with the current state of affairs or who have done me a favour. Gifting it onto them as I feel it has been a gift for me.
Lately, as attention increasingly turns to the “what next?”, to what sort of lives people will be able to lead when the lockdown itself is lifted, I have begun to wonder how we can hold onto the ideas and way of seeing the world expressed so beautifully on that anonymous wall.
What if this sentiment – of love in action, of a “remarkable act of global solidarity” – was applied to how we design the economies of the future?
What if, from here on in solidarity was the guiding principle for our economy and for the decisions taken in the corridors of power, rather than share prices or ‘scillions more for the scillionaires’ as it seems to have been in the past?
If care for each other and for nature took precedence in how we build back after covid, we’ll go a long way in creating the wellbeing economy that more and more people are calling for.
For example, in work it would mean sharing the employment on offer much better than we did heading into covid-19. There will be less work in the formal sense available than there was before covid, so instead of making masses of people unemployed, solidarity would mean distributing that work more widely, recognising and valuing the vital work outside the market better, and paying a decent wage more aligned with social value across the board.
It would mean people willingly embracing payment of taxes in recognition of the vital role tax plays as investing in the collective good and vital public services that almost by definition embody solidarity.
It would mean large scale debt relief – globally and for those in rich countries who have been forced into debt to keep their heads above water.
Solidarity businesses would mean businesses designed in a way that doesn’t prioritise squeezing every last ounce of profit and driving down conditions, but instead is about ensuring pay is fair and prices take account of environmental impact. It would mean firms structured to ensure benefits for a wider constituency than a narrow bunch of remote shareholders. Firms such as cooperatives that are set up to benefit their members or social enterprises that deliver social benefits on the back of commercial activities.
Solidarity in our democracy would mean divvying up public resources according to deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting practices.
And solidarity in our individual lives would mean spending more time with each other, being more supportive of those who are struggling, being patient and gentler, not judging people by the title on their business card or size of their car, but starting conversations from our shared humanness rather dwelling too long on points of divergence.
Today we’re practicing solidarity because we have no choice – and many are losing far too much as the pandemic continues to unfold, claiming lives and livelihoods. When the worst is over, if we can hold onto that ‘remarkable act of solidarity’ we can choose to to build back better and create the economy needed for tomorrow.
For more from Katherine, see her website.
Below is her video from the December series of The Elephant Meets… presentations, which Katherine will build on, in a post-Covid context, for her talk on Tuesday 2nd June.
[BTW there is a very lovely video/music usage (and localisation) of the “Love in Action” text above we’ve found, by a Mutual Aid community action group in Belfast - see below:]