Belief in the End of Growth as a Social Nightmare

Belief in the End of Growth as a Social Nightmare

Many people are horrified at the suggestion of abandoning composite growth as the primary goal of economic activity. This horror seems to arises from several (mis)conceptions about what this abandonment applies:

1. Everything will be frozen in place exactly as it is now. People who are poor will remain poor forever (It is amazing how many people will tell you that the Americans, Europeans, Australians, Japanese, etc must go on getting richer in order to save the Africans, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans etc from the horrors of eternal poverty). The accumulation of technological and scientific knowledge will cease. Life will be dull and boring forever after as the advance of civilization grinds to a halt.

2. I am not financially secure now, and if growth comes to an end I never will become so. This conception is really part of conception one but is more direct and personal.

3. The only alternative to a growth oriented economy is Soviet style central planning. Since this is a fate worse than death we might as well grow until we collapse. Of course most of the believers in growth do not believe in a future collapse. The more realistic people admit that growth will end someday when we are rich enough. Exactly how we are going to organize society in this future paradise of universal riches is not clear, but hopefully this paradise will occur at such a distant date that you and I will not be forced to deal with the consequent horrors of a planned economy.

Let me address these ideas one by one:

1. The abandonment of composite growth as the end all and be all of economic activity does not imply a petrification of human society any more than the fact that the earth’s biomass has not been continuously increasing over the hundreds of millions of years of the history of life on earth implies that the evolutionary tree has taken on a fixed and petrified form. The idea is not to eschew all change but to eschew short term increases in the total volume of economic exchanges as the primary measurement of economic ‘health’. The primary output of our social system should be healthy, long-lived, intellectually and artistically productive human beings, not piles of toys. Obviously we need growth in non-fossil sources of energy, in energy efficient housing, in public transportation, in sustainable food production systems, etc. But there is no physical reason why the growth of these valuable outputs in the OECD countries has to be pursued in the context of the overall composite growth of economic exchanges of all types. And in point of fact by eliminating the production of wasteful or frivolous products and services we can speed up the growth of these desirable outputs.

Of course extremely poor areas of the world do exist where overall growth of the local economy is desirable. I am not rejecting all growth; I am embracing the idea of economic maturity. The idea that continued excessive resource use by the richest parts of the developed world is helping to pull the underdeveloped world out of poverty is one the craziest, self-serving pieces of nonsense that I have ever encountered. Clearly the amelioration of poverty in a finite world must involve an equitable sharing of natural resources and of the outputs of the economic process. The idea that poor people will remain poor for ever if the overall global economy stops growing is based on the assumption that current huge inequities in wealth distribution and in wage rates is going to remain frozen in place forever. These inequities can be fixed if the political will to do so exists.

The accumulation of scientific and technical knowledge will not stop. The question is to what ends should this increasing knowledge be directed? My contention is that in the OECD countries it should be directed toward increased efficiency and toward decreased resource consumption and decreased ecological footprint. If it is necessary to redistribute wealth in order to give a decent standard of living to people in these societies who are still poor despite the very high average incomes, then we should redistribute wealth rather than insisting that the rich have to go on getting richer. I am not opposed to the idea of any society getting wealthier if such increase is consistent with the long term health of the ecosystem. But cling to economic forms which are incapable of a steady state or a contracting total output when circumstances require it is insane.

2. The assumption that I am personally insecure without further economic growth is an assumption that the individualistic, every person (or least every family) for themselves attitude of our current society will continue forever. This attitude perpetuates the current system. Only when a majority of the population becomes willing to abandon the competitive accumulation paradigm in favor of a paradigm of cooperative community wealth will there be hope of significant societal change. I advocate the abandonment of the competitive accumulation paradigm because I do not believe it will work for me. I believe that for the vast majority of people mere financial wealth (which is a contractual claim against the output of the community) will vanish as the economic health of the community breaks down because of our dedication to the principle of wealth concentration in a world of finite resources.

3. The ‘Wall street or the Politburo’ dichotomy cannot be disproved. I think, however, that belief in this dichotomy is more a matter of religious faith than of objective thought. Using human history to inductively ‘prove’ what human nature is or is not capable of is a dangerous game. Did the failure of the Greek city states or of the Roman republic prove that democracy and human nature are incompatible? Did three billons years of existence in the oceans prove that life was incapable of living on land? We are dependent members of a community whether we like it or not. If the workers of the world went on strike tomorrow, even Bill Gates would be out of luck. The creation of stable community wealth should be the goal of economic activity and not the competitive accumulation of short term private wealth. If cooperative, democratic, economic production cannot be achieved because corrupt human nature will not allow it, then the end of growth is going to be a very grim affair indeed.

Jan 10, 2008