Fantasy economics

You might think it wild-fantasy economics if the United Nations had a convention supporting the right of everyone to reproduce (that is, two per couple) backed up with ensuring the right of those children to have a chance of a healthy life.

At present world economies are at risk because the people of the United States are not consuming as much as is needed to make the wheels go round, they are not buying enough houses, despite population growth. How mad! That the biggest consumers, debt-ridden as they are, must continue to consume and waste more and take on more debt, or the world shakes.

Fantasy economics would prioritise the needs of the poorest people in the world who are to be the users (not consumers) that make the wheels go round.

Fantasy economics does not measure everything in dollars. Money is only a means of exchange. The measurement of quality of life could end up with sums in which the human population stabilised at five billion covered only half the land in its footprints, and the other half was shared with the rest of life – in jungles and rainforests, woodlands and bushland, savannahs, tundra, ice, and deserts that crept no longer.

Imagine. In my city of Melbourne, no longer condemned to a thousand more people every week, we might still be able to drink the finest tap water in the world, to have wildlife in our gardens, and place for children to play outside, and to enjoy close at hand, fine beaches and unique bushland and fertile farms.

A country like Tonga need not be dependant for 70% of its revenue on the expatriate funds from its children sent overseas, and so value continuing large families to make the problem even more incapable of solution. Solomon Islanders would not have to rely for funds on having their forests ripped out for timber, and in Kalimantan the jungles of the orang utang and the Dyaks would not have to give way to soil-doomed palm oil plantations and Javanese transmigration because the Indonesians must survive too. And in sub-Saharan Africa people would not need to turn the semi-arid into deserts by over-grazing and eat bushmeat.

When I worked in schools, one of my most popular projects was 'My Dream Island'. Ten-year-olds had readings about some other dream islands and a stack of books was left in classrooms – ranging from Narnia, Robinson Crusoeand Gulliverto Utopiaand Revelations, and then everyone designed their own – and we had everything from Lollyland and Criminal-land to visions and hopes that some of them still remembered ten years later. Adults today need wider possibilities for fantasies than our entertainment and our dystopias allow, and that can even exceed the parameters set by computer games like SimCity, stimulating as these can be to say to our minds, 'Hey, things can be different from what we have!'

Sometimes analysing in-depth what we have today is rather like stirring round chicken entrails to discern the future. Let's see where the live birds might fly to as well.