For all our lives, worthies – our politicians, business people and economists – have assured us we need economic growth to make us better off. Almost everything I write assumes this to be true. But is it?
These days, there are more doubters than there used to be. Some people don’t believe that spending your life striving to own more stuff will make you happy. (Spoiler: they’re right.)
But a growing number of scientists tell us unending growth in the economy simply isn’t physically possible, and the more we keep growing the more we’ll damage the natural environment, to our great cost. Climate change is just the most glaring example of the damage we’re doing.
Historians remind us that our obsession with The Economy is relatively recent. It didn’t take hold until the middle of last century.
What we call “the economy” is all economic activity. It’s people getting up every morning, going out to earn a living, and then spending what they’ve earned. So it’s “getting and spending”, production and consumption. This is measured by gross domestic product – the value of all the goods and services produced during a period.
It was only when we started regularly measuring GDP in the mid-1950s that we began our obsession with whether it was growing and by how much. Or whether – God forfend – it was going backwards.
But these are just modern words and concepts. In truth, Australians have been preoccupied by what today we call economic growth since the day white people arrived. Their magic words were “settlement”, “progress” and “nation building”.
The recent arrivals saw a “new” nation where nothing had been done, but with huge potential for endless bush to be made to resemble the old country. They set about clearing the land, damming rivers, building houses, establishing farms and digging up minerals.
Why? To become more prosperous. They spurred themselves on with the belief they must “populate or perish” – be taken over by invading Asians.
So how do you achieve what we call economic growth? The easiest way is to grow the population. Have lots of kids and encourage (in those days, white-only) immigration. That gives you more people to work, but also more people needing to be fed, clothed, housed and entertained.
Bingo. A bigger economy. But while increasing the population makes the economy, GDP, bigger, it’s really only if the growth increases GDP per person that it can be claimed to make us better off, to have raised our material standard of living. And this doesn’t follow automatically.
The harder way to grow the economy is to increase the proportion of the population in paid employment, or to increase our investment in plant and equipment, and (well-chosen) public infrastructure. This does increase GDP per person.
But there’s another, more magical way to increase GDP per person. It’s to take the same quantity of resources – raw materials, labour and capital equipment – and use them to produce more output of goods and services than you did.
This is what people mean when they talk about increasing our “productivity”. It’s achieved, as economists keep repeating, by “working smarter, not working harder”.
How? By building a better educated and more skilled workforce, and by finding ways to make the organisation of factories and offices more efficient, but mainly by advances in technology that create better machines (and these days, computer programs) doing better tricks.
This is the bit scientists don’t get. When they hear the word “growth” they think of one thing: growth in humans’ exploitation of natural resources and all the damage we do to the environment in the process.
But that’s not what GDP measures. Economists know that most of the growth in GDP over the long term comes from increased productivity, not increased inputs of raw materials, labour and physical capital.
This means that, unless you believe there’s a limit to human ingenuity, it’s not true that continuing growth in GDP is impossible.
But when scientists say more clearly the kind of “growth” they’re referring to – growth in the use of natural resources and “ecosystem services” – it’s not possible to argue with the laws of physics.
While economists used to argue that the “limits to growth” weren’t as close at hand as some scientists had calculated, the possibility of the developing world enjoying the same profligate use of natural resources as the rich world is not credible. We expect the bottom 80 per cent to resign themselves to lives of relative poverty, while we in the top 20 per cent continue partying as though there’s no tomorrow.
So I accept that we and other rich countries will have to greatly constrain our use and abuse of the natural environment if the planet is to remain functional. A “circular economy” in which resources are so expensive that almost everything has to be repaired, reused and recycled? Sure.
But here’s the joke. It wouldn’t be the scientists who worked out how we could move to such an economy, it would be the economists.