This guest post from Veritas Curat (“the truth cures”) merits reading … As currently structured, our economic system is defined simply: growth is good, stagnation bad, and contraction disastrous. In fact, the demand for ever-continuing growth faces Malthusian-like challenges about sustainability in terms of global resources. For a century, humanity’s growth has been propelled via eating into Earth’s capital — most notably, not solely, hydrocarbons (but also fossil acquifer water, minerals, top soil, etc …).
Studying the interrelated crises afflicting our world, scientists see more clearly than politicians that there is no technological fix. No magic bullet can save us from cropland erosion, deforestation, poison by pollution, wholesale extinctions of plant and animal species, climate disruptions and consequent famines. That is because our political economy is harnessed to growth: it sets its goals and measures its performance by how fast corporate profits accelerate. So, to save ourselves, we will have to want different things, seek different pleasures, pursue different goals, than those that have been driving us and our global economy. New values and new ways of meeting our needs must arise now, while we still have room to maneuver – and that’s precisely what is happening. They are emerging at this every moment, like green shoots through the rubble of a dysfunctional society.
– Joanna Macy
It would be a profound heresy and political suicide to speak in favor of reducing the number of jobs provided by our economy. So the solemn propaganda continues about how best to reduce the unemployment rate while ignoring the profound, fundamental dysfunction the unemployment rate is a symptom of. Some basic math is required to get at how serious this problem is.
Because of population growth there are an ever increasing number of people who need jobs. The U.S. labor force is projected to increase by 12.6 million over the 2008–18 period. Labor productivity increased by 6.2% last quarter – meaning, if it continues at that rate, output must increase by more than 6.2% to keep unemployment from rising, even if we had zero population growth.
Given these numbers, our economy needs to grow at around 8% per year to provide adequate jobs for everyone who needs them. What does it mean for the economy to grow at 8% per year?
For some perspective, let’s take the present earth’s population (6.8 billion) and grow it at 8% per year for the next 50 years. By 2060 it would be 371,267,420,000. At 5% growth, it would be 82,840,958,000. At 2% – 18,484,316,000.
An economy growing at 2% per year would be universally considered anemic and would clearly lead to ever increasing unemployment, given the above figures (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). And an economy that was not growing, or even shrinking, would be in a recession or a depression.
Granted, productivity does not always rise at 6% but it does seem to always be rising. Labor productivity is defined (BLS) as: “the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output.” So it takes ever fewer labor hours to produce ever more output. As an example, new gold mining technology has allowed fewer workers to produce more gold wedding bands more efficiently. And to more efficiently produce the 20 tons of mine waste that is also produced for every ring.
Paul Hawken (“Natural Capitalism” 1999 ) says
one percent of the total North American materials flow ends up in , and is still being used within, products six months after their sale.
So 99% of the actual physical “output” that needs to increase 8% per year to provide jobs is waste – garbage, trash, pollution, toxic chemicals, mine waste, plastic gyres in the Pacific Ocean, … – created in the processes of extraction, production, packaging, transportation and selling things like gold wedding bands. If this waste material grows at 8% per year it will soon weigh more than the entire planet itself – which is a physical impossibility. But political speech is good at ignoring physical impossibilities.
Things are starting to look a little crazy now. We seem to be committed to ever more productively trash the planet at an exponential growth rate in order to keep up with unsustainable population growth.
It is what happens when the economic system is 180 degrees opposed to reality. In reality the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet. Our present economic system assumes just the opposite: the planet is a wholly owned subsidiary of the economy. Unlimited and cost-free “resources” enter into the materials flow at one end and “waste” is deposited in unlimited and cost-free dumpsites. When this insane system grows everyone benefits and there are more jobs.
Of course, openly admitting this insanity is political suicide. Growth is good. No growth is a recession and is very bad.
Our present “growth is good” economic system is doomed. It has only a few decades left.
This doesn’t mean we are all doomed. There are solutions arising everywhere. Elegant practical, useful solutions. Most of these solutions are small-scale and local, as they should be.
The transition to these solutions will not be easy. The present system is very, very good to the wealthy and powerful. They will not let go of that power without a fight. But, one way or another, they will lose that power.
There is a lot of good work to be done.
The real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done, it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.
“The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breastbeating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it. All of us are responsible for bad work, not so much because we do it ourselves as because we have it done for us by other people.– Wendell Berry