Eckersley, R. 2005. The challenge of post-materialism. Australian Financial Review, 24-28 March, Review, pp. 5,10.
The challenge of post-materialism Richard Eckersley wonders when enough is enough. The Spectator magazine claimed last year that ‘we live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history’. And if now was good, it argued, the future would be even better. The belief that we live in the best of all times has been most famously and controversially articulated in recent years by Danish academic, Bjorn Lomborg in his 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the real state of the world. That we live in such a ‘blessed’ era is usually credited to material prosperity resulting from economic growth. Australian governments give over-riding priority in public policy to economics, believing economic growth to be the basis for improving the wellbeing of the Australian people. This position is regarded as a ‘policy constant’ that is largely beyond scrutiny or debate. The Prime Minister John Howard made much of his Government’s economic record during the last election campaign, claiming repeatedly that a strong, growing economy was critical to Australia’s future. In his ‘Getting the big things right’ speech last July, he said: ‘Maintaining a strong dynamic and growing economy is the…overriding responsibility of government’ (along with, now, national security and defence). At a World Economic Forum dinner in Melbourne in 1998, Howard stated unequivocally: ‘The overriding aim of our agenda is to deliver Australia an annual (economic) growth rate of over four per cent on average during the decade to 2010.’ This is a bipartisan position: former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating said that if you couldn’t grow the economy at over four per cent a year, ‘you might as well give the game away’. There are, on the face of it, good grounds for the equation of more with better. Today, many more people are living much richer, longer lives than ever before. In the year 1000, there were about 270 million people in the world who, on average, could expect to live about 24 years and earn about US$400 a year (in today’s dollars). Today there are over 6 billion people on earth who, on average, can expect to live about 67 years and earn almost US$6,000 year. All parts of the world have shared in the gains. In the developed world in the past two hundred years, per capita GDP has risen about twenty-fold, and life expectancy has more than doubled. In the rest of the world, per capita GDP has increased more than five-fold and life expectancy has also more than doubled. The primacy of growth is at the heart of the concept of material progress, which regards economic growth as paramount because it creates the wealth necessary to increase personal freedoms and opportunities and to address social and environmental problems such as unemployment, poverty, crime, pollution, land degradation and global warming. In public policy terms, economic growth means more revenue, bigger budget surpluses, and so more money to
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