Cancer: a word for uncontrolled (economic) growth

Buying compact fluorescent bulbs is good. Easy-going driving to save gas is good. It’s all good.

However, if we are to make a transition to a sustainable society, these things that we can do ourselves, personally, are not enough.

We citizens need to come to grips with facts, one of which is that our culture is immersed in a number of assumptions that are so pervasive we don’t even realize they’re there. It’s just like the air we breathe. Some of these assumptions are profoundly mistaken, and unless we, all of us, can begin to work our way out of them, the future looks perilous, indeed.

One such assumption is the need for constant growth. Our progress as a culture and an economy has always been driven, in part, by growth, and growth continues to be essential, it seems. When we take risks, as individuals or as a whole economy, and things go sour, as they recently did big time, the impulse is to try to grow our way out of trouble.

But nothing grows forever. We have a word for uncontrolled growth in cells: cancer. Why do we indulge in the delusion of endless economic growth? – Talk about unsustainability!

So let’s concentrate for the moment on just the orthodox imperative for economic growth.

Virtually all economic models are growth models. Yet, when you really think about it, no kind of growth in the physical world can go on forever. In a closed system like Spaceship Earth, there has to be a stop somewhere.

What has kept us from addressing this obvious fact is that growth has been seen as a remedy for deficit spending, unemployment and poverty. (The jobs problem is another very basic and misunderstood issue that I hope to address at length in another column.)

Some economists therefore are beginning to take up the task of thinking about a steady-state economy.

What would such an economy look like, and how would it work?

There should be no decline in satisfaction in such a world. In the face of everything being more elaborate now than it was 50 years ago, people are no happier now than then, research says. It seems that we’ve reached a point of saturation.

Once we eliminated the drive to produce ever more stuff, we’d all have to work a lot less, so there should be more time for family and recreation. The shrinking work situation would open space for people to look after one another in all sorts of ways that are now accomplished only in desperate haste. This kind of work, care for the elderly, home schooling, etc. might be incorporated into the formal work world, recognized as part of the GDP and subsidized. Such restructuring is quite realistic. The thing to keep in mind is that our civilization is phenomenally productive. Value is being created all the time. We can re-direct more, not less, of that value to things that enhance the quality of life.

In an associated values shift, there ought to be a greatly increased demand for truly durable goods, instead of the throwaway stuff we now tend to buy.

In general, a steady-state society would not have the crashes and booms we now tolerate, and consider to be “natural.” We would produce the goods and services that make life decent and satisfying, and shed the kind of competitive, position-obsessed acquiring of more and bigger stuff to “have bragging rights with my obnoxious brother-in-law,” or whatever.

A steady-state economy cannot exist independently of other reforms. We’d have to address some tough issues, mostly controversial because of attitude and ideology: Things such as stabilizing world population and actively addressing the now huge wealth disparity problem. This last item is itself an ecological problem. Tony Judt in his recent book, “Ill Fares the Land” says; “Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within… What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.” It is only since the 1980s that we have degraded, even thrown away, the ongoing policies of the advanced societies of the West: progressive taxation, provision of social services, economic oversight.

Yet, lest we think that all this reform is unlikely, radical or impractical, and that the current policies and attitudes stand firmly in opposition, consider this: Right here in Plymouth, the people and the various companies and foundations with resources have come together in the face of the current economic headwind and funded the building of the Plymouth Inter- generational Center, a civic project, conceived outside of government or religious structures, precisely crafted to meet ongoing quality of life needs for everybody. It was a visionary concept and is an expression of kindness and love. As this project is built and occupied, we can expect a continued outflow of enthusiastic volunteer efforts to make it the homey and vital place it is intended to become.

This kind of regard for the public good, right here in our community, is a local counter-example to the more general complaint that we Americans are concerned only with private wealth and are typically greedy, narrow-minded, suspicious and resentful.