Ever wonder about the real cost of that cheap burger?
Summit sows the seeds of revolution in economic thought
YClimate change is a form of slow violence inflicted on already disenfranchised people.
ELLIE PERKINS PROFESSOR, ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS, YORK UNIVERSITY
ou can buy a cheeseburger or a taco at a famous multinational fast food franchise for about a buck. But how close does that price come to the real cost of food?
It most certainly doesn’t reflect government subsidies for wheat or corn. It doesn’t include environmental protection and restoration resulting from industrial- scale corn production, nor does it reflect the cost of government oversight of the beef industry.
If all the ingredients came from a jurisdiction with a carbon tax on fuel, some of the costs of air pollution and respiratory disease resulting from fertilizer manufacturing, cultivation and transportation might be reflected in the price. But that’s pretty unlikely.
The extra health care costs incurred by junk food eaters will be borne by taxpayers, not just taco and burger buyers. ( They will suffer their own personal heart attacks, but we will all pay for their time in hospital.)
Welcome to the new economy. It’s a place where all of those so- called externalities are accounted for, if not in the price of things, then at least in minds of economists and, one would hope, of politicians who set public policy and decide what to tax.
But wait, there’s more. Ecological economics — especially feminist ecological economics — might also seek to quantify the costs of social inequality, alienation and that huge well of unpaid labour without which our economy and our society could not function. Housework. Someone has to do it, not many people get a paycheque for it and you can bet the world would grind to a halt within days if no one cooked, shopped, cleaned or cared for the children.
“Until we can quantify these things it’s hard to know how well we are doing,” said Ellie Perkins, a professor of ecological economics at York University. Perkins is one of 20 academics and social entrepreneurs presenting at The New Economy Summit, April 5 and 6, on topics from ethical investing and local food economies to reforming economics education, sustainable development and craft economies.
“Much of what we want to know isn’t in StatsCan documents and it’s difficult to value,” she said. As a result, stock economic models don’t account for unquantified social, environmental and psychological costs.
“If you could measure those things you might find out that our standard of living isn’t that great,” said Perkins. “Not everyone is happy.”
People are naturally reticent to think in a critical way about an economic system that has delivered significant wealth to Western nations, but the current model is broken, according to Perkins.
“The kind of resource throughput and energy throughput that we have been using is unsustainable,” she said. “We need to use this time of relative affluence to consider the long term sustainability of the planet and figure out ways of doing things more fairly and less wastefully.”
The need for change may come down to preserving global political stability. The developing world will only put up with the current system for so long.
“The wealth and the high standard of living that we enjoy in North America is dependent on resource transfers … from other parts of the world where people are in fact suffering mightily in an increasingly inequitable situation because of climate change,” said Perkins. “Climate change is a form of slow violence inflicted on already disenfranchised people.”
Happiness, alienation and justice are resistant to quantification. Translation: They are hard to cost out in dollars and hence a challenge for economic models.
“We have to get together as a society and decide what we value, what we want and what our goals are going to be and what our vision is for a socio-ecologically sustainable economy,” said Perkins.
Envisioning a government making economic decisions based on values beyond dollars and cents will be even harder. Building local, sustainable economies that decouple from international trade appears not to be the agenda of federal governments that sell to voters’ prosperity built on a model of infinite growth.
Local, sustainably grown food — grown without subsidies, harvested without inflicting misery on field workers and delivered without harming the environment — is sold at a price that more closely reflects the true cost of production. The multinational cheeseburger does not.
Whether we decide to buy the $ 3 lettuce and not the $ 1 hamburger is a measure of our appetite for the truth.