Reducing inequality will help make our society more sustainable

A recent report and article in the British Medical Journal by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett highlight the relationship between sustainability and income inequality. They find that happiness and life expectancy are no longer related to wealth. The graphs below from the report show that we have well and truly passed a point of diminishing returns where large increases in wealth have relatively little effect on life expectancy or happiness.
 

However, relative incomes within a society are strongly related to health and wellbeing outcomes (see more graphs from the report below - there are many more examples in the report). They argue that this is related to status differentials rather than material benefits. 

Greater inequality leads to competitive consumerism, as people compete for material displays of status, which in turn leads to much higher greenhouse gas emissions (see graph from the report below).

They conclude that achieving a more equal, sustainable society will require "people's willingness to act for the common good" rather than "private greed, short termism and sectional interests" (p45). We need to focus more on developing social capital; and less on economic growth. 

Can status-seeking drive sustainable behaviours?

A recent study by Griskivicius et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has linked peoples' preference for green consumer products to status seeking behaviour. Their experiments showed that people were more likely to choose less luxurious green products after reading a short story that activated their status motive. This effect increased when the choice was made in public rather than in private, and when the green products were more expensive than the non-green products. They explain their findings using evolutionary psychology - costly signalling theory, which suggests that conspicuous conservation behaviours show others in a social group that a person a) is pro-social rather pro-self, and b) that they have the spare capacity to sacrifice resources (time, money, etc) to choose the less personally-beneficial product.

These findings have implications for corporations who are marketing green products - although the idea of increasing prices to make green products more attractive may have undesirable outcomes from an equity point of view! These findings are also interesting when imagining the role of private enterprise in a sustainable society - it may be false to assume that status-seeking behaviours inevitably lead to poor environmental outcomes.

Google N-gram Viewer - tracking social change

A recent article in Science discusses the use of the data encapsulated in Google Books to analyse social trends by looking at the frequency of words or phrases over time. Google has made this data available, and perhaps more usefully, developed a tool (Ngram Viewer) that allows exploration of the data online. So for example, we can see below that the frequency of the phrase "corporate social responsibility" has been trending upwards since the 1960s, while the use of "environmental sustainability" exploded after 1985.

UPDATE: An interesting critical view on the data set used (Google Books) from the humanities at Stanford University's ARCADE 

Are we reaching peak travel in developed countries?

A recent study by Stanford University researchers published in Transport Reviews suggests that per capita travel (motorized travel by car, public bus & train and domestic plane) has reached a plateau in developed countries. They conclude that total per-capita CO2 emissions from travel in developed countries could decline as the carbon intensity of transport continues to decline.

via Lavatus Prodeo

Imagining a sustainable Melbourne - Short Films at Fed Square

Apparently VEIL has some short films showing on the big screen at Fed Square over summer created by students and lecturers of four Victorian universities imagining a sustainable Melbourne in the future. I'll post a program when I can find one.

via Sustainable Melbourne.

The role of population in moving towards a sustainable Australian society

A very fiesty debate on the role of population in progressive politics in this months' Overland between Dr Mark Diesendorf and former Greens senator Andrew Bartlett - available in full here on the interwebs.

Corporate repositioning based on sustainability drivers

An example of a company making significant adjustments to their business based on perceptions of sustainability.

"In recent years we have been aware of the shift in our market to more sustainable solutions, which has led us to reconsider our name and position."

http://glggreenlifegroup.createsend5.com/T/ViewEmail/r/CB8E65DB8086C5E8/03B34709663B4DCFC9C291422E3DE149