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.

Continue reading "Can the world afford more economic growth?" »

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Poverty & Wealth
        

Tyler Cowen is a great blogger in part because he understands nuance. A libertarian, he nevertheless has no detectable partisanship bias. He constantly tests his own assumptions. He rarely gets angry. He is happy to acknowledge good points by his opponents. But every now and then, equanimity and magnanimity must step aside for spleen and pique. Cowen trashes Phillipe Diaz's The End of Poverty. If Cowen's description is accurate, the film richly deserves it.

Blowhards everywhere take note: The critique is all the more powerful coming from someone who is not a chronic screamer. Some excerpts from his review:

If you ever thought that [Ayn] Rand’s [clueless lefty] nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore....

In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies....

Diaz and company also fail when it comes to simple fact-checking. At about the one-hour twenty-three minute mark we are told that an expenditure of $20 billion would cut global poverty in half; this sum is then compared to the much larger U.S. military budget and the suggestion is that Americans are being greedy. You don’t need much calculation to see that this is nonsense. Under any plausible assumptions, this sum is less than $10 per poor person in the world....

In this light it is entirely appropriate that the producer of The End of Poverty, Beth Portello, previously worked for Nike and Adidas. I see nothing wrong with her having done so, but one would think Diaz and company would, given these companies’ well-known reputations for running sweatshops in poorer countries. I’m willing to state that those sweatshop jobs are better than the “natural economy” jobs they displaced, but are Diaz or Sheen? The Cinema Libre website tells us that Portello is “making amends” for her past, but in reality she is repeating it—except that now she is no longer giving poor people stable jobs at higher wages than they had before.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Poverty & Wealth