Prosperity for Rhode Island

There is an inextricable link.  A society can not end poverty without healing the ecosystems (local and global) it depends upon, nor can it heal the ecosystems it depends upon without ending poverty. A general prosperity depends on both ending poverty and healing ecosystems at the same time, and requires an effort that strengthens the linkage between the two.

The basic premise is that the paradigm governing current economic development policies is the wrong paradigm for creating a true prosperity.  The current paradigm is based on enriching the few and relies upon using up natural capital and calling that profit.  The results are poverty, ecological disasters such as global warming and the extinction epidemic, and rampant violence.  We need a new paradigm, and Rhode Island, due to its small size, is the perfect place to test these ideas. 

Three weeks after Roger Williams arrived in Providence in 1636, settling right on the banks of the Moshassuck River, one of his compatriots opined that the Rhode Island economy was in trouble and the best thing to remedy the situation was to give a tax break to all men of property.  Just kidding about Roger Williams and his friends, but for as long as there has been a Rhode Island there has been a lucrative industry in making suggestions to improve the economy, but mostly it has just lined the pockets of those who already have lined pockets while increasing poverty and leading to ecological decay. 

The Economic Policy Council, Economic Development Council, politicians, and practitioners of the dark arts of economics have for years been saying we can fix the economy, but it still does not work.  Children still go hungry, homelessness increases, there is ever greater disparity between rich and poor, and the land is less fruitful. 

Given the long term failure of economic development plans, it seems useful to at least examine if the economic growth promoters are promoting the wrong thing and if a new approach might be more useful. This may be even more important today when the physical limits of the Earth are being reached and the growth mentality that developed in the age of tiny wooden boats crossing tempestuous oceans seem to have run into the end of petroleum and the age global warming.  

It  is time for a study on what a sustainable Rhode Island economy might look like, how it might function, and what kind of prosperity would be possible while healing the ecosystem that support us and to get that information into the hands of the public and the policy makers.