Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

106 S politics and governance
There are many reasons why an economic doctrine over two
centuries old and on speed for the last 60 years could not work for
long in a biosphere with rules evolved over 3.5 billion years. They
are well described by economists such as Herman Daly, Robert
Costanza, Peter Victor, and Richard Douthwaite. The point
is that this president and those to follow must begin the diffi -
cult but necessary task of educating the public to understand why
the growth economy measured as quantity will end one way or
another and must be replaced by an economy based on durability,
quality, and fairness. It will be necessary to state the obvious but
often overlooked facts that the benefi ts of the growth economy
were distributed unfairly, and often in ways that were ugly and
inconvenient to boot. Urban sprawl, for example, fueled a great
deal of economic growth, but also squandered energy, time, land,
people, and quality of life. For those left behind in the cities, the
experience of growth has often been a nightmare of crime, diminished
services, bad schools, and joblessness. In either case, beyond
some fairly minimal point, the growth economy did not contribute
nearly as much to our well-being and happiness as promised
and is not sustainable anyway. The challenge for this and future
presidents is to use their authority and powers to free us from the
grasp of outworn economic doctrines and align our expectations
and behavior with biophysical realities.
S
True leadership, such as that shown by Lincoln and Franklin
Roosevelt, is the rarest of human traits. It is often confused with
management, which keeps the trains running on time and paper
moving effi ciently through the bureaucracy. 2 Management is
about effi ciency, what German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1940)
once called “functional rationality,” while leadership has to do
with “substantive rationality,” or the big choices that we make.
Leadership is about direction, relating our highest ideals to our