GDP has a way of over simplifying the most important things. A basic tally that says little about the overall health of an economy, its corruption or lack thereof, its long-term viability (or lack thereof), or its operational values and principles, and whether those values and principles approach reality or remain abstract, unpracticed ideals. GDP can’t capture distributions of wealth, environmental degradation, nonmarket transactions, and other metrics that can give a holistic reading of a nation’s well-being. I’m convinced that making and measuring green jobs across diverse sectors—from energy to manufacturing to construction, agriculture, waste management, and more—can catalyze a shift in the global market economy, adding an essential and weighted metric to an otherwise uninformative variable, GDP. Bowen et al. (2018) estimate that around 20% of American jobs were (directly and indirectly) “green” in 2014. A substantial investment to increase the proportion of green and indirectly green jobs to over 50 percent could fundamentally transform an economic system beholden to fossil fuels and ecological exploitation. Such a shift would challenge the existing economic order and realign our economic values to prioritize environmental sustainability at the same time as employment, elements essential for long-term economic resilience and growth.
Recall my proposal: simply put, we need green jobs. Less simple is the task of coming up with agreed-upon metrics for their definition, promotion, and aggregation, essential metrics if we want to find ways to ‘green’ old jobs and create new jobs that are themselves intrinsically green. But our first problem is definitional: “green jobs” is a fuzzy category with no universally agreed upon definition.1 Stanef-Puică et al., “Green Jobs—A Literature Review,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 19 (2022), 1-15 (13). doi:org/10.3390/ijerph19137998. (Chicago) I propose we approach “green jobs” less as an analytic category but a family resemblance among jobs that work towards sustainability in all its guises: preserving natural environments, reducing uses of natural resources, improving energy efficiency, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, etc. Suppose green jobs are understood to bear a family resemblance with shared, eco-friendly commitments. In that case, we can see how they might be promoted in sufficient sectors and created in sufficient numbers to overturn the old economic, fossil-fuel-dependent regime.
1960s Cabaret singer Sally Bowles coined the seemingly greedy aphorism, “money makes the world go round.” But, as Bill Vaughan points out, “Money won’t buy happiness.” Rather, “it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.”2Laurence Peter, ed., Quotations for our Time: Gems of Wit, Brevity, and Originality from Minds Ancient and Modern (London: Souvenir Press, 1978), 338. This is exactly what a Cambrian-style explosion of green jobs requires: money to pay the salaries of many varied and well-staffed research labs to study the obstacles inhibiting a needed explosion and the solutions needed to precipitate it. We need to incentivize university research in green science and invention so that successful discovery can be assimilated into industry, thus giving each industry, each sector—agriculture, transportation, energy, etc.—attractive opportunities to adapt to a future fast-running out of thermal leeway. Money has driven almost every major epochal cultural and global shift, so we do not have good reasons to think anything different will be the case here. Take the industrial revolution: if it had not been preceded by the “financial revolution”—i.e., the growth of banking, the ability to take out loans to fund massive enterprises that would only become productive in the future—it would likely never have occurred. Science, like industry, would not have advanced into its own revolution if not for the ascent of money, which introduced divisions of labor into societies that permitted some to excel and become profitable in agriculture, while others became profitable in their intellectualizing. Thus Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, as quoted by Niall Ferguson, who states that “the financial system [is] the brain of the economy . . . It acts as a coordinating mechanism that allocates capital, the lifeblood of economic activity, to its most productive uses by businesses and households.” We need to guide the financial system, the brain of the economy, to allocate capital to its most productive uses, but no longer for short term gain, for mere quarterly earnings or annual general meetings.
A green reorientation requires long-term thinking, something or species is perhaps ill-equipped for, and that education can correct. Such a reorientation requires both top-down processes (investment in research) and bottom-up processes (the cultivation of new, deep-time intuitions). The most significant development that could push humanity towards this is the development of a new curriculum, changing education from as early as kindergarten to emphasize sustainability and the impacts of climate change, and poising kids for change early on.
In exploring the paradigm shift needed in our economic valuation systems and research for an alternative approach, green jobs emerge as a pivotal element of this transformation. The path towards such a framework faces challenges, notable is the need for a universally accepted definition of “green jobs”, which necessitates the development of new terminologies, and a shift towards a more environmentally focused paradigm. Incentivizing both public and private investment in green research and investment in the green job market is pivotal for catalyzing innovation and fostering sustainability. The creation of a substantial number of green jobs across diverse sectors holds the ability to insight into a significant shift in the market economy. Establishing a metric to quantify this principle could greatly complement GDP, offering a more nuanced understanding of a nation’s economic health that considers environmental sustainability and social inclusivity as key indicators of prosperity. The shift towards green jobs not only has the potential to redefine how economic success is measured but also encourage a ‘social appearances’ effect internationally. By prioritizing green jobs, countries can signal their commitment to combating climate change, fostering an environment where countries thrive not to be seen as climate delinquents. This collective movement towards sustainability could redefine global economic properties, highlighting the importance of sustainability in achieving true economic prosperity and resilience.
