It’s time we had a conversation about “growth.”
By that, I mean it’s time to challenge the model that shapes contemporary economic assumptions and society as a whole. I have only a layman’s perspective, but it seems to me that the conventional wisdom that “growth” rather than “sustainability” is the primary goal for human enterprise, is fundamentally unsound.
Even on the most abstract plane, one can argue that the nature of our visible world is self-limiting and finite; so it stands to reason that economic models and expectations that do not honor that blanket truth represent magic thinking.
Nature strives perpetually for balance in order to sustain its life-forces; and when uncontrolled growth runs amok in nature, it is a cancer that quickly extinguishes life. We see this principle demonstrated all around us every single day, and yet the economic and political assumptions that drive human endeavor remain stubbornly resistant to the lessons being repeated by the natural world since long before mankind learned to count.
Some consideration has been given, from time to time, to population, with all its implications; but we never seem to have extrapolated from that conversation about population to one about the inherent folly of striving for perpetual economic growth. We’re actually more comfortable talking about the possibility of limiting human population, with all that implies, than we are with the idea of abandoning forever any idea of growing richer…let alone the thought that achieving a truly sustainable world at this point would most likely require that some of us should be somewhat poorer.
Ironically, nature is pretty good at limiting populations, unaided by human intervention; but as economic models are human constructs, nature can’t apply the brakes.
Wall Street, that pinnacle of magic thinking, has foisted on us the idea that unlimited growth is not only possible but compulsory; so much so that corporations engage in all kinds of financial sleight-of-hand to convince their stock-holders that they are meeting this phantom goal. And the interests of Wall Street have become firmly wedded with domestic economic policy. They are almost indistinguishable now. Those interests almost completely exclude sustainability in order to focus on the next quarter’s bottom line.
In a finite system, for some to benefit from perpetual growth, perpetual contraction is necessary in an opposing sector. This is the stuff of expanding income inequities that are rendering thread-bare the very fabric of America.
The politicians and conventional media won’t talk about it, because it flies in the face of the great American myth of upward mobility; so it’s really up to us.
Pass it on.
One that has been sustained for quite some time by mortgaging the future of our kids for the benefit of an increasingly belligerent and self-centered group of wealthy and powerful. While there has certainly been some trickle-down benefits for the rest of us, our well-being as a society is clearly not the goal of this particular setup.
I wrote this diary on GMD, asking if anyone could envision how a no-growth economic model would/could actually function. Nobody could really come up with a solid answer. Try again?
But the idea of a “steady-state” sustainable civilization has no precedent in human history that I know of. The balloon either inflates, deflates, or pops. And natural systems, despite our claims of being “in balance”, are never really so . . . long before humans, every fish, bug, weed, germ and rat has been at war with everything around it, either dying or evolving and multiplying. If I sound off-topic, it’s just that I don’t think we are exempt from all the laws of nature.
The subject is relevant in Vermont because the kind of low-density growth we have up here is so wasteful and onerous, and I agree when you point to Wal Mart as an example. I don’t have a problem with thoughtful growth in town and city centers. But we’re of two minds in Vermont; we hate sprawl, but we fear density. We don’t want the big boxes or the McMansions, but we don’t want taller buildings in Burlington, even if they are greener than detached homes.
Like it or not, our social contract with the older and less able among us, is predicated on a larger pool of younger workers. Until we change this model (which I do not expect any time soon) then “growth” will always be the mantra. If there is another way out I would like to hear about it!