http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archiv ... 91910.html
On the one hand, it seems like if there isn't "growth," then there's horrible unemployment and everyone suffers. However, if there is "growth," then we end up burning more oil, cutting down more trees, mining more coal, etc. etc. once again in proportion as we push the slider towards More of the Same.
Both of these groups also imagine that their slider, from Less of the Same to More of the Same, corresponds to historical circumstance. So, if they decide that they would prefer Less of the Same instead of More of the Same, they push the slider to the left, which, in their minds means getting in the Way Back Machine and going to some 1880s or 1830s lifestyle.
One reason I bring this up is because I think that the unintended consequences of More of the Same, having built up over decades, have finally reached a point where many people can no longer call "growth" a good thing. Do we need more McMansions and big box stores, with more SUVs to drive around in and parking lots to park in while we burn more oil and kill off more of the natural world, not to mention our own cultural heritage as we gradually decay into a nation of "consumers"? This is why I go on and on about the end of the era of Heroic Materialism. We are so done with that Heroic Materialist crap.
I think this has a lot to do with the general unpopularity of "pro-growth" economic approaches (low taxes, stable money) throughout the developed world. It's popular in the emerging world, in places like China or Eastern Europe. They want what we have. But we've gotten a bit tired of this treadmill. However, the alternative, which is economic stagnation -- The Same Old Same Old, with more unemployment -- doesn't work so well either. So, we need "growth" that actually represents an improvement in the overall quality of our civilization -- our "lifestyle" -- which includes things like the natural world.
Previously, I brought up the idea of an economy that is centered on performing arts. Performing arts count as "economic activity" just the same as paving parking lots. This was an intentionally whimsical idea to get people to think about what a "service economy" is. A "service economy" is about people doing things for other people, instead of making things for other people. You could imagine an economy which had an enormous output of performing arts. We would spend a lot of our income on watching live performances, several times a week. Consequently, we would have lots of people employed as performers, and in related jobs. We can see that this has practically no resource component. An economy whose output is performing arts doesn't require natural resources, doesn't consume much energy, and doesn't pollute. You could have "growth" in the form of -- not more -- but better performing arts. (Most manufacturing is about more but most services are about better. You can't eat two dinners at once, but you can go to a better restaurant.) In that case, growth would be Better of the Same, which would of course be more highly valued (think of an expensive restaurant compared to a cheap one), and which would then turn up in the standard economic statistics as "GDP growth." And if you decided that maybe you had maxed out on performing arts, you could enjoy some other sort of service -- let's say massage therapy -- or maybe just take the time off. Then, you would have Better and Different. Even taking time off -- enjoying more leisure instead of more services -- counts as increasing productivity, if not necessarily "growth." We would have the Same or Better with less work (the Europeans have already been experimenting with this for decades). If we spent 50% of our income on performing arts, or massage therapy, then 50% of the economy would consist of performing arts and massage therapy. To finance our love of performing arts, we would naturally have less of everything else, or in other words, all the people employed in performing arts wouldn't be producing some other sort of good or service, like building McMansions in the suburbs. Imagine, if you like, a society where people lived in modest little apartments, and didn't own cars, and didn't own many other material items either, and didn't do things that required a lot of resources (like flying to Jamaica for four days in February), but instead walked to the theater several times a week to catch the latest show.
