Can We Have Continued Growth in a Finite World?

The 1 August 2010 print edition of The Oregonian carried an Op-Ed by Jack Hart, The Fallacy of Growth in a Finite World. In it, Hart, who's a former managing editor of The Oregonian, questions the premise that continued economic growth is always good.  

Hart asks some good questions: Do we really need to keep growing? Is 'sustainable growth' - the mantra of many today - an oxymoron? Can we really have a good life with a steady-state economy? Does consumption make us happy?

Hart believes continued growth is a drug:

But growth is also an addiction. And, like most addictions, it threatens to destroy us. Not only does it clog our freeways, but it also paves farmland, wipes out open spaces, saddles taxpayers with ruinous development costs and crushes the quality of life that attracted us to our communities in the first place. Growth sucks irreplaceable resources out of the earth. It dumps poisonous pollution into our environment. It crowds out the planet's other species and utterly fails to deliver the human happiness it promises.

Strong words indeed.

Hart mentions 'steady-state economics' a concept the believes we can have prosperity without growth, He mentions some proponents: Herman Daly, who coined the term, Bill McKibben; the New Economics Foundation ; the New Economics Institute; and the Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy.

He concludes:

Some worried academics and environmentalists think steady state is not enough. Three hundred of them met this spring for the first North American "de-growth" conference in Vancouver, B.C. The tenor of the conference, as one observer summarized it, was that "if everyone consumed even as much as Europeans, much less North Americans, it would take three to eight planet Earths to do it. Billions want more, and we still want more. A collision of unimaginable proportions is coming."

Despite the alarms, even the de-growth people seem to realize that practical solutions for heading off that collision don't include economic collapse, joblessness and the kind of chaos that would keep us from solving the very problems that got us into this fix. Millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and no politician will get far arguing that we ought to keep it that way.

But maybe it's possible to get growth under control while keeping families fed and communities intact. The goal of steady-state economics is, after all, reasonable incomes for all human beings in a more humane society that preserves the planet and promotes human happiness. That's a tall order. But we've satisfied tall orders before.

We can start on this one by questioning our near-universal assumption that growth is always good. And the next time a candidate promises unending growth, it wouldn't hurt if somebody in the audience asked, "What for?"

After all, as Edward Abbey long ago pointed out, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Give it a read, and check out the comments.

"The increase of wealth is not boundless. The end of growth leads to a stationary state." -- John Stuart Mill, from the column

"In war, there is no substitute for victory; in peace, there is no substitute for growth." --Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), from the column

Comments

[David Zetland]

1) Growth is not necessary for prosperity: http://aguanomics.com/2009/04/over-capitalization-and-sustainability.html

2) GDP measures of growth/output are useless

3) It's not good for us: http://aguanomics.com/2008/07/growth-cult.html