AS the cost of living statistics become more and more like a reject JG Ballard novel, and the party-political responses become ever more fatuous, I’ve been trying to go deeper – even just for sanity’s sake.

One invaluable guide to the economic struggles of the present is the economist James Meadway. He was an advisor to Jeremy Corbyn in the heyday of his leadership and a fellow traveller with the Yes campaign of 2014.

In widely available writings, Meadway has set himself the challenge of understanding how the pandemic and the climate crisis must change the very logic of modern economics.

Meadway starts by pointing out a massive implicit assumption in standard economic thinking – which is that economies will always eventually recover from “shock” events.

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These shocks can be internal to the system (boom and bust), or external (a pandemic virus). But eventually, something like 2% growth will be steadily recovered, once fluctuations caused by the shock are absorbed by the magic of the market, and the mitigations of the state.

But what if it’s shock, after shock, after shock? What if they are increasing in their rate, even incessant, rather than occasional and singular?

Climate catastrophe and geopolitical upheaval is going to make this likelier than not, with collapses in food systems, bottlenecks in energy supply and resource availability, massive migrations … Meadway suggests we need an entirely new economics for this – because the old one unthinkingly assumed “ecological stability”

(with industrial capitalism itself arising in a relatively calm environmental period, between the early 19th century and the 1980s). The biosphere we’re moving into is one of “guaranteed and foundational instability, from which stability may briefly emerge”.

Therefore the old methods of adjusting an economy, in order to restore “growth”, are looking increasingly absurd. As Meadway pithily puts it: “there is no wage low enough [or interest rate high enough] that will end the floods in Brazil that have damaged coffee production. Or call off the plague of locusts in East Africa. Or remedy droughts in Taiwan, which put the hugely water-intensive production of semiconductors at risk”.

Of course, price rises in commodities certainly aren’t helped by marauding authoritarian leaders, strafing Ukrainian bread-baskets. But the deeper fact, holds Meadway, is that most material inputs to production are going to be rising in cost, due to a disrupted biosphere and its consequences, in any case.

Yet the screaming injustice of the current moment – household energy and food bills doubling and tripling, while corporate suppliers of these goods equally increase their profits – points at a capitalism which, no matter how well-managed, simply can’t fulfil its historic function.

That function was to grow the pie for everyone so that both labour and capital could benefit, with the asymmetry between the two manageable and liveable-with. Yet what if there are hard (and hardening) planetary limits to the pie? Then there’s a fight for the remaining slices. And in a zero-sum game, for some to win, others have to lose.

What is starkly true in this situation is that an unregulated (or severely under-regulated) corporate capitalism wins, and the people lose.

Such egregious profit-making in these circumstances brings back the whole orchestra of left-of-centre policy instruments.

See France nationalising its energy companies, or international consensus on imposing windfall taxes, or the waves of cross-sector industrial action taking place.

But if Meadway is right, and tightening ecological constraints are compelling a low-or-no-growth future, don’t we have to start accepting how novel this situation is, as well as how serious it is? Might it compel us to start concretely preparing for a fundamental shift in lifestyles (which the Covid lockdowns began to hint at)?

Meadway’s suggestion is that, along with asking for redistribution of cash from bloated elites, we should “restructure the economy around resource-minimising consumption”.

That means reduced working time, more public holidays, more social spaces, more provision of care and education, more digital consumption.

“All still resource costs” notes Meadway, “but all of them more efficient than high material-use alternatives”.

George Monbiot has called this “private sufficiency, public luxury” (though the public part of that depends on how long we have to build and reform, before the next inevitable pandemic chases us indoors).

How do you feel about living in such a world? Are you ready to largely turn yourself away from the status consumption of unrecyclable stuff and services? For high streets and retail malls to buckle and morph into something else?

Will scary summers/winters, and shrinking disposable income, compel you to embrace profound changes in your work-life balance – if they are properly offered, thought through and structural?

At the very least, let us assume that nothing like this kind of vision will emerge from the Tweedledum of the pestilential Tory leadership contest. Or from the Tweedledee of a UK Labour Party that believes it’ll shuffle into power unnoticed, presenting the smallest possible target for any attack.

I maintain my hope that the possibility of an independent Scotland, and notably one led by a centre-left and a left-green party, will begin to build a society that can cope with, and bed in, these shifts.

I remain proud to be on the board of Common Weal: they are largely out there on their own, proposing policies and institutions, large and small, that take a worsening climate seriously but adaptively. I would also point readers to the work of Hillary Sillitto, whose book Scotland 2070 is full of clear-eyed, enterprise-minded proposals for a Scottish eco-state.

There’s just one element in Meadway’s analysis that I think is a bit insufficient. And that’s his scepticism about whether we’ll experience another technological upheaval that’s as transformative as the industrial and informational revolutions.

As I regularly explore in these pages, we are technologically in the best and worst of times – often as we contemplate the same devices.

The digital omni-surveillance that renders our souls up to tech giants (or to authoritarians) could also help us continuously monitor and moderate our energy usage.

AI can make us more like machines, or amplify our human imaginations. Editing our biology could unleash the worst bug of all, or deeply improve our mentalities and longevities.

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To be blunt, if we can’t afford to be stupefied by trash consumerism anymore, we might do worse than to expand our identities as science and tech-aware citizens. Where we take the time from necessary economic activity to inform ourselves, and then deliberate among ourselves, about the choices we should make with our incessant human ingenuity.

Meadway has a slightly dated but very funny line, when considering how our current capitalist arrangements encourage companies to do political lobbying for procurement, rather than radical innovation:“If you want to make money, is it easier to be friends with Matt Hancock, or to build a quantum computer?”

I think I would want an independent Scotland to be a place where money (or some other form of value) could be made by inventing and refining things like quantum computers, or more efficient batteries, or new super-materials. Along with new civic forms and behaviours that would benefit best from such innovation.

We’re being pushed to the wall.

So instead, let’s leap the wall first.