Can the world afford more economic growth?
To Wednesday's column, which said, "Economic growth is still the best prescription for human welfare," my friend and former Sun environmental columnist Tom Horton responds:
your column today is correct that growth serves us better than recession. but the real questions are how well does continued growth serve us--and might there be a better course than either growth or recession, such as a steady state, with relatively stable populations and an economy that develops, innovates, yadda yadda, without physical expansion.what you're telling readers is rather like a nutritionist saying you gotta keep overeating or you'll starve, without ever considering a healthy diet--and yeah, getting down to your ideal weight's not gonna be fun.
we've grown the global economy about five fold in the last fifty years, a rate that will take us to 80 times the size of the current economy by 2100; and we've given nature and our environment about the same attention as your column, which is the obligatory sentence toward the end that says, and of course we've got to be mindful of the pollution we cause---it's how we've degraded more than half of all our natural systems, from forests to fish, and seriously impaired the Chesapeake.
we're in a potentially very teachable moment with the old economy more open to questioning and rethinking than at any point in my life, and you might do a bit more of that: talk to some of the ecological economists like bob costanza at u of vt (I think you interviewed herman daly some years back, a decent interview as I recall); also peter victor, a canadian economist who has written a good book Managing Without Growth, about Canada, but also pertinent to the U.S. it's Elsevier Press.The fact is, growth isn't making us any happier...a sizeable body of literature on that (at least not in the developed world), and it's not solving poverty (the percent of people in poverty in the world has fallen, but because we're growing, more people than ever live on less than two bucks u.s. a day). And the myth that we can just grow smarter and have sustainability is not borne out by reality--Peter Victor has some very interesting stuff on how becoming more energy efficient doesn't seem to translate into using less energy (like doubling up portions when they come out with a low fat version of your favorite chips, I think).
Comments
The first issue to address is the overpopulation problem. Free contraception should be part of the discussion.
Posted by: NotableM | May 21, 2009 9:01 AM
Jay - I'd be pleased to be interviewed by you on economic growth (and by the way the publisher of my book Managing without Growth. Slower by Design not Disaster, is Edward Elgar.
Posted by: Peter Victor | May 21, 2009 7:04 PM
It is important to understand that when we use the word "growth" in regard to the economy, we're referring to a very narrow, questionable -- and recent -- notion of growth (GDP increase) that is only haphazardly related to improvement of human welfare. Long ago, Simon Kuznets -- who devised the national income accounts -- admonished congress against relying on it as a measure of well being.
The dilemma we now face is, in part, a matter of definitions. To truly grow -- in the sense of improving life -- we now need to dispense with a pecuniary fixation that can no longer serve as a vehicle for improvement. One of the great strengths of Peter Victor's book is that he puts the very youthful status of the contemporary obsession with economic growth into perspective.
It is arguable that the current consensus for economic GDP growth is a response to the trauma of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Up to now, we have indeed succeeded in keeping another great depression at bay. If the model wasn't broken, that success would be argument enough against fixing it. But the growth model IS broken. It is relentlessly generating clouds of catastrophic climate change and has failed even in its core mission of maintaining economic stability.
Posted by: Sandwichman | May 22, 2009 12:28 PM