Meredith Thring is the author of The Engineer's Conscience , chairman of the charity Poweraid and a Fellow of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering. I have shown in my book 'The Engineer's Conscience' that this optimum level of consumption is one which the Earth could supply to many billions of people on a permanent basis. The only hope for our descendants is if the judgement of success becomes Quality of Life rather than wealth' It is obvious that the average Quality of Life is low when the standard of living is so low that people are starving or desperately scratching a bare living. But a study of the rich societies shows clearly that Q is falling due to the loss of all life purpose other than the desire to acquire luxuries and wealth. Ambitious people are never satisfied with their wealth and power and elbow others out of the way to get it, often either coming a cropper or reaching the end of their lives with a nagging guilty feeling.
Defence lawyers become the highest paid people.
Adding to the fundamental distress of feeling that they are useless, the unemployed are subjected to the stigma that it is their own fault. Many people are terrified by the risk of losing their jobs. Thus the Equilibrium Society must be based on the principle that everyone puts at least as much into the system as they take out. The way in which this change of paradigm will come about will probably be when one or other of the disasters looms so clearly that people are really frightened, just as we accepted rationing when we were frightened of Hitler. The other civilisations which lived in equilibrium with the ecosphere for thousands of years, such as the North American Indians, the Kalahari Bushmen and the Australian Aborigines were basically nomadic, with very few people to a given area of land.