Why say so now? Because Rachael Reeves, referred to growth 58 times in her Mais lecture this week.
She, admittedly, said it was not the solution to all problems. But, you could be mistaken in thinking that she did not really believe that, given how often she referred to it, and how everything that she offered was premised upon the possibility of its delivery.
So why don't I believe in growth?
Firstly, that is because the way we record growth does not in any way indicate the value of economic activity . As I used to say to students when I was talking about this subject, one of the easiest ways to deliver growth would be for everyone in a society to get divorced. The expenditure on legal fees and splitting up of households would significantly boost GDP, but the sum of human happiness would undoubtedly reduce.
Then there is the matter of distribution . Most measures of growth are not even related to GDP per head. Worse still, very few provide any indication as to who has enjoyed the benefits of that growth. The best example of the resulting nonsense is found in Ireland. Approximately one quarter of its GDP is made up of the profits of multinational corporations recorded in that country, none of which are attributable to any person living there. In that case, GDP growth in Ireland might bring no benefit whatsoever to its population as a whole, let alone any one Irish person in particular. More commonly, elsewhere, when we know that most GDP growth goes to those already wealthy, it is a particularly poor target for any society.
Then there is the sustainability issue. As a simple matter of fact, we cannot consume ever more physical resources on a finite planet without destroying its capacity to sustain us.
But most of all, I do not believe in growth, because I do not think that it is nearly as important as the goal of meeting needs.
We all know what needs are. We require clean air and water. Good food is essential for a good life. So too is warm shelter. And we need education so that we can integrate in our communities, and help advance their understanding.
Much of healthcare is about community provision, by necessity. And when the events that require a personal healthcare intervention also very largely arise as a result of randomised risk, it is always the case that the community as a whole is the agency best able to carry that risk, and so meet it. The same is true for so many other needs that have to be addressed if we are all to have access to a reasonable quality of life.
Nothing about this denies the existence of wants. Meeting needs does not say that wants should not be fulfilled. But there is an order of priority here. The meeting of wants is not nearly as important as the meeting of needs.
Implicitly, GDP does not recognise that fact. The pursuit of growth does not, therefore, do so either. For that precise reason, I think that both are morally suspect, at best, and profoundly ethically biased at worst.
Nor do, I think that either can be amended to address those deficiencies. Growth is the wrong goal. Meeting need is what we must do, for everyone. Only then  can we consider meeting wants, and then only within sustainable limits.
For those who think that this suggests that we will have a miserable existence, think about what it is that have created all the most valuable memories and experiences in your life. I can almost guarantee that none of them related to material consumption that satisfied a want. Almost all of them will relate to an occasion when you shared an experience with others, whether that was an intimate moment, or a family event, or a concert, or some similar experience, such as the celebration of an achievement. What all these things have in common is that each also relates to the meeting of the need, whether that be be for emotional, intellectual, or spiritual well-being.
Meeting those higher order needs is harder, however, if our material needs are not met . It is very hard to be joyful when you are hungry, cold, destitute, or are living in fear. Meeting need is, then, the precondition of happiness. Supplying the wants of some, at cost to meeting the needs of others must always, in that case, be a sub-optimal objective. GDP growth is, in that case, always the wrong goal in economics.
That economics has moved far from its roots in moral philosophy is evident from its focus on growth . It needs to go back to its roots and talk about what is right. Meeting everyone's needs is the right goal for economics. It is what any government should do. And that is why I will criticise any government that fails to achieve that, most especially if it does not even try to do so.
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It seems to me that relying on growth is not sustainable, and society and its economy should function regardless. It’s not as if we are short of things that we want or need, nor are we short of the people and resources need to achieve that aim.
The biggest problem I see is the move to financialisation, and a group of people who make money (and a lot of it) without producing anything, and expect others to make up the slack.
Very true
Thank you, Richard. Haven’t tuned in here for couple weeks. How nice to find this rich post & thread.
Your degrowth comment reminded me how most of us don’t really get this & aren’t aware of the sheer scale of it needed to what … survive, face precarity, learn to live differently? Share skills, thrive outside of the Machine?
And wanted to reply to Tony Philpin just to say thank you for your insightful comments. You might enjoy (if unfamiliar) Planet Critical podcast of yesterday 21/3/24 where Rachel Donald chats with Jonathan Mille of UCL climate unit. He’s one of the few people using words like Sobriety (I first heard from Vanessa Andreotti) & Degrowth in mainstream. He speaks about the Psychological Transition & very few talk about this. Jem Bendell & the Deep Adaptation folks do.
Go well y’all.
Rachel Donalds’s channel Planet Critical is a great source of info attempting the untangle the mess we are in like, Nate Hagens – The Great Simplification YouTube, channel if you have not heard of him.
I’m not sure parents getting a divorce boosts GDP. It shifts it around – there would be more compensation for lawyers so the lawyerly component of GDP would rise, but there would less value add from what would otherwise be done with those resources of time and skills of both the parents and the lawyers.
The costs of lawyers involved in divorce and the resulting increase in GDP is surely only an illustrative example. The much bigger increase comes from one household suddenly having to become two. Two mortgages/rents, two lots of furniture, two lots of utility bills, etc, etc.
In other words the increased atomisation of society.
You know, what that paragon of integrity and intellect David Cameron used to refer to as the Big Society.
Exactly
Not just neoliberalism I fear, but almost all classical and neo-classical economics assumes a capacity for infinite expansion, about as useful a concept as homo economicus.
Tragedy of the commons ?
Herman Daly’s steady state economy has been as much rubbished and ignored as the work done in the ‘Limits of Growth’ revisions over the last 50 years, and subsequently by Donella Meadows’ on systems management that underpins Kate Raworth’s approach. All have been voices in the capitalist wilderness.
The Pandora’s Box of externalities opened by Prof. Pigou in the 1920s has not led to any serious movement in political economy or human behaviour that either costs and tackle even basic pollution risks.
It isn’t as if the progressive impacts of CO2 emissions were unknown even then.
I see the World Air Quality report published today is an utterly dismal confirmation of our custodianship of our own welfare, let alone the planet, with only 7 countries meeting the quality guidelines.
I first wondered as a teen during the Torrey Canyon disaster, very fearful that my local bird islands of Skomer and Skokholm would be destroyed by oil pollution, and finding ever more oiled seabirds on Pembrokeshire beaches, that we humans, as a species, have this fatal shortcoming in our make up of destroying the environment that we inhabit, and that has led to us all endlessly fouling our own nests.
Whether this pattern of behaviour originated with man the hunter gatherer moving across the Savannah, taking then moving on, and leaving his detritus in his wake, is something for the anthropologists., but I have never escaped this fear that our flaws as a species do not augur well for our survival in geologic time, and that we will deservedly burn up like a shooting star.
At least there’ll be an interesting fossil record.
Politicians are simple folk who believe the rest of us to be even simpler. They need a simple measure like GDP where a big number is good a smaller number is bad and a negative number is the fault of someone else. They would struggle to understand more subtle metrics and be unable to sell them to voters.
Richard,
Your argument is refreshing, and if I may add to your list; even if we established effectively what we deem to be ‘real’ economic activity, how effective is the current GDP measure of a) actually capable of capturing it; b) measuring it accurately, and c) capturing all of it? The black economy and economic activity that evades tax are two not inconsiderable sources, merely to state the obvious, without close scrutiny being required. Who is doing the close scrutiny (you really think any of the denizens of Westminster or Whitehall have any expertise)? I am confident neither Jeremy Hunt, nor Rachel Reeves know anything useful about the subject; they are politicians, far removed from the real problems of data identification, capture and measurement; or even understanding the detail, difficulties or resources required. They are specialists of one thing – scripted sound-bites.
Finally, I would add another item to the list of growth issues Hunt and Reeves (they even sound like a soap company), throw around liberally but haven’t a clue what it is; still less how to look for it; never mind find it, capture it, measure it, or in any way affect it. What the political soap dispensers are really talking about when they talk about growth, is ‘productivity’; and the last people you would wish to talk to about productivity growth, and how to acquire it, is that clueless sump of unproductive growth in hot-air, senior politicians (and the second worst source of knowledge on productivity is economists).
Thanks
I guess most people reading here will know Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 outburst:
“GDP counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts jails, napalm, nuclear warheads, and the loss of natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. Yet it does not pay attention to the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play… It measures everything in short—except that which makes life worthwhile.”
He was right
Happy Birthday Richard and keep working as long as you wish.
The world’s fixation on continued economic growth assuming that this is the panacea for society is being shown as not sustainable.
Why must companies always be expected to hit massive growth targets? Perhaps to justify the financial services industries, economists, think tanks, highly paid executives and low wages existence?
Does it matter if Amazon does not grow 10% each year? It would save a huge amount of electricity production for its Cloud division.
As you point out that the calculation of the GDP is really bonkers.
It does not need growth per se to produce good schools, health/social care, a proper integrated transport network for the benefit of all.
Your last point is so true
I’ve stopped calling it ‘growth’ and now refer to ‘stealing from our grandchildren’. Probably a bit extreme, after all, Malthus was wrong, wasn’t he?
Thanks for blogging about growth today. It seems to me that much of the world has been obsessive about growth over the past 150 years (200? More?) – indeed our western financial and political systems are dependant on it.
In my lifetime growth during the 60s, 70s, 80s was easy; energy was relatively low cost and abundant. Populations grew, salaries / wages increased, consumerism was rampant. The markets were happy. There was no end in sight. We took it for granted.
Unfortunately, by definition, there must be limits to growth. Growth is exponential – it doesn’t matter if we grow at 10%, 1%, or 0.1% eventually the curve goes vertical which isn’t possible in the real world. I am aware there are arguments that growth can be decoupled from energy consumption – I suspect this logic is wishful thinking from those that want the growth party to continue.
What you argue above makes sense and is refreshing. The way we measure growth (GDP) and the ways in which society values growth falls short in terms of meeting our human needs.
However (and this is the bit that can cause insomnia) if growth is coming to an end, and our current financial and political systems are dependant on growth … then what comes next when we transition to a steady state economy or even degrowth? I get the sense that some of the instability (global, national, local) we are already experiencing is in part due to falling growth. When the wealthy “elite” see their growth dependant incomes diminishing the only way to recover it may be to take more from the rest of us leading to the rising inequality we have been seeing over recent years. Our choices at the ballot box give us no opportunity for a government that can deal with the realities facing us.
I hope you don’t get too many trolls today. Tufton Street won’t like your message at all.
PS: Happy Birthday!
Thanks
The rush will nit like this
We need courageous politicians with a powerful story to tell
The urgent need for different indicators of economic success beyond GDP is prominent on the agenda of numerous global organizations (including the UN, EU, OECD), academia, numerous economic think tanks, environmental organizations, charities, and more. Despite this, the ‘Beyond GDP’ movement remains largely unheard of within the UK’s political mainstream. Instead, politicians across the spectrum continue to chant the mantra of GDP growth. Meanwhile, a significant portion of UK citizens lack adequate access to essential services and necessities such as accommodation, healthcare, food, heating, transport, etc..
That economic growth can be decoupled from energy consumption is delusional.
At the most fundamental level all economic activity (indeed all human activity) consists of three things: transport and transformation of materials, and communication.
All require energy. You might make our energy conversions (our machines and devices that convert one form of energy (usually heat) to another (mechanical energy) or electricity to mechanical energy (electric motors) or to heat or electromagnetic radiation (radio waves)) more efficient, but that is all.
Vaclav Smil is a wonderful writer on energy and his book “Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems” is rich in insights.
https://vaclavsmil.com/2008/01/01/energy-in-nature-and-society-general-energetics-of-complex-systems/
But we can minimise the transport and the materials
It is wrong to pretend that we cannot
Of course you can minimise energy and materials usage, which means minimising economic output which means degrowth. I’m 100% in favour of degrowth, preferably by choice, because ultimately oil production will decline – it’s largely propped now up by US shale – and we will eventually hit materials shortages and of course we will run into the chaotic economic impacts of climate change.
Steve Keen has shown that there is a direct correlation between energy consumption and GDP. So growth (in the meaning of increasing GDP) requires increased energy consumption. Unless this energy is 100% renewable (which is unlikely) then growth cannot be achieved without increased emissions.
Somewhat tangentially, Robert Kennedy (snr) offered the most succinct comment on GDP. The full quote is quite long, but the summary is “GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”.
Totally agree. Gdp is such a made up statistical fiddle anyway.
Maybe we could use the 17 sustainable development goals we prescribe for other countries we (barely) give aid too. Corruption might be first…….
Richard, your argument neatly dovetails directly into the main argument about supply side measurement vs demand management, or more theory argument about neoliberal economics vs Keynesian.
I agree growth is not essential, but we must adapt to change as development progresses, rebalanced the economy for sustainability and to harness AI for the benefit of all humanity – to cite two examples.
Clearly Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture was a meaningless load of waffle in which true Starmer “Will of the Wisp” manner she thought saying the word “growth” a million times, or what seemed like it, would help evade having to explain the nitty gritty mechanics of achieving growth in the UK.
What her lecture did achieve for me was push me back to re-reading your and the GIMM’s submissions to the House of Lord’s National Debt Commission. In the latter’s conclusion I came across something I hadn’t spotted before but ties directly back to the critical need for politicians and the electorate to understand Sectoral Balances Accounting.
The GIMM authors are really implying that not understanding this Wynne Godley discovery is anti-democratic!
Indeed the conclusion we must draw is that because of monetary illiteracy none of the UK’s political parties are actually truly democratic in willing to meet all of the people’s needs and inclined to impose policies that are ideologically extreme left or right wing.
3.2.8
“Political rhetoric that propounds the unsustainability of the national debt and the government’s inability to finance its expenses18 is misleading and anti-democratic. This rhetoric has led to a widespread political consensus that accepts degraded public infrastructure and services, unemployment, and poverty. Instead, the government should educate the public on its fiscal capabilities. This will develop political capital for national regeneration, leading to a more sustainable and equitable economy.”
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/128254/pdf/
Here’s the Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie quote the GIMM submission refers to in the footnote on the first page of its submission:-
“Notwithstanding the extreme simplicity of this model we are already able to reach a supremely important policy conclusion which will survive throughout this book. Given the level of activity, the quantity of private wealth and the rate at which it accumulates are determined entirely by the propensities of the private sector, which the government cannot change. But this is to imply (again given the level of activity) that government deficits and debts (being identically equal to, respectively, private saving and wealth) are endogenous variables which cannot be controlled by governments. This conclusion totally contradicts many influential, or even statutory, proposals regarding the regulation of fiscal policy which are made in abstraction from any consideration of how economies actually work – for instance the European Maastricht rules, Gordon Brown’s Golden Rule in the United Kingdom and, most important, the view widely held by ignorant politicians and members of the public that government budgets should be balanced.”
Page 142:-
http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/8726/1/53%20.%20Wynne_Godley.pdf
This is reinforced later in the GIMM’s submission document to the House of Lords National Debt Committee:-
2.3.2
“It’s important to understand that although the government can control how much it spends, the amount of tax collected depends on the number of taxable transactions happening in the economy, as tax is generally a percentage of the transaction amount. Therefore, the total amount of tax collected in any given period is primarily determined by the spending and saving decisions of the non-government sector and not by government policy. If the non-government sector decides to increase its net savings or import even more than it exports, only a portion of the money spent by the government will recirculate within the domestic economy. The tax collected will be less, and the budget deficit will increase. Net saving and net importing are typical behaviours of the UK domestic private sector, which is why the government has a deficit financial position in most years.”
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/128254/pdf/
Thanks
For me ‘growth’ has strong affiliations with financial ‘returns’ on investment.
It is a very narrow definition and shorthand for ‘short termism’.
It takes and whatever it gives is very unfairly shared.
Good points
To use a crude business analogy, it’s like focusing only on revenue growth and profit, whilst ignoring your employees, customers, skills, R&D, equipment and so on. Which of course is just what today’s financialised businesses do, driven by the City.
There are other sets of measures out there – Sustainable Development goals, Wellbeing, Doughnut – which between them would describe a much fairer, healthier, sustainable and more equable set of outcomes. What we lack are any courageous politicians and parties prepared to argue for them. We also have a voting public conditioned by credit card, household budget and magic money tree metaphors.
Growth “equivalent to” financial returns recalls Piketty and the r > g problem: if returns to capital are greater than the growth rate, inequality increases. Hence growth is vital to assuage the non-capital-owning classes, who make material gains (which they’re persuaded make them ‘better off’) even as capital makes gains.
We’re coming round to this issue again after the ascendancy of neoliberal economics shoved it to the sidelines. The book ‘The Limits to Growth’ was published in 1972. There’s a good podcast about why, after a positive initial reception, it was fought, then ignored.
https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/the-problematique-part-1/
Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics is along these lines, and the European Trade Union Institute has run conferences on looking beyond growth
https://www.etui.org/news/trade-unions-beyond-growth-what-next
It’s hard to see how we get from capitalism turbo charged by fossil fuels and financialisation to the virtuous circle of the doughnut where we all live within planetary boundaries, but I hope there’s a way.
Great to know you’re on board Richard.
[…] By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future. […]
Happy birthday. An innovative use of the broken window fallacy (break more windows to get GDP up). Perhaps “meeting needs” should include contentment or happiness?
That would be the aim
Once again growth has to take place against the awareness human beings become far too easily “entangled with things” without anticipating the consequences:-
http://www.ian-hodder.com/articles/the-entanglements-of-humans-and-things-a-long-term-view-pdf
Can not it be argued AI will help us to make better judgements?
I know you are no longer a supporter of the Green Party due to concerns over economic policy, but the Greens are the only political party with well-refined Socialist policies who are not obsessing over ‘growth’. Greens believe in the redistribution of wealth and a fair taxation system. One of the Green Party slogans pertaining to our finite resources on earth is: “There Is No Planet B”! An important Green Party goal is to keep trade local; I created a poster declaring that there is no ‘Green Brexit’. Exiting the EU to grow trade links with nations on the other side of the planet was insane, due to greatly increased transport costs and our growing carbon footprint.
I am so frustrated by those who buy into the media propaganda that the Greens are a single issue party. The reality is that the Green Party has a very full set of well documented principles that cover all areas of public life, with every single issue having been democratically voted on by the members. I realize that our monetary policy still requires a rethink. It remains the legacy of Molly Scott Cato at a time when most in the party were more focused on other policy areas. This and other radical ideas like Basic Income would not make it into an election manifesto. I have no doubt that our monetary policy will change as Green Party members are now discussing MMT.
There are a growing number of new start-up political parties who have not had sufficient time to devote to democratically voted on, fully evolved policies. I think that there will be multiple left-wing challengers to what remains of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer. Offended by Starmer’s lurch to the right, abandonment of Socialist values and unconditional support for the Gaza Genocide, I think more MPs will desert Labour before the next election to run as independents. Although some of them may be reading your blog and discovering a new economic direction, my concern is that this fragmentation does not bode well for their electoral prospects if they fail to unite.
In the next few months these groups will need to coalesce under one broadly Socialist banner or the media will be able to completely sideline them exactly as they already do with the Greens. The Green Party has always been a Socialist Party, the only one left standing now that Keir Starmer has turned Labour into a Tory tribute act by glorifying the misery wrought by Margetet Thatcher. If ousted former well-respected Labour MPs, other Socialist groups and independents joined the Greens then we would have a collective voice in televised debates. These candidates can run as ‘Workers Party and Green’ at the election. This collaboration would mean the BBC could no longer ignore the Left.
We cannot rely on Starmer and Reves ditching their overwhelming loyalty to the wealthy elites, it just will not happen. The obsession with growth stimulated by zero investment is the path to extended misery for ordinary people in the UK. We never used to have masses of people sleeping on the streets or families reliant on food-banks to survive. We must stop this regression, but while your right to assert that ‘growth’ is not the solution, we cannot get this message across without a unified political voice. As I will tell any MP who asks my opinion on ‘Growth’: “I had a 13cm growth on my right kidney and I was ecstatic when my surgeon cut it out”!
In the right ploace I would vote Green
“From each according to their ability to each according to their needs”.
Didn’t someone write that in 1875?
Might the prominence/emphasis on growth be because, to a significant degree, the word-concept “Growth” is a deluding or “marketing ploy” to lure regular people into accepting/believing that current economics theories, practices and consequences are, despite their realities, acceptable/”a good thing” because they promise good times in the future?
Might there have been a metaphorical reference to growth in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 book, “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice Found There”?
The Queen said:
“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.”
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”(Edward Abbey)
Brilliant
When I first started taking photos in the middle of the last century I had to think carefully about the best viewpoint, exposure, whether there was something that would distract the eye and even whether the subject justified a photo because there was no photoshopping and having a film processed was expensive.
Similarly, before the advent of computers, you had to consider carefully exactly what data would need to be collected in order to illuminate your issue and how to design the later numerical analysis if it was going to tell you anything useful, as the process was going to be expensive of time and effort.
It always concerned me that the power of computers to crunch numbers would lead to a lack of critical thought about the quality of the data being crunched and whether the outcome was actually telling you anything useful. I fear we have got to the point where being able to crunch the numbers seems to have given them a mystical power which outweighs reason. Just because you can calculate a statistic doesn’t mean you should and questioning whether you should is the important bit.
I so agree
On photography too
I often think about how I would frame a picture if I was using film now. It makes me try harder
It’s a good analogy, having taken photos in the days of film when every shot counted and you were much more careful.
Then working in IT when computers were slow and storage very expensive. You had to think very carefully about what you really needed and programmes were written to be as efficient as possible. Old school IT folk look at how it is used today as stunningly wasteful. Quantity does not mean quality. And of course, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Quite so….
I assume you’re aware of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and various proposed measures of the real conditions of citizens, beyond financial metrics? Eg. the writings of Trebeck and Williams (Economics of Arrival) and others. Plus a lot on commons (re-commoning) and reversing the atomisation and financialisation of society…
I am only aware of them, no more……
https://weall.org/about-weall for a quick browse?
There’s also a government alliance WEGo:
https://weall.org/WEGo
(Sturgeon, whatever her other faults, signed Scotland up)
I agree some of the degrowth narrative can be too negative, lacking positives about human flourishing and community, too much jeremiad and not enough joy.
https://weall.org/about-weall for a quick browse?
There’s also a government alliance WEGo:
https://weall.org/WEGo
(Sturgeon, whatever her other faults, signed Scotland up.)
I agree some of the degrowth narrative can be too negative, lacking positives about human flourishing and community, too much jeremiad and not enough joy.
Thanks
See also the wellbeing work done by the Carnegie Trust. Jen Wallace there is very good. As ever, hard to get the orthodox economists who dominate party thinking to pay attention.
I agree with your analysis.
I would go further – I would suggest that an ‘economy’ that does not efficiently serve essential human needs, a system that refuses to avoid avoidable harms to entire populations, is not really an ‘economy’ at all. It is something else.
It is a system of Wealth Extraction within a culture of Power and Wealth Hierarchy that deploys layers of violences, large and small, to maintain and expand its dominance.
https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/10/1982-cabinet-report-privatise-nhs.html
The Ruling Class are quite open about this. They always have been. The intelligentsia tend to keep quiet about it, as it is more than their jobs and mortgages and OBE/MBEs are worth, apparently.
The populations main job, including the disabled, is to do our duty, as Laura Trott opined, 21st November 2023 or there abouts and get to work. Wealth must be extracted.
I am certain she had many, many others cheering her on, not least Iain Duncan Smith and the purveyors of low wage job opportunities who are also politically powerful billionaires.
There is a lot in what you say I agree with
Thank you for your reply, Richard.
I’d be interested in which parts you do not agree with, because a) Regard you as a reliable expert in economics of Government deployment of Taxation/Borrowings as a shared commons that belongs to all of us… and b) where I am inaccurate or wrong or making unfounded assumptions, on any footing, I would like to learn more, so that my understanding is more accurate, and therefore potentially useful.
I believe that Government deployment of our shared resources ought to be predicated on avoiding avoidable harms.
Impoverishment through low wages and bad policy is an avoidable harm. The cutting of funding to support systems for vulnerable people is an avoidable harm. It is these harms to the most vulnerable that I am most angry about. The psychological distress caused is immense, and entirely avoidable.
I understand that there is no value in unfounded assertions and that my limitations are many, given that I am neither an academic scholar to an active economist.
Avoiding avoidable harms is a good basis for any plan, I wouild say
I agree with it
I remember, during the Covid epidemic how anxious the government was to get us to go back to our offices, go shopping, eat out to help out etc, they were desperately worried that we might get out of the consumerism habit. What might happen if we were to discover that we dont need all that Central London property? Property wealth would melt away and most of us would all be better off without it.
Some very interesting and perceptive comments. Another facet may be that when politicians call for growth as the panacea what they are really calling for is more consumption. We have to buy that new car, the monster tv, move house to somewhere bigger and more expensive, more clothes, more gizmos….endlessly.
How about “the case for Degrowth” by George’s Kallis et al? They “ question the wisdom of producing and consuming more and more, just to keep the system going. The time is ripe for us to refocus on what really matters: not GDP, but the health and well-being of our people and our planet.
In a word, degrowth”
Blooming Autocorrect. Should have been Giorgos.
Too negative
And too focussed on data
Let’s take about what people need