A while back I blogged a couple of items on the argument Bill McKibbon makes in his new book Deep Economy for rethinking our commitment to growth uber alles.

Interested readers may want to check out this article at Mother Jones where McKibbon develops his argument at greater length. In short, the argument is that we’ve gotten to the point where continued fossil fuel-driven economic growth that we’re used to both threatens the environment and doesn’t make us any happier (“we” here refers mainly to the prosperous West). The solution, he thinks, is a shift toward more local economies and reconnecting with the sorts of things that, beyond a certain level of income, actually increase happiness, such as companionship.

I’m still unsatisfied that a withdrawal for the global economy is really feasible here. McKibbon concedes that there are still many people in the world who live well below a decent level of material well-being. Given that, it seems that places like China and India (not to mention other even more impoverished nations) don’t yet have the luxury of putting the breaks on economic growth. But this has consequences for the West too. After all, suppose that the U.S. were to slap tariffs on products from abroad as a way of encouraging local economies. Doesn’t this effectively close or at least reduce the market available for Chinese goods? And don’t the Chinese depend on the U.S. market for their continued growth? I have to say that shutting the door on the world’s poorest producers doesn’t sit too well with me. I almost certainly don’t understand all the variables here, but I wonder if a reformed global economy isn’t a more realistic option.

But I still think this is good stuff to be grappling with. And McKibbon is certainly right to challenge the equation of increased wealth with happiness, which goes as an unspoken assumption in a lot of our public debate about economic policy. You don’t need the latest “happiness research” to realize this either; it’s also the virtually unanimous wisdom of our philosophical and religious traditions. And this raises another interesting question: if consuming less is better for our happiness and our souls, but consuming more is better for keeping the economy humming along, doesn’t public virtue become private vice? I guess this is just an exaggerated version of Adam Smith’s paradox that the pursuit of rational self-interest creates broaded public benefits, which is pretty clearly true to some extent. But McKibbon’s warning is that taken to its logical conclusion this attitude becomes disastrous.