Achieving Environmentally Sustainable Prosperity

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The contribution of this chapter is to explain how to achieve a universally prosperous environmentally sustainable global good society. This objective is incompatible with traditional economic policies dependent on full employment and ideologies based on uninhibited use of nonrenewable resources or the various descriptions of a “good society” articulated by Berliner (1999). Politically attractive incentives of smaller taxes and other policies are identified as a way of changing the way an economy operates so that prosperity can be increased even with a declining and aging population. Localizing the ownership and control of the means of production and exchange with individuals creates a way to establish a universal minimum social dividend to replace the need for full employment, welfare, pensions, and big government. Local democracy becomes enriched with the power to nurture its host environment. The introduction of ecological forms of cost-carrying money redeemable into local services of nature allows market forces to encourage production techniques that reduce their environmental impact. Increased life expectancy with depopulation is already occurring in 20 countries and this is expected to spread globally in the current century. This phenomenon with current environmental pressures creates an imperative for achieving environmentally sustainable prosperity sooner rather than later.