According to this Lib, we should give up, go green and embrace a shrinking economy. Via Yale Environment 360:
Herman Daly has reminded us that if neo-classical economists were true to their trade, they would recognize that there are
diminishing returns to growth. Most obviously, the value of income growth declines as one gets richer and richer. Similarly, growth at some point has increasing marginal costs. For example, workers have to put in too many hours, or the climate goes haywire. It follows that for the economy as a whole, we can reach a point where the extra costs of more growth exceed the extra benefits. One should stop growing at that point. Otherwise the country enters the realm of “uneconomic growth,” to use Daly’s delightful phrase, where the costs of growth exceed the benefits it produces.
Of course, it is the elites in academia that will measure the costs and benefits, not consumers or the markets. They will decide what is best for us.
The lunacy continues:
Though not widely accepted, the case is strong that growth in the affluent U.S. is now doing more harm than good. Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. GDP, productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It can undermine families, jobs, communities, the climate and environment, and a sense of place and continuity because it is confidently asserted and widely believed that growth is worth the price that must be paid for it.
But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy is ruining the environment; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; it hollows out communities; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues — for doing things that would truly make us and the country better off.
It is time for America to move to post-growth society where the natural environment, working life, our communities and families, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of ever-more growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with our country’s compelling social needs; and where true citizen democracy is no longer held hostage to the growth imperative.
Read the rest if you dare. It is truly nauseating.
For a guy who is who is supposed to be super smart and is going to tell us how to live our lives better than we are now, his two main points are dead wrong.
First, he is tring to tell us that our chase for economic growth is turning people into working zombies through increased working hours. This is not true at all. Via Economic History
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And it gets better:
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The idea that people are working longer hours in an expanding economy is flat out false.
Our intrepid lib professor’s second assertion that we are destroying ‘the environment’ in a ruthless pursuit of an expanding GDP is false as well.
If you are a frequent MCT reader, you know that one theme here is that only wealthy countries can afford to worry about the environment.
Go to any poor or developing nation and look at the condition of the environment. Go to rural China, Africa & Cuba and look at the conditions people live in. They don’t care about the environment. In many cases, they only care about where their next meal is coming from.
A growing economy makes life better for everyone.
