Continual growth has been our background belief about how the economy works for 150 years. Perhaps it is time to return to those thinkers who didn't make this assumption.
Not quite comprehending this James, if under a socialist programme we switched to putting our efforts into (say) building more useful things such as schools, colleges and hospitals instead of putting the valuable earth resources into useless personalised trinkets of the capitalist consumer market; then we would still be increasing GDP as we are still actually building the physical “stuff” and increasing services for peoples’ use. A net social gain.
Now the only way that you could actually shrink GDP without society being in a more impoverished state is if the shrinkage exactly matched efficiency gains in the same period of time. Otherwise all shrinkage in GDP would result in some sort of impoverishment overall. Quite how that impoverishment was distributed would be another matter of course.
So in order to protect the environment what we are after surely is Green Growth not No Growth?
Not quite comprehending this James, if under a socialist programme we switched to putting our efforts into (say) building more useful things such as schools, colleges and hospitals instead of putting the valuable earth resources into useless personalised trinkets of the capitalist consumer market; then we would still be increasing GDP as we are still actually building the physical “stuff” and increasing services for peoples’ use. A net social gain.
Now the only way that you could actually shrink GDP without society being in a more impoverished state is if the shrinkage exactly matched efficiency gains in the same period of time. Otherwise all shrinkage in GDP would result in some sort of impoverishment overall. Quite how that impoverishment was distributed would be another matter of course.
So in order to protect the environment what we are after surely is Green Growth not No Growth?