Manifesto for a Post-Growth Economy

[snot]

by James Gustave Speth, Sep 19, 2012, yes! magazine:

We tend to see growth as an unalloyed good, but an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for most it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people, and creating more problems than it solves for those in affluent societies.

We’ve had tons of growth in recent decades—while wages stagnated, jobs fled our borders, life satisfaction flatlined, social capital eroded, poverty and inequality mounted, and the environment declined. The never-ending drive to grow the overall United States economy has led to a ruthless international search for energy and other resources, failed at generating needed jobs, and rests on a manufactured consumerism that does not meet the deepest human needs.

Americans are substituting growth and ever more consumption for doing the things that would truly make us and our country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States rose sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction. Meanwhile, levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.

Politically, the growth imperative is a big part of how we the people are controlled: the necessity for growth puts American politics in a straitjacket—a golden straitjacket, as Tom Friedman would say—and it gives the real power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver that growth—the corporations.

Much more at http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/Manifesto-for-a-post-growth-economy-james-gustaves-speth .

[patrice]

1. K&R

[pscot]

2. We're going to need a manifesto of managed decline

if the climate scientists are right.

[gulliver]

3. Ordered the book just now. K&R

[NoOneMan]

4. My issue with steady-state:

What makes anyone think that we can even perpetually maintain our current infrastructure and meet our current energy needs within a finite system?

Further, what makes anyone think the current level of development & consumption, and the supposed "goodness" that it imparts on the human condition, is necessary and worth maintaining in the first place?

When push comes to shove, we may not even be able to keep what we currently have. And when that happens, maybe we ought to ask if its even worth keeping.

[snot]

5. Yes; the goal should be well-being,

which for most of the non-brainwashed seems to have more to do with personal rather than financial growth.