Here’s somewhere I stayed a couple of months back with the good folks from the Breathe network – Britain’s only purpose-built eco-hostel. It’s in the National Forest, part of an ambitious plan to re-forest a 200-mile strip of English countryside. Being in a ‘forest in the making’ means the hostel is currently surrounded by saplings and looks a little isolated, but once those trees have grown it’ll be beautiful.

What makes it an eco-hostel? It has overhanging roofs that shade the building in the summer and keep it cool without blocking natural light. The windows are all shuttered to keep heat in during the winter and out in out in summer. It’s also well packed with insulation.

On the roof you can see a solar hot water system, and the heating runs off a biomass boiler which is fed with wood pellets from the National Forest itself. The roof collects rainwater and stores it in an underground tank beneath the building, and that is used to flush the toilets.

To top it off, the canteen tries to source as much of the food that it serves locally.

To me, this is just the kind of future-facing building I want to see more of. It’s not wacky or waving its green credentials in your face. You could stay there and not notice any of it. It’s just a well thought-out building, a great hostel, and one that will have a considerably lower impact on its environment. I’ll have to come back in 20 years and see it with the trees full grown.

The Coming First World Debt Crisis came out in 2006, and is pretty much prophetic. Ann Pettifor was a debt campaigner with the Jubilee 2000 movement, and having spent years looking at developing world debts, turned to the overlooked issue of rich country debts. Her book spots a property bubble and an impending credit crunch, and foresees the costs of the crisis being passed to the taxpayer.

She predicts a financial crisis that turns into a sovereign debt crisis, and then into a crisis for democracy itself, with a prescience that is almost heart-breaking. Along the way there are some very useful notes on how banks create money – see the Positive Money campaign. There’s a great historical explanation of US Treasury Bills and the US’ unique place in the global economy too.

The biggest problem with the book is of course the second word of the title. The crisis isn’t coming, it’s well and truly here, and there’s a sense of stable doors and horses about it. I wanted to read it because if someone saw the problem from afar, perhaps they had some solutions in mind to prevent it happening. And while it might be too late to stop the crisis, at least we could take those suggestions on board in fixing things.

So what solutions does Pettifor propose? A new definition of usury is one big one: “usury is the practice of exalting money values over human and environmental values; of creating money at no cost and lending at rate of interest.” She describes how much of finance is parasitic, extracts money from the poor to deliver it to the rich, and makes a claim on the future. Fundamentally, banks have the right to create money, and they charge extraordinary sums for something that costs them nothing. This sort of usurious behaviour needs to regulated out of existence, putting finance back in its proper place as the servant of the economy and not the master.

Re-regulating the financial sector is a primary concern, and most of all, creating a healthier culture around money. Sizeable chunks of the book are dedicated to the ethics of banking, and the responsibilities than lenders need to accept in return for the privileges they enjoy.

The other reason I wanted to read the book is that I heard Ann Pettifor give a talk at the Greenbelt festival a couple of years ago, in which she proposed a jubilee for indebted developed countries. It was an outdoor lecture and it was raining and windy and just about the worst possible conditions to have to give a talk, but I heard enough to set me thinking. There’s not as much in the book about jubilee as I expected, but it gets a mention and I will refer to it when I get around to writing up my thoughts on the subject. I am increasingly convinced that a Jubilee-style debt write-off is the only way out of the current debt crisis.

It may be too late for the warnings in The Coming First World Debt Crisis, but there is still much to learn from this wise, angry, well informed book.

• Ann blogs at Debtonation.org

If you’re in the UK, you can listen on iPlayer. Otherwise, here’s the audio:

A third of the world’s population doesn’t have access to cheap energy. If current progress continues, there will still be 900 million people without electricity in 2030, and 3 billion still cooking on traditional fuels such as wood or animal dung. In fact, given population growth, there will be more people cooking with unhealthy and inferior fuels in 2030 than there are today. As a consequence, an estimated 30 million people will die from smoke-related diseases.

Despite this, access to energy is fairly low on the global to-do list. Perhaps that’s understandable, given the competing priorities of health, education, and basic poverty alleviation. But, as we’ve seen before with water and sanitation, infrastructure is a catalyst to all of those other aims. Access to energy has benefits across all those other legitimate social concerns. So Practical Action is campaigning for Total Energy Access, and the Poor People’s Energy Outlook is a way of monitoring progress. It “seeks to understand and communicate the real experience of people living in energy poverty, and show how people’s lives can be changed by energy access.”

Access to energy is a vital part of overcoming poverty. Imagine living without a fridge to store fresh food, or without electric lights to read by at night – your way of life is constrained by daylight hours. When you factor in not being able to use power tools, charge a phone, or run a computer, you can see the obstacles to business too.

Without access to reliable and affordable electricity, you can’t use any kind of machinery – whether that’s a mill to grind grain, a pump to irrigate fields, or a lathe to shape wood. You are shut out of global communications, and all the benefits of online services and information. You have to use simpler, old-fashioned technologies such as manual sewing machines or typewriters. Even if funding is available through micro-finance, you will never run anything more than a cottage industry. So developing countries need energy to do business, creating new opportunities and making existing activity more productive and efficient.

Energy is also vital to agriculture. Raising yields in African countries is a real priority in a world of rising food prices and growing populations, yet many small farmers still rely on hand tools and manual labour. Farmers need energy inputs to till, plant and harvest, and then for processing and storing foods. Energy allows you to increase local production and improve food sovereignty. You can also add value to your crops. If you can power a mill, you can sell flour instead of grain.

That poor people need access to cheaper energy is, in my opinion, not up for debate. The important questions are around how that can be delivered in a sustainable manner. There is climate change to consider, and there is no point in creating energy dependencies on dwindling resources. It would be counter-productive to mechanise a farm, only to see global diesel prices spiral out of reach of the tractor driver.

Energy access for all therefore requires a judicious combination of old and new technologies. Draught animals can double the amount of land cultivated, which is a big step up. Tractors can double it again and more, but remain too expensive for many small farmers. One approach to this problem is Integrated Food Energy Systems, where farmers grow food and energy crops together. The waste from one crop might serve as fuel for anaerobic digestion or biomass burning, which provides energy that irrigates another crop, for example.

Many poor people will be able to leapfrog to newer technologies and bypass older and more polluting forms of energy generation. Renewable energy will reduce the need for national grids and power stations. Mobile phones mean many places will never be connected to a landline phone system. Biogas will ease the pressure on forests for firewood.

Still, even with the best technologies available, there will still be a rise in CO2 emissions from the poorest countries. That’s why we in the West need to work in the opposite direction. As developing countries increase their energy use and fight poverty, we can create ecological space for the poor by reducing our energy use and eliminating waste.

Triple bunks? The government says no.

Today I discovered that I was homeless for much of my childhood. As you can imagine, this came as something of a surprise to me.

As I was making the baby his breakfast and listening to the radio, I heard a discussion of government plans to cap the total sum of benefits that a family can receive. This, the presenter was saying, would make people homeless. No, said home secretary Iain Duncan Smith, not as you and I understand homelessness. “The public thinks that homelessness is about not having reasonable accommodation to go to” he said. “That’s not the definition. The definition inside government and places like Shelter is that children have to share rooms.”

On that basis, it turns out that I was homeless for years at a time as a child and didn’t even notice.

So is that right, that the government defines children as homeless if they have to share rooms? I looked it up in the Housing Act, 1996:

175  Homelessness and threatened homelessness.

(1) A person is homeless if he has no accommodation available for his occupation, in the United Kingdom or elsewhere, which he… is entitled to occupy.

(2) A person is also homeless if he has accommodation but (a) he cannot secure entry to it, or (b) it consists of a moveable structure, vehicle or vessel designed or adapted for human habitation and there is no place where he is entitled or permitted both to place it and to reside in it.

(3) A person shall not be treated as having accommodation unless it is accommodation which it would be reasonable for him to continue to occupy.

(4) A person is threatened with homelessness if it is likely that he will become homeless within 28 days.

There’s nothing in Iain Duncan Smith’s statement that can be directly traced back to that legal definition of homelessness. But perhaps it lies in subsection 3, that it would be unreasonable to expect someone to live in a house in which children have to share a room. Reading on through the bill to understand what ‘reasonable accommodation’ might be, I’m pointed to the government’s definition of overcrowding, set out in the Housing Act 1985. A house can be deemed overcrowded by either the ‘room standard’ or the ‘space standard’:

325 The room standard.

(1) The room standard is contravened when the number of persons sleeping in a dwelling and the number of rooms available as sleeping accommodation is such that two persons of opposite sexes who are not living together as husband and wife must sleep in the same room.

(2) For this purpose— (a) children under the age of ten shall be left out of account, and (b) a room is available as sleeping accommodation if it is of a type normally used in the locality either as a bedroom or as a living room.

326 The space standard.

(1) The space standard is contravened when the number of persons sleeping in a dwelling is in excess of the permitted number, having regard to the number and floor area of the rooms of the dwelling available as sleeping accommodation.

Here is gets complicated, with the number of people allowed in a house with 2 rooms or 3 rooms, and the number of people allowed in a room of a certain size. A room of 90 to 110 square feet, for example, can sleep one and a half people. (Children under 10 count as half a person, according to the government.)

It also gets a little odd. You can be fined for overcrowding your house, but since you’d technically be homeless if your house was overcrowded, does that mean we fine people for being homeless?

Or since living rooms count as sleeping accommodation in the official definition, if you share a bunkbed with your brother in the box-room, you’re homeless, but you wouldn’t be if you slept downstairs on the couch.

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood that somehow, but I suspect the minister has too.  His paraphrase is certainly a little off the wall, although he’s right to say that the general public don’t understand the legal definition of homelessness. The homeless charity Shelter were also quick to suggest that he’s not got it right:

‘The Secretary of State said that, according to Shelter, a family where children share a bedroom would be defined as homeless” the charity said in an official statement. “This is simply not true.”

The 1996 Housing Act defines homelessness to include not just rough sleeping, but a broader range of circumstances that include reasons why people are unable to occupy their current home, such as because of a threat of domestic violence.

This wider definition is essential in order to capture the true scale of the problem and to tackle it effectively. Only the most severe overcrowding, such as people sleeping in kitchens, could be potentially considered by local authorities as homeless under the statutory definition. This would not include two children sharing a room.

So the good news is that perhaps I wasn’t homeless after all. The bad news is that our government minister in charge of homelessness doesn’t seem to understand it very well.

First, let’s put those questions in perspective and see why they are worth asking. In 2010, the world spent 2.6% of its GDP on the military – and you could do a lot with that. According to the Stern Report, preventing climate change would cost 1% of global GDP. The Millennium Development Goals are based on using 0.7% of the developed countries’ income. So you could end poverty and halt climate change and still have plenty left over.

Those are pretty serious competing priorities, but military spending is of course a product of international events. It ran high through the cold war, and then fell for a decade when the Iron Curtain fell. Margaret Thatcher predicted a ‘peace dividend’ as that money went towards more useful things. But then 9/11 changed the scenario entirely, and spending shot back up again as the US and its allies went to war in the Middle East. 2011 looks like the peak of that spending, and it may now begin to decline again as even the US has started cutting its defense budgets.

What’s interesting is that the amount we spend on defense doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with how dangerous the world actually is.

Throughout that decade, military spending rose by 50%, but the number of armed conflicts fell. Much of that spend increase was on the ‘war on terror’, but more US citizens are killed by lightning strikes than by terrorists.

Military spending is political, guided by economic priorities as well as security risks, and often responding to fear in an uncertain world. When you stop to think about it, an all-out conventional war against terrorists is impossible, but it made people feel much better to see something being done, and presumably there were plenty of secondary goals that made the ‘war on terror’ worthwhile.

So that’s the first reason to think that we could cut our military budgets considerably: we’re already spending far too much for the risks we face. In fact, the very existence of big military budgets may well make the world less safe. The Cold War and its arms race is the obvious example, but it’s a general principle. There are of course rogue states, but generally speaking peace-making begets peace-making, and aggression pisses people off. Global armament or disarmament runs on an I-will-if-you-will basis. Nine times out of ten, diplomacy and reconciliation are better approaches than ramping up the rhetoric, or worse, striking out in vengeance.

Fortunately, there are the forums for this kind of thing where there weren’t before. The UN, the international criminal courts, regional intermediaries such as the Arab League, the EU or the African Union, all of these can be places where differences can be settled and solutions found. In the past, if you had a beef with your neighbour you would have to deal with it between the two of you. There are many other options now: UN resolutions, economic sanctions, inspections, the granting or withholding of aid or trade. In such a interconnected and interdependent world, you can count the number of genuinely rogue states on the fingers of one hand.

With those mechanisms in place, there is scope for more alternative military arrangements, and plenty of other countries are demonstrating every day that you can get by without a massive army. As a percentage of GDP, Germany spends half as much as Britain does, and is still the major power in Europe. The UK spends 2.7% of its GDP on defense, despite being an island nation with no obvious enemies. We have less than 1% of the world’s population, but 3.7% of its military spending, enough to give us the fourth largest military budget after the US, China and France. Presumably that’s a historic inheritance, from the days of empire and the Second World War. (It’s notable that the winners of WWII, the members of the UN Security Council, are still the top five biggest military spenders today.)

But could we do without armed forces altogether? Maybe – there’s precedent for it. There are 14 countries with no armed forces at all, most of them small island states. Most of these have a patron of some kind for emergencies. Samoa, for example, has a treaty with New Zealand if they get into trouble.

The most progressive country on the list is Costa Rica, who permanently dissolved their armed forces in 1949 to protect the country’s democracy. The constitution forbids the forming of a standing army, making them pretty much unique. Their role as international peacemakers has been well recognised: they host the UN’s University for Peace, and former President Oscar Arias won the Nobel Prize. “Without a doubt,” Arias said in 1999, “military spending represents the single most significant perversion of worldwide priorities known today.”

Other countries have paramilitaries or a home guard of some kind, but no armed forces as conventionally defined. Panama has survived with no armed forces for 20 years, and its been 140 years since Iceland had an army. Haiti has a police force with limited military capabilities instead of an army, as does Mauritius.

Japan is also an interesting case, and is certainly the largest country with alternative military arrangements. Under the peace terms of the Second World War, the US banned Japan from military operations outside their own borders. That defense-only policy has continued ever since (with a couple of notable exceptions, see North Korea). To this day Japan refuses to invest in offensive weaponry, although the rise of China is prompting a re-think in some political circles.

Japan’s defense-oriented policy was apparently partly inspired by Switzerland, who are famously politically neutral and refuse to get involved in other countries’ wars. The Swiss haven’t been to war for 500 years, but they still take defense seriously: every male citizen has to do military service and they contribute to UN peace-keeping missions.

So could a country exist without armed forces? Absolutely. It’s not for everyone – I wouldn’t recommend it to Israel or Taiwan. And it goes without saying that it depends entirely on context. Raise this question and within seconds someone will have said ‘what about the Nazis?’. And they’re right that it would have been daft to disband the army in the 1930s, after a long legacy of European wars and a rising tide of aggressive nationalism. But that’s a very different context to today. Who are Britain’s enemies today? And how many of them are a genuine threat?

For more, see:

• Ploughshares
• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
• Hazel Henderson‘s work on replacing national military capacity with global military insurance.

• Samuel Alexander and the Simplicity Institute are producing some great research on downsizing and post-growth lifestyles. If you consider yourself to be living a life of voluntary simplicity in any way, head on over and fill in their online survey.

• The Simplicity Collective is the more community-focused side of the Institute, and the website is a nice mix of the thought-provoking and the poetic.

• I recently met Jeff White from the Lifestyle Movement, which has been inspiring people to live simply since 1972. “If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed” says their flyer.

• Adrian recently wrote from Eco-Congregation Scotland, a group that encourages churches to think through their environmental impact. It represents 274 churches in Scotland, and the blog has related news and information. The broader Eco-Congregation site has networks in England and Wales, Ireland, Norway and Canada.

• Living Lightly also works with churches to inspire Christians to think through their lifestyles, and is run by Arocha, the only Christian conservation agency I’m aware of.

There are two kinds of ‘more’, says Atwood in the course of a discussion on transhumanism.

“The first is, of course, the echoing ‘more’ pronounced by Oliver Twist when he is being starved in a foundlings’ home by venal officials. That ‘more’ is the legitimate response to ‘not enough’. It’s the ‘more’ of real need…

The second ‘more’ is in the film Key Largo, in the remarkable exchange between the Humphrey Bogart character and the Edward G Robinson evil crook. The crook is asked what he wants, and he doesn’t know. Humphrey knows, however. ‘He wants more’, he says. And this is what the crook does want: more, and more than he can possibly use; or rather, more than he can appreciate, dedicated as he is to mere accumulation and mere power.”

When it is a response to scarcity, more is good and growth saves lives. It is when ‘more’ becomes an end in itself that it becomes a problem. That distinction is vital to the message of this blog, which can otherwise be misinterpreted as anti-progress or callous towards the poor.

Being wary of ‘more’ doesn’t mean we aspire to an equally abstract ‘less’. Between those two kinds of ‘more’ is ‘enough’, and that’s where we need to find our balance.

In other words, it’s a stern reminder from the temples of economic orthodoxy: do not meddle with the markets, do not interrupt growth, do not ask questions. It would be easy to ignore, except that these sorts of papers are bound to be cited, repeatedly, by anyone whose purposes it serves. And it is wrong on many levels.

If you’ve been following this debate, you’ll know that this is a response to David Cameron’s new Index of National Happiness. The Prime Minister commissioned this last year from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, as a complementary metric and guide for policy making. It’s there to measure the many things that GDP can’t reflect, and the first results came out in November last year.

But, it’s got the Institute of Economic Affairs worried, probably because it suggests that the government might pay more attention to real people in future, and less attention to economists. The horror! So they’ve got together a collection of eminent contributors and issued this series of essays. Unfortunately, it either misunderstands or misrepresents the idea of wellbeing metrics throughout.

First, it begins by dismissing the credentials and sophistication of the wellbeing movement. “The scholars who first measured GDP realised from the outset that it had serious limitations” writes Paul Ormerod. “The same point applies to the happiness data, yet it is scarcely recognised by the proponents of happiness-based policies.” This is nonsense. There’s a long and ongoing debate about how to measure wellbeing and how useful ‘happiness’ actually is.

In fact, the way that the IEA uses ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ interchangeably shows that they haven’t done their homework. Happiness is just one part of wellbeing, which is a broader term that includes a sense of purpose, autonomy and resilience, quality of relationships, work satisfaction, and the ability to contribute meaningfully to society. This is reflected in the differing hedonic and eudaimonic approaches within the movement. The first asks ‘are people happy?’ and is concerned with reported feelings. The second asks ‘are people flourishing?’ and looks at individual and social functioning too. The IEA are apparently unaware of the more sophisticated and holistic approach.

Having over-simplified the debate, the paper then sets up a false choice, pitting the ‘wellbeing agenda’ against the growth agenda. The whole first section is called ‘GDP or GWB?’ as if it’s an either/or situation. “The wellbeing movement” worries Ormerod, “suggests replacing GDP altogether with a measure which purports to describe not the material prosperity of a population, but its happiness.” Does it? Surely no single metric can sum up progress, and a wellbeing index would have to be used as part of a broad set of measurements including life expectancy, levels of literacy, ecological footprints and yes, GDP.

Then we get to the original research, where the team attempt to disprove the long-running observation that increased wealth delivers diminishing returns once people reach a point of satiation. So you get graphs like this one, that shows life satisfaction plotted against income. “Our graphical analysis suggests that subjective wellbeing rises with the log of income” they say.

But note that the horizontal axis here is a log scale – it doubles with each move to the left. What this graph actually demonstrates is that as GDP rises, it takes ever larger increases in income to deliver greater satisfaction. According to the graph, someone on an income of $64,000 would need to double that to $128,000 to see the same degree of satisfaction that someone on $2,000 would get from a rise to $4,000. That looks a lot like the law of diminishing returns to me, just disguised by the choice of visual presentation.

Next Christopher Snowdon contributes an essay on how there is no evidence that people living in more equal countries are happier. On this he’s correct, but inequality can be linked with a whole host of social ills. There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that more equal societies do better, and the absence of happiness among the many benefits of equality doesn’t weaken the case at all. Greater equality also guarantees a slice of any of that much-prized GDP growth that the IEA seeks to champion.

Finally, the paper turns to wellbeing and government intervention. Here it makes a rather bizarre assumption: that pursuing wellbeing means big government and central planning. This is daft, especially considering that David Cameron is the main target of the paper, and he is an advocate of both wellbeing and small government. “Larger government does not imply a happier population” writes Christian Bjørnskov soberly, as if there was anyone, anywhere in the world going “why am I so unhappy? I know, it must be because the government is too small.”

Having belittled the wellbeing movement, then oversimplified it and hashed the data, the monograph concludes by taking the worst possible interpretation of its motives. Wellbeing advocates aren’t just social scientists wondering why it’s so wrong to ask if economic growth means actual progress. They’re utilitarian utopians who believe that happiness can be centrally planned by totalitarian governments. The editor even admits this is a flawed argument, but then concludes with it anyway. “The reader may consider that this is knocking down a straw man and that nobody seriously believes that societies should be centrally planned to maximise happiness, just as nobody really believes these days in centrally planning an economy to maximise wealth.” Exactly, so let’s stop there shall we?

Finally, the monograph doesn’t maintain a coherent position across its many authors, and manages to contradicts itself. One section decides that wellbeing research does have some value: “we conclude that subjective wellbeing data is indeed likely to be useful in assessing trends in global wellbeing.” But nobody briefed Pedro Schwartz. “Happiness economics” he decides, “must be pronounced an unworkable project”. Likewise one statistical section claims a “positive but somewhat less precise relationship between growth in subjective wellbeing and growth in GDP”, while another admits that no link exists. “The mere fact that economists have, hitherto, found little evidence of happiness increasing with income does not mean that happiness does not increase with income – it could also mean that the evidence has not yet been found” says Philip Booth.

Ultimately, …and the Pursuit of Happiness is a work of ideology, of economic dogma. It is riddled with big government paranoia and fear of redistribution, pro-growth tub-thumping and faith in the markets. Which is a shame, because if the Institute of Economic Affairs hadn’t been so determined to see wellbeing economics as a threat, there could have been some genuine engagement with the issues. Instead, it comes across as a defensive, knee-jerk reaction from an economic philosophy that knows it has no place in the 21^st century.