Architecture & Nature: Essays 1-5, 2002

Architecture and Nature
Essay No3 : The Complex Problems of Tomorrow – ­ Ethical Economics

In my book, Well Connected Architecture, published in 1994, I wrote the following about architecture, ecology and global economics:

“A new, wider and more appreciative Europe will not, hopefully, be just the creation in the coming years of the largest, most powerful single economic market that the world has ever seen, with its consequent energy growth demands, but also a staging post symbolic of the desire to achieve a more integrated, intelligent and compassionate society living together in the world.

Monetary economics has so far failed to find a way of dealing with social costs or with renewable resources. The present Western mania (indeed more and more global) for development based on a mechanistic and materialistic viewpoint, supported by the present inadequate economic methodology, has led to increased pollution on a global and local scale. Yet to most economists it appears that the social and environmental costs still remain intangible.

One may think that the point of economics is to help us manage the world better. I suspect, however, that few economists see it this way. It seems inevitable that there must be a change in the current economic way of thinking. Man developed the present model, and our actions still maintain it. A sustainable economy means a more compassionate one, in the way we relate to each other and the planet. We all know that the earth owes man nothing. The global spread of the free market economy (so far leaving aside the polar regions) sucking up the earth’s wealth will probably lead our present concept of progress into oblivion.

Competition has been and remains the conceptual trigger of our present economy and society. I do not believe that this is inevitable as is often argued. Collaboration, cooperation and indeed altruism are as common a natural inheritance as ‘survival of the fittest’. This is a clue to redefining economic ethics, where the economy is seen not only to serve people in a material sense but in a wider, more holistic context, where non-material issues are as important as material ones. We need more enlightened economists and others who can genuinely think long term.

The balance between individual well-being and the future direction of society depends on recognising that today’s electronic communication has created such an awareness of global interdependence that all actions and reactions should have a moral base. It will become increasingly difficult to ignore cause and effect consequences of individual and corporate actions that, hopefully, will increase social accountability. We should be looking towards an Age of Intelligence, both human and cybernetic, whose morality, informed by cultural and environmental awareness, is concerned with both global and local welfare.

© Ian Ritchie 03/2002