The assumption has always been that growth will make things better. In fact you could say that growth is the escape valve for modern capitalism. Without it, the poor would have good reason to grumble. With it, tomorrow will always be brighter. If we just keep ramping up the GDP, things will improve. Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies summed up this view when he said that ‘economic growth is necessary to keep the promise… that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is the American Dream.’
The measuring stick for growth is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is basically a laundry list of all the things we produce, usually divided by population to give us GDP per capita. As a measurement of human progress, this is a very rough-and-ready metric. How can it not be when it mixes up ‘bads’ and ‘goods’? Anything that has a dollar sign attached to it contributes to GDP. Oil spills, suburban sprawl, war and crime are lumped together with steel production, medical consulting fees and the value of this year’s wheat crop.
But the indication now is that the price we pay for growth exceeds the benefits. The balance has tilted to the increasingly worrying downside – what the writer Herman Daly calls ‘uneconomic growth’.
Only this time there’s a difference. There’s a growing recognition that the global economic system is rigged in favor of the wealthy, the top 1% who run the show.
In September 2011, a few thousand folks pitched tents in a corporate-owned park in the heart of lower Manhattan. ‘We are the 99%,’ was their slogan. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ (OWS) movement was a mix of jobless college graduates, single moms, social activists, union members, clergy, concerned citizens and others. The message was clear, even if the alternatives weren’t. The protest was against the corporate takeover of the international economy, against economic inequality, against the continuing destruction of the environment and called for social justice and a different vision for the world.
The OWS movement was initially overlooked by the corporate media, but it soon spread via the internet and social media until it could no longer be ignored. Other ‘Occupy’ movements popped up in dozens of cities around the globe – from Toronto, Montreal and San Francisco to Sydney, London and Paris – in an effort to spread the message of dissatisfaction with the global economy. Growth was not specifically the target of the protests. But it was certainly the subtext.
The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement is the most recent sign of a more extensive global phenomenon. There has been a wave of social and political turmoil and instability since the world lurched into economic chaos. The ‘Arab Spring’ caught the attention of the world, igniting political change across North Africa and the Middle East while causing dictators elsewhere to be on alert. There were riots in London. In Spain, Italy and Greece, citizens faced with painful austerity measures staged mass public demonstrations. Chilean students took to the streets to bring attention to economic inequality and rising tuition fees while Israel experienced its largest demonstrations in decades when hundreds of thousands of middle-class citizens protested high housing prices and falling living standards. Even in the two economic powerhouses of the developing world there were signs of dissatisfaction. There is growing impatience and disgust with corruption in India and mounting unhappiness with inequality and environmental damage in China.
Finding a better path
There has to be a better way and that’s what this book is all about. Sustainability and degrowth are, in many ways, very old ideas rooted in traditional spiritual and humanist notions of husbandry, stewardship and community. But they are also two very loaded terms.
In this No-Nonsense Guide I’ve attempted to unpick those concepts and to think about what it means to live in a world where growth reigns supreme. With each passing day it’s increasingly evident that the prevailing model is leading us down a dangerous and ever-narrowing path. We need what used to be called a ‘paradigm shift’.
A decade ago, a global opposition movement provoked by the ravages of economic globalization declared that ‘another world is possible’. If anything, that alternative vision is even more urgent today as we face a future of life after growth. We need to redefine what we mean by prosperity but, more critically, we need to ask fundamental questions about the end goals of our frenzied economic activity. What is an economy for? Do we want an ever-growing GDP and ‘sustainable growth’? Or do we want to reshape our economic project to sustain people, communities and the natural world? With a sense of common purpose we can avoid environmental collapse and pave the way for a more convivial future. Without this great transformation, we risk lurching from crisis to crisis, compromising the fate of the generations who will follow us.
As Kenneth Boulding warned: ‘There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity, and which loses its positive image of the future, loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.’
Wayne Ellwood
Toronto, 2013
The unquestioning devotion to the idea of constant economic growth is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history. But it has taken firm hold despite the numerous great thinkers who have pointed out what should be clear to all – that in a world of finite resources, exponential growth is not only unsustainable but also extremely dangerous.
‘The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.’
John Maynard Keynes
The eminent British biologist Charles Darwin was a careful scientist – meticulous, patient and rigorous. He spent five years at sea on a research ship, The Beagle, collecting data, then nearly 20 years sifting his research, honing his analysis and polishing his prose, before publishing On the Origin of Species, his groundbreaking work, in November 1859.1
Darwin’s slim volume was what we would call a ‘game changer’; a revolutionary work that irrevocably and fundamentally altered the way human beings see themselves and the natural world. Today, most of us are familiar in a general way with his theory of ‘natural selection’ – the foundation of modern evolutionary biology. But 150 years ago, things weren’t so clear-cut. Darwin was sailing into choppy waters. The Church of England set rigid boundaries on scientific thought and his thesis was clearly offside – a challenge to the orthodox Biblical view that humans were a separate, unique part of God’s creation and that all life was divinely concocted and unchangeable. The establishment mocked him. There was intense public debate. But Darwin stood his ground and eventually, with the support of Thomas Huxley (aka ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) and others, his radical insights found acceptance.
Darwin’s core idea that all animals and plants evolve and adapt through natural selection is now the bedrock of modern life sciences. He unlocked the door to a new way of understanding the history of life on Earth – although ‘junk science’ theorists, religious fundamentalists and ‘intelligent design’ proponents are still trying to slam it shut.
History of an idea
For most of human history, economic growth was a mere blip. Societies developed slowly, economies were founded on subsistence and growth was minimal. Only the last eight generations of humans have experienced consistent growth (out of an estimated 125,000 generations in total). ‘Historically, steady state is the normal condition; growth is an aberration.’2
The modern idea of growth is a product of the 17th- and 18th-century European Enlightenment that challenged traditional views of religion and humankind’s place in the cosmos. Thinkers like John Locke in England, David Hume in Scotland, Voltaire in France and Thomas Paine in the US mapped out this new intellectual terrain.
This rupture with tradition changed age-old cyclical thinking to sequential thinking,