Totally Growthed Out?

It’s the economy, stupid!

James Carville is credited with creating that phrase as a campaign strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

It’s almost an axiom of faith that any politician running in any democratic election will embrace economic betterment as one of his or her key platforms, often as the key policy platform. Just imagine a candidate telling a voting constituency that economic growth is bad and that learning to live with what we have or less is good. A few might, but never here!

But exactly what does “growth” really mean? More consumers through population growth? Consumers with more disposable income to buy more services and stuff? More exports to other countries where either more people or wealthier people are buying our services or stuff? Imagine telling all Americans that healthcare for all is simply unrealistic and should never be our goal. Poor folks just die? Or that the minimum wage should stay where it is set forever? Or that moving up on a corporate ladder is destructive to the society around us? But “growth” has a severe cost.

People performing services often need transportation, sometimes specialized venues (think doctors) or equipment (think construction), office space, electrical power, back-up services (think insurance), etc. People making stuff need raw materials, packaging, transportation and usually manufacturing facilities. And all people need food, water, housing, shelter, clothing and increasingly medical and environmental care. The societies that support all of the above provide infrastructure, power, police and fire, usually military and all the other trappings of government that people expect or depend on.

Most of these “growth” vectors, thus, require more people with more money extracting more raw materials while impacting the environment to generate their growth activities. If in fact there are finite quantities of desirable resources and if the environment has a limit before it starts making vast tracts of the planet uninhabitable, does humanity finally hit a wall where “growth” itself begins slowly killing us off? Do wars, murderous crimes, natural disasters and disease effectively already provide a partial natural barrier to Malthusian population growth?

Martin Kirk, writing for the July 16^th FastCompany.com, explains: “This is the Golden Promise of politics: more economic growth. Golden, because it is effortlessly translated in voters’ minds to mean more jobs, more money in the economy, and therefore more income in everyone’s pockets. Because economic growth is, obviously, a thing greatly to be desired…

“But there are some new strains of thought that take a more nuanced and sophisticated view of growth. That say, yes, all other things being equal, economic growth is a positive thing. But all other things are not equal. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and, for all its positives, economic growth has a dark side; its ecological impact. The impacts of our ever-growing economy have become so stark and so widespread that they are by any sane measure portents to catastrophe. Whether it’s the fact that Antarctic ice is now melting three times faster than we thought, or the unfolding ‘biological annihilation’ that has already wiped out 50% of all animals and up to 75% of all insects, or the fact that, in spite of all this, we are pumping out CO2 at record levels, it takes willful ignorance or a blinding ideology to deny the severity of the crisis.

“This creates a terrible paradox: Economic growth keeps economies stable today, but threatens not just future growth but medium-term social and civilizational cohesion, and ultimately the very capacity of this biosphere to sustain life. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year suggested that ‘the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most.’ And that even this dire prediction is considered ‘conservative’ by the authors, ‘given the increasing trajectories of the drivers of extinction.’ In terms of practical politics, that means acting immediately, preferably yesterday…

“But wait, I hear you cry, technological progress will save us! We can just grow meat in test tubes rather than needing so much land and clean air space for cows and their methane-laden farts, or we can all switch to renewable energy, or recycle more and better, and then we can get back to the promise of infinite growth. Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is simply not possible. Yes, we can make dents in our impact with such measures, and we should with all possible speed, but the way the global economy is currently programmed means such things are important–but also entirely insufficient.

“So, once we discard the vain hope of being able to grow the economy infinitely and indefinitely, what are we looking at? This is where the innovation and bravery come in… A new alliance was formed in 2017, called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. What they are shooting for is one–or many different–economic model(s) that have, ‘the fundamental goal of achieving sustainable well-being with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of Nature.’ Which means they cannot just reach for socialism or any other historical model–socialism, like capitalism, relies on growth, as does communism. They have recognized that we can’t rely on past thinking; we must genuinely put our best brains forward and innovate.

“We’re not talking about a bunch of random, dreamy utopians here, but real politicians who have won real elections and are exercising real power. So far, the roster of governments signing up to the Alliance includes Scotland, Costa Rica, Slovenia, and New Zealand. Other governments that are actively looking at the issue include Italy, and there are political parties emerging, like the Alternative Party in Denmark, which is also embracing the innovation challenge. These are not what are often referred to as Tier 1 countries in the international order, but neither are they so small they are irrelevant.

“Scotland, for example, provides a direct line into both the U.K. and (at least for the time being) the EU. Costa Rica has long been a pioneer of innovative economic and social thinking, with impressive results: It is routinely in the top three countries in the world when measured for the well-being and happiness of their people. New Zealand is, perhaps, the most newly bold. Its prime minster has not only called growth-at-all-costs capitalism a ‘blatant failure’ but also has said her government would no longer accept GDP as the sole, supreme measure of progress. ‘The measures for us have to change,’ she said in October last year. ‘We need to make sure we are looking at people’s ability to actually have a meaningful life, an enjoyable life, where their work is enough to survive and support their families.’…

“Consider a few facts: More than 50% of millennials say they would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values, while 90% want to use their skills for good. And these trends are on the up. Deloitte’s 7th Annual Millennial Survey of 12,000 young people, for example–both millennials and gen Z–reports record low opinions of businesses. Fewer than half now believe that businesses behave ethically, and this directly affects how loyal they feel to their employers; 43% of millennials and a whopping 61% of gen-Zers expect to stay in a job no more than two years. And all this against a backdrop of general public opinion that is also looking increasingly unkindly on the economic paradigm we have.”

In the modern American political reality, we have a primarily a reactive government. Unlike the Eisenhower era, we do not build for the future anymore. We do not anticipate what we will need and how we can sustain our quality of life. Virtually every American administration of late has required a triggering event in order to spur action. Our national debt has caused our elected officials to kick essential policy fixes – “cans” – down the road. That which is bad just get worse. For example, our government is pretending climate change is not real as forest fires rage, hurricanes intensify, flood devastate, sea waters rise and droughts decimate once productive farms. Perhaps, as the above article excerpts suggest, the upcoming generations just might be willing to live in the real world with all of its rather stark challenges.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does appear that after Trump is finished with all of his policy vectors and judicial appointments, if we are to survive as a nation, we probably will need to elect a new government to “Make America Great Again.”