real-world economics review, issue no. 100 subscribe for free
Issue no. 87, 2019
Growthism: its ecological, economic and ethical limits Herman Daly [University of Maryland, USA]
Copyright: Herman Daly 2019
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We have many problems poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, climate change, financial instability, etc. but only one solution for everything, namely economic growth. We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism. It now creates more problems than it solves.
A journey of no return, not a circular economy The economic process is not a mechanical analogue that can be run forward and backward, nor a circular process that can return to any previous state. Rather it is an irreversible and e cab e ce g e d ec f e a f c ea g e . 1 Finitude and entropy guarantee that the economic life of our species will be a journey of no return. Therefore even a stationary economy, in the classical sense of constant population and constant capital stock, is ultimately a journey of no return, because the metabolic throughput of matter and energy required to maintain constant stocks of people and physical capital, in the face of depreciation and death, is an entropic flow from ever less concentrated sources to ever filling sinks and both sources and sinks are finite. Consequently, technology must change qualitatively to adapt to entropy increase, to depletion and pollution of the environment, even e a a , ead - a e ec a a bee e ece ca ed. Re a e e growth economy the steady-state economy is a slower journey of no return, one that values longevity with sufficiency, and seeks qualitative improvement rather than quantitative increase. The many advantages of a slower journey were emphasized by John Stuart Mill, the champion of the classical stationary state: 2 I d be a a e f c g a a a e ae already richer than anyone needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative f ea .
1
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1972)The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press. 2 John Stuart Mill (1857) Principles of Political Economy, vol. 2 (London: John W. Parker), pp. 320-326, with omissions.
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