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by Stephen Elliott-Buckley
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Economic Growth is a Cancer: Meet Steady State Economics
For decades I’ve been hearing about and studying how humans are living beyond the planet’s capability of sustaining us…and that we’ve been doing so quite unequally.
And what have we done about that? Embraced neoliberal, deregulated free market capitalism: the economic expression of rape and pillage.
Reduce, reuse, recycle neglects the real first R: refuse.
Our notion of progress requires growth and improvement. We measure this in expansion of GDP and trade. But we are so divorced from the ramifications of our lifestyle that despite all the canaries dying in coal mines, we still might screw up Copenhagen beginning this weekend and leave the meeting with a world lacking unity on averting climate breakdown. And Canada may end up being the spoiler.
We are divorced from the reality of nature’s cycles. We think of growth as linear and upward and not cyclical and level. Nature goes in a circle of seasons. We don’t get more winter or spring each year, we just have equilibrium.
Even our calendars do not help us realize this, which is why this new way of envisioning a calendar is quite liberating: Chris Hardman’s Ecological Calendar.
And if people whack the equilibrium, the ecosystem responds. My children may be the victims of that response for decades more years than I will remain alive. If we cannot stomach that, we need to make sure Copenhagen works.
But how do we get off the economic growth addiction?
It requires a massive reframing. 20 years ago, there were no drink or paper recycling containers in schools and offices. Now they’re ubiquitous.
That took a reframed mindset.
Take also environmental footprints, a concept virtually unknown a decade ago. Now it is a useful and widely understood analytical tool for thinking about our individual contribution to a better or worse environment.
Getting off the economic growth fix can mean embracing steady state economics. This is an economic model that treats the economy as a means to human ends, not maximizing short-term shareholder wealth.
But what does anyone know about this model of zero-growth economics? Follow the link above and read the brief description of the values inherent in the model: sustainable scale, fair distribution, efficient allocation. Do they resonate with you? Do they seem more appealing for your moral goals for our relationship with the planet than getting a 9-18% return on your investments until you retire? Because that is the trade off.
More blatantly, the trade off is between something more like a 1-5% return on your investments or reframing our economy so the majority world living in poverty has a better chance at surviving and living in dignity.
If we cannot conceive of economic growth as being a cancer, it may not be because it’s wrong. It may be because we’ve been drinking this Kool-Aid fed to us in a steady marketing diet since birth. How could we be expected to see things differently. We need to use our imagination to contend with liberating ideas that are challenging to our unquestioned mindset.
Try steady state. 4 out of 5 dentists surveyed find it a healing tonic for ecological turmoil caused by neoliberal economics.
Good piece, Stephen. This topic needs to become the center piece of all environmental discussion.
You and other readers may enjoy my latest:
http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2009/12/climate-change-and-limits-growth
PS:
My news reader rejects your RSS feed as a bad link, don’t know why. I use Thunderbird.
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