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So in the 1930s when the welfare states were started, there was no
concern with the environment. There was an optimism that we could continue
to grow in the ways we had grown forever. They’re not thoughtless people,
obviously. Keynes was not thoughtless. He and others, if you have heard of
Myrdal in Sweden, and so on, just thought that it was inconceivable that people
would want so much that the desires for consumption could not be satiated by
producing things. They thought we would all have enough because once you
got the factories moving they would produce enough to meet all our desires.
But they didn’t know, besides they didn’t know about the environment or think
about the environment. They didn’t know about our insatiable desires. We want
a lot, all of us want a lot, and it turns out that their optimism was misplaced.
The welfare states have always assumed that we will all get richer. This is
an actual graph of Canadian income distribution, and it is not a typical country
in that way. Some other countries would have bigger slices in some cases,
other distributions, but the big blue slice there is about 45% that the richest
fifth gets of the income in Canada, and the smaller blue, smallest blue slice
beside it are what the poorest fifth get, and they get a lot less, of course.
They get around 5%. So, it’s about 10:1 between the Canadians, the richest
fifth get with the poorest fifth get. But, that’s been okay, so to speak, because
we’ve had the opportunity to take from the rich and give to the poor, a little
bit, not a lot, but enough, so everybody got richer. The rich didn’t mind paying
taxes, because they knew that they will still get more next year. And, the poor
were happy to get whatever could be gleaned from income transfer programs or
from public services. And this is just one little slide here of showing how
hustle incomes before there is a redistribution and after just even recently, the
way… taxing the rich and giving income to the poor, let alone services, actually,
it has been a way that we have dealt with the problems of income inequality.
What do we do now, I’m going to make a claim and you may disagree
with this claim, of course. What are we going to do now when welfare states,
the pies start to shrink? If people were always willing to pay taxes more or
less, nobody likes paying taxes, of course. But, if we were willing to pay tax as
the pie got bigger and bigger, what do we do when the pie starts to shrink?
And I’m going to claim that, in fact, all countries in this world, including
Thailand and every other country as well, is in this situation. You can argue
about that. We can have a long discussion about what the sustainable
development goals mean and the argument for that in the United Nations,
adoption of them in 2015. But, the bottom line is that, there is an assumption 0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT
that things are going to keep growing, and in that way we can deal with our
social problems as well as our environmental problems, indeed, when in fact we
may be unable to do that.
