Some Thoughts on Sustainability, Insurability and Insurance

Abstract

There are clear indications that the present "old" industrial economy needs a serious adjustment to become compatible with the aims of a sustainable society. The main issues involved are the time factor, resource productivity and socio-cultural ecology.-the time factor: sustainability is a long-term societal vision concerned with the stewardship of natural resources and assets in order to safeguard the opportunities and choices of future generations. The industrial economy is often limited to a short-term optimization of throughput in monetary terms. Changing course towards a more sustainable society means to introduce the indeterministic time factor into economic thinking, which again implies an indeterministic vision of economics and the capability to deal with uncertainty.-resource productivity: in the present industrial economy, micro-and macroeconomic success is directly coupled with resource flows (flows of matter and energy), due to its linear structure. The per capita resource consumption of this system cannot be generalized to the less developed countries without a world system collapse. In order to become sustainable, industrial economies must operate at a much higher level of resource productivity, i.e. be able to produce the same utilization value out of a greatly reduced resource throughput1. This change of course can be achieved by decoupling economic success and resource throughput-one way to do this is to change to a service economy, in which the measure of success refers to the performance of assets (stocks) instead of flows, and to stock utilization (Giarini and Stahel, 1989/93).