Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

China has been swamped with technologies from the West. The abacus has been blown away. The "sedan," once the prerogative of princesses carried by sedan bearers and now with four wheels and motor, is the people's preferred transport. Smartphones have improved our lives. Yet cars and phones and new technologies also let in a host of burdens, debts, distractions, and other obligations. 

Social scientists from Tsinghua University have discovered that GDP became unhinged from the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) in 1993 and after 2001 GDP has rocketed while GPI has remained the same. We were as happy 13 years ago as we are now. New generations of technology have not made us happier and there are extra pressures of commuting, pollution and community expectations.

The old economic model, which moved on to new frontiers as the old one starved of resources and choked in pollution, is now clearly untenable in a finite world, where the global economy nests in a global environment.

It will definitely be new, and for the old guard who blindly pursued GDP growth at all costs, "normal" means not abnormal pursuit of growth. The foundations of successful economics are set out in a simple diagram where production of goods and services flows to consumers who in turn complete the cycle with flow of labor and entrepreneurship to production, for which they receive wages and profits.

It is a useful model, showing that because goods and services cannot be added together as things, the prices paid for them in the market, forming a flow going in the opposite direction, can be counted in money as a nation's output, the GDP. On the other half of the circle, money paid for wages and profit can total up to national income, and should equal GDP.

But China has discovered this is not "normal," not in 2014 for a global economy constrained in a finite global environment. Models once used of farm produce in village economies, of hunters bartering beavers and deer as per Adam Smith in 1778 and assuming that "abundant" nature is free, as David Ricardo did in 1817, are not the norm any more. After two centuries, this classic development model has a feature missing that is now painfully obvious.

When economic activity was small and the world was large, not only could we reach out to the land and forests and ocean and take resources for the cost of the catch, but also we could dump waste free too. Ricardo writing in England in 1817 that empty land was free could dream of the Americas. The Oklahoma Land Rush, 72 years later, seemed to vindicate that.

But that is not the norm for 2014. Ricardo could not have imagined that invisible and then unnamed gases would be monitored by the billions of tons and cause nations competing in markets to have to join together to address the distressed global climate.

The new economic development model is not based on a Dickensian factory churning out items for consumer/workers in a mindless cycle, a concept that has enslaved its followers even up to now, and even in China. Policy and judgment based on the old GDP model must give way to valuation with Chinese characteristics, founded not centuries, but millennia ago.

The new normal starts with an economy in a full world requiring structural reforms of production, distribution, consumption, and astute government. It pointedly acknowledges that blind production and consumption, irrational distribution and opportunities for corruption are abnormal, and those that pursue such activities are subnormal. Cleaner development in harmony with nature's ecosystems, meaningful productivity and wholesome consumption based on human creativity are the new normal.

The author is a China-based Australian researcher collaborating with several institutions on harmonizing economy with environment. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn