A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Can we do without growth?

Bill McKibben writes in the LA Times of the need, primarily for environmental reasons, to cure ourselves of our addiction to economic growth (“Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” Edward Abbey once wrote).

But my question is this: is is possible to have an economy that is both sustainable and wealth-creating? There are still millions and millions of people in the world living in abject poverty and simply putting the breaks on economic growth (assuming that’s even possible without seriously draconian measures) hardly seems like an option. It’s easy for us, who have so much, to tut-tut growth, but I doubt people in the third world would see it quite the same way. Can growth in the developing world continue in spite of a massive reduction in growth in the developed world? I guess my wory about some of the “localist” agenda is that it will effectively cut the very poorest people in the world out of the circle of production and exchange.

I don’t know what the answer to this is (McKibbon himself seems to be trying to addess it in his new book, which I haven’t read), and I’d like to learn more about what people are thinking about these kinds of issues. But if the environment is in as much trouble as many think, then we’re likely to be spending a good chunk of the 21st century trying to figure it out.

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8 responses to “Can we do without growth?”

  1. Andy

    You’re certainly right to raise the issue of global poverty, but I’m not so sure that our ecomonic growth doesn’t hurt as well as help the poor. We definitely need to do something, and we can fix extreme poverty much faster than we can slow down our economic machine.

    Have you noticed that the general free market/economic growth approach wherein the rich get richer but the poor benefit too is essentially a pyramid scheme?

    My feeling is that to really fix things, we would need to fundamentally rethink our ideas concerning private ownership. I’m not suggesting that we adopt communism or communalism, but we need to do something to get past our instinctive scarcity thinking. As long as we’re looking out for number one, we can’t really help number two.

    It seems to me someone has already put forward something along these lines before, but a lot of his followers keep insisting that he wasn’t interested in economics or politics. 🙂

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  2. Consumatopia

    The argument that growth is necessary for the world’s poor would be more defensible if, say, Al Gore became president and he passed a gigantic carbon tax to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid and energy research, but as it is growth just seems to mean more consumption. We can’t argue that our growth helps the world when we import more than we export.

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  3. Jack Perry

    I want to put the questions of sustainability and even of economic growth aside for a moment, because poverty is relative (I’d rather be a poor grad student in the US today, say, than a poor farmer in medieval England) and consider merely the question of living in a situation where children live as well as, or better than, their parents. To live better than your parents requires one of two things, I think: (1) more money than they had, or (2) better technology.

    Can either of those occur without economic growth? Can we deny economic growth without denying the possibility of living better than your parents did?

    And do both of them not conflict with the common understanding of “sustainability”? By this I mean the following: environmental activists are not at all progressives, but some of the most reactionary folks the world has ever seen. They want to keep the environment exactly the way it is, or even better return it to what it used to be, because they fear what environmental change could bring.

    Environmental change is not always bad. For millennia it was unquestioned that progress meant draining swamps: it created farmland, and eliminated mosquito habitats. Even in these days of modern medicine, mosquitoes are vectors for lethal diseases, considered A Bad Thing. These days, however, draining swamps is also A Bad Thing, because it eliminates wetlands. Most people today (myself included) want to preserve as many wetlands as possible because of various benefits perceived from wetlands, some real, some more perceived than actual.

    Likewise, no one questions the idea that vaccinating children against disease is A Good Thing. However, if all these children live, the population explodes. Look at the 20th century! Suddenly you need land for these people to live on, and for someone to farm for their food. You also need to dispose of their wastes, at the very least of their sewage. All of this means cutting down trees, which destroys animals’ habitats. Is this A Bad Thing then? not for all those children who grow up to live productive lives instead of dying of pertussis, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, malaria, and so forth. Certainly not for those of us who share in the benefits of their production, which can often mean less, more efficient production rather than more, less efficient production.

    My point is, the issue is quite complicated, and can’t be simplified to broad generalizations of “economic growth” versus “environmental sustainability”. Economic growth is not a variable one can isolate, as if it were independent from the others.

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  4. Lee

    I agree that it’s complicated; it’s not as if there’s a simple relationship between growth and environmental well-being. In fact, it’s been observed that richer countries can afford more environmental protection than poorer ones, that capitalist countries treat the environment better than communist ones, etc.

    Still, I can’t help but think there’s a limit to how much stuff we can produce and consume without some kind of serious and lasting environmental damage (climate change currently appearing to be the most likely candidate). Granted that we should always be sensitive to trade offs, there’s some point where the values in question simply become incommensurable.

    I also think Andy and Consumatopia raise good questions about whether economic growth as we understand it is really the best way to improve the well-being of the global poor. Again, another very complex issue it seems to me.

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  5. gaius sempronius gracchus

    I think economic growth is not necessarily the problem, provided it’s not accompanied by population growth and is subject to careful regulation.

    Actually, we need significant global population shrinkage.

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  6. John Perry

    gaius,

    Europe and Japan are about to grant your wish, and they’re not happy about it. With a population shrinkage, the tax base shrinks, and they don’t know how to afford their welfare states. Russia has oil revenues, but even they are worried enough to increase the bonus they award to families who bear children. (My wife, who is Russian, joked that maybe we should apply for it.)

    It’s sort of like our Medicare and Social Security problems, which we panic over once every administration, then forget about. Except that the Europeans are struggling with this question now.

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  7. More on growth, happiness, and climate change « A Thinking Reed

    […] 23rd, 2007 by Lee Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s an interview with Bill McKibbon that fleshes out some of his economic ideas a bit […]

    Reply
  8. gaius sempronius gracchus

    John (Jack?),

    Yes, I know. We don’t know how to manage this. We’ve never done it before. And we may not do it, now. In which case we won’t learn how to manage it, now, either.

    (The French government, also, is very supportive of families with multiple children. The more the merrier!)

    We may just head into an abysmal future with our eyes open, pretty much due to human over-grazing and nest-fouling on a planetary scale.

    With enough people, it might even be worse if we are technologically primitive – and hence a low productivity economy very far, indeed, from the “consumer society” – than if we are advanced.

    Subsistence farmers are the ones cutting down all the rain forests, looking for arable land. Imagine that.

    Btw, the idea that we are producing and consuming ever more “stuff” is a lot more convincing from inside a McMansion (or bigger) than a public housing apartment, or even an ordinary, miniscule working class saltbox built around 1950.

    In a lot of ways, many ordinary Americans are not better off than their parents were, but worse off.

    Yes, the economy has expanded steadily, but so has the population. And so far as productivity gains have outstripped population, there is the little matter of distribution.

    As for the idea that the people of modern, industrial countries have “too much,” this sometimes seems just so much claptrap based on a wholly unjustified tendency to take naked Indians in straw hovels along the Amazon as some sort of norm.

    Why on earth should that be the norm for human life?

    2nd Btw, Jack. I quite agree there is a “reactionary,” profoundly anti-human strain to some in the environmental movement. Google “deep ecology” for a look.

    And for that matter I often find mainstream environmentalists, ordinarily from the educated and well-off strata, totally insensitive to the potential impact of their recommendations on working and poor people, if not intentionally urging measures that dump most of the costs of watching out for the environment on the lower orders.

    There is very definitely a class edge to environmentalism. It is typically espoused by liberals and Democrats more than Republicans, but those two parties are, after all, just two different front groups for the interests and political aims of the plutocracy, neither of them really and truly being a “people’s party.” It helps to bear that in mind.

    Not that it matters what we think, eh?

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