I'd be interested in views on this.
Some of them I could predict now. Green would almost certainly say growth is bad because it can't help impacting negatively on the biosphere.

Increased prosperity for all can only come from growth. That includes the possibility for increasing the communal transfer of prosperity to disadvantaged groups. It also includes the inevitability of some people achieving ever increasing wealth. That's something you could only prevent by having an almost police state which of itself would strangle growth to a greater or less degree.

Or would you put so many caveats on the ambition towards economic growth that it likely wouldn't happen at all.

Discuss - 30 marks

Sun Tzu wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2015 at 4:02pm:


You have 3 variables all with finite limits ? Looks like a recipe that has to end in disaster ?

Guess we are all hoping that we aren't still playing the game when the music stops ?

That is a hard question to answer solely based on growth, which neo-liberalism teaches us is the pinnacle of business.

Of course growth is good it leads to prosperity for most of the people in that country where growth is being experienced.

The problem is the current economic climate advantages corporations rather than the countries these corporations have established themselves in.

For example our jobs are slowly being transferred to low cost centres in India and China, these days corporations want their headquarters to be here in Australia so there CEO's and upper management can live the grand old life in the midst of civilization while all the work gets done in these low cost centres.

Also some of these corporations want the work or services to be done in Australia with a foreign work force.

Now I don't know about you guys but I think if the business claims to be Australian it should be based in Australia with an Australian work force.

Another thing, our government should p!ss of the privately owned Rothschild Central bank (RBA) and form its own.

Where it can cut money for the economy and its consumers without having to pay interest on that money, our government has the power to do this, yet it lets our RBA be owned by international bankers who them control our country.

Geez I could go on but this question is more than the growth of the economy, its like taking an equation out of a formulae ten miles long, unfortunately you have to deal with the whole rather than one small piece.

Could the world order survive without growing?

It’s hard to imagine now, but humanity made do with little or no economic growth for thousands of years. In Byzantium and Egypt, income per capita at the end of the first millennium was lower than at the dawn of the Christian Era. Much of Europe experienced no growth at all in the 500 years that preceded the Industrial Revolution. In India, real incomes per person shrank continuously from the early 17th through the late 19th century.

As world leaders gather in Paris to hash out an agreement to hold down and ultimately stop the emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that threaten to make Earth increasingly inhospitable for humanity, there is a question that is unlikely to be openly discussed at the two-week conclave convened by the United Nations. But it is nonetheless hanging in the air: Could civilization, as we know it, survive such an experience again?

The answer, simply, is no.

Economic growth took off consistently around the world only some 200 years ago. Two things powered it: innovation and lots and lots of carbon-based energy, most of it derived from fossil fuels like coal and petroleum. Staring at climactic upheaval approaching down the decades, environmental advocates, scientists and even some political leaders have put the proposal on the table: World consumption must stop growing.

“This is a subtle and largely unacknowledged part of some folks’ environmental/climate plan,” said Michael Greenstone, who directs the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

Sometimes it is not so subtle. The Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich has been arguing for decades that we must slow both population and consumption growth. When I talked to him on the phone a few months ago, he quoted the economist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

The proposal that growth must stop appears frequently along the leftward edge of the environmental movement, in publications like Dissent and the writing of the environmental advocate Bill McKibben. It also shows up in academic literature.

For instance, Peter Victor of York University in Canada published a study titled “Growth, degrowth and climate change: A scenario analysis,” in which he compared Canadian carbon emissions under three economic paths to the year 2035.

The Carbon Era
Economic growth has taken hold across the world over the last 200 years, fueled by innovation and fossil fuels that contribute to global warming.

Limiting growth to zero, he found, had a modest impact on carbon spewed into the air. Only the “de-growth” situation — in which Canadians’ income per person shrank to its level in 1976 and the average working hours of employed Canadians declined by 75 percent — managed to slash emissions in a big way.

And it is creeping into international diplomacy, showing up forcefully in India’s demand for “carbon space” from the rich world, which at its logical limit would demand that advanced nations deliver negative emissions — suck more carbon out of the atmosphere than they put in — so the world’s poor countries could burn their way to development as the rich countries have done for the last two centuries.

Working for the Sustainable Development Commission, set up in 2001 to advise the Labour government in Britain, Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey produced a nifty calculation. Accept that citizens of developing nations are entitled to catch up with the living standards of Europeans by midcentury, and assume that Europe will grow, on average, by 2 percent a year between now and then.

To stay within the 2 degree Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) average temperature increase that scientists generally consider the upper bound to avoid catastrophic climate change would require the world economy in 2050 to emit no more than six grams of carbon dioxide for every dollar of economic output. To put that in perspective, today the United States economy emits 60 times that much. The French economy, one of the most carbon-efficient because it is powered extensively by nuclear energy, emits 150 grams per dollar of output.

A stream of cars backs up on a highway exit in New Delhi. Emerging markets like India are demanding "carbon space" to allow their economies to grow. Credit Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Drawing what he saw as the inevitable conclusion, Professor Jackson published a book in 2009 called “Prosperity Without Growth” (Earthscan/Routledge).

Whatever the ethical merits of the case, the proposition of no growth has absolutely no chance to succeed. For all the many hundreds of years humanity survived without growth, modern civilization could not. The trade-offs that are the daily stuff of market-based economies simply could not work in a zero-sum world.... article has more

Well, let me simply state that everything has limits, as we are now in the process of finding out, on a "few" fronts!

perceptions_now wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2015 at 6:22pm:


Yes, everything has a limit, but doen't mean you find and stop there. You can find new way, new direction from it. When you were young, did you think about there will be something called Google? the best thing/limit is a big library.