Economic Growth

Now, I know less about economics than almost anything else (except maybe curling). Still I think I know one thing that seems to fly in the face of all economic pronouncements, left or right: growth is not sustainable. We hear reports about the health of the economy based on growth and stagnation; growth is good, stagnation is bad. Well, the words themselves are certainly charged. Everyone knows that growing implies health. Stagnation implies fetid swamps, mosquitos, poisonous snakes. But, what if, instead of stagnation we said stability? That certainly sounds nicer.

Economic theory was developed in a time of seemingly limitless resources and relatively small poplulations. In those circumstances, there is no immediate down side to growth. So growth is an easy way to sustain an economy. Generate more people. Generate more jobs for them. Use up more resources doing it. It was always a bad model but there was no way to see that it was "through the trees". Well, the trees are gone now, literally. It isn't that the depletion of resources, or the rise in population has changed a growth-based model from good to bad, it was always a bad model. There have always been those who could see that but they were dismissed by the establishment on both the right and the left as alarmists, pessimists, and, when all else fails, idiots.

We need a good economic model. One that doesn't require growth to be strong. There is, in fact, no logical reason why an economic model must equate growth with success. Consider a system where the number of elements remains constant, but not the elements themselves. The resources that fuel the processes in this system are recaptured, re-cycled, to fuel the next generation of processes. And so on. This is, indeed, the definition of a star, well known to be a powerful engine.

I don't know what the right model is. But I get angry when I hear growth equated with economic health. Growth is growth. That's all. Economic health must be measured against people's ability to live, and the expectation that their children will be able to live, as well.