We need a resilient economy, one which creates the good jobs that give people the income to live good lives now. It must have the security to make us confident we can live good lives in the future. It must be useful, diverse, and non-exploitative. It can not contain high levels of risk, or which falls over in a crisis. This resilient economy must be based on a resilient environment, able to regenerate itself and sustain our lives now and in the future.
To help visualise what Resilience Economics might mean in practice, the following is a short list of some of the high-level goals these economics suggest for Scotland:
― Scotland must create an economy which is more productive and useful and which reduces low-pay and insecure jobs with high-pay, secure ones
― Scotland should do much more to prioritise domestic productive business over corporations and help and encourage those businesses to develop themselves as part of a new green economy
― Scotland should get property price inflation under control so excessive rents and mortgages don’t undermine the economy again
― Scotland should make banking safe and boring so that a reliable and resilient banking sector can be trusted to provide crucial services – with risk-takers being allowed to fail
― Scotland should reduce the volume of commercial retail and to transition away from a reliance on the low-pay service sector
― Scotland must begin a major programme of green reindustrialisation and increase domestic manufacturing capacity
― Scotland’s recovery must be driven in part by land-based industries and so land reform will be crucial
― Scotland must adopt an ‘entrepreneurial state’ model working to a national industrial strategy
― Scotland must very substantially increase the proportion of our economy which is domestically owned
― Scotland must use the economic rebuilding post-virus to move rapidly to start a radical Green New Deal
― Nothing in Scotland’s recovery and its subsequent re-industrialisation process must be considered if it does not decrease economic inequality and poverty.