According to Niels Röling
Global society is structured to support unsustainable exponential growth rather than the adaptive, cyclic management of ecological processes.
Yes, unfortunately most economists would still agree that the best measure of the health of an economy is growth.
Let me leave aside the issue of how this growth is achieved. (Economists seem to be willfully blind to the injustices of “primitive capital accumulation”, or what geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”, fostering the politically convenient illusion that almost all growth can be chalked up to virtuous advances in technology, education, the rule of law, and so on.)
The fundamental problem is that growth simply cannot go on forever if it means consuming ever more of a finite world. Economics as it is may be a fine guide to the economic system as it is, but economists ought to have higher aspirations than that.
Is there really no alternate economic system that would incorporate markets, competition, free trade and all the other things economists love, but which does not depend on growth? Or at least not on the growth of material consumption?
More blog entries about Sustainability.
See also “Vivid details of a completely different kind of life“.
According to Republic Steel
By: bradpierce on 2009/02/06
at 6:19 pm
I agree with the sentiment here, but I blame only the Keynesian and Marxist economists for the attitudes you summarized so well. They are fond of growth because their employers (the world’s central banks) use growth as an excuse to increase the money supply – an activity which enriches these counterfeiters disproportionately and undeservedly.
I have coined a term for this (more of a recurring headline actually):
Keynesians Declare Hamartial Law to Avert Crisis
A few economists mistaking self-centered measures of “growth” for a Good worth pursuing would have little impact without the heavy-handed and necessarily coercive (hence political) means afforded them by governments.
Much of the injustice laid at Capitalism’s feet arose not from fair trade and voluntary exchange, but from mercantile favoritism in the taxes and regulations of the most forceful governments.
By: Greg Jaxon on 2009/07/23
at 7:09 pm
But didn’t extreme overexploitation of the environment occur already thousands of years ago? If so, the roots of the tragedy are deeper than Marxism or Capitalism, and my question is, what practical economic system could we devise that would guard against our tendency to devour the Earth?
By: bradpierce on 2009/10/08
at 4:01 pm
According to the Nobel committee
By: bradpierce on 2009/10/12
at 4:03 pm