permaculture

[Russ Grayson <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

The following story, published by the Sydney Morning Herald, the city's 'quality press' (as opposed to the Murdoch-owned tabloid), comes from Ross Gittins, the paper's economics writer and himself no enemy of economic growth and business.

The Australia Institute referred to is a Canberra-based, independent think tank....

Sydney Morning Herald 2003 June 30
ROSS GITTINS, MONDAY COMMENT

It’s silly, dangerous and coming to a head.

If you think the old ideological divide between Left and Right has
lost its punch, never fear. A new and far more disturbing ideological
fault-line is emerging: the battle between the proponents and the
opponents of economic growth.

Just how disturbing many people find the gathering anti-growth push
can be seen from NSW Treasurer Michael Egan’s outburst last week.
He was reacting against my sympathetic columns about Clive Hamilton’s
book 'Growth Fetish' (published by Allen & Unwin and into its third
printing).

"Clive Hamilton's garbage", Mr Egan said;"is just plain silly,
dangerous, left-wing crap".

Well, it may be crap, but it's not left wing. The attack on economic
growth - on the primacy of ever-increasing production and
consumption of goods and services - is an attack on materialism. And
when you question materialism you soon discover you’ve united the
Right and the Left against you. The traditional Left is just as
obsessed by the pursuit of material gain as any fat capitalist. The
only distinction is that while the Right's into greed, the Left's
specialty is envy. Its beef is with the way the cake's being divided,
not with its scrumminess -- that’s self-evident.

The commitment to growth -- "rising living standards" -- is so nearly
universal among our economists and politicians that it’s tempting to
dismiss the anti-growth push as a one-week wonder.

But I think that would be a mistake. The push has got more momentum
behind it than most people yet realise. I think it could become the
major ideological battleground of the coming years. Why? Because of
satiation (for some people, at lease). Because, in our ever-more
hectic lives, "downsizing" is so tempting. Because the rise of
economic rationalism has made capitalism turbo-charged and
overdone.

Everyone used to be fairly laid-back in their pursuit of the good
life but now we're surrounded by people with whips. Our bosses whip
us because they live in fear of the sharermarket’s whip. In the
micro-reformed economy, the unceasing cry is More! More! Faster!
Faster! Is it so hard to believe that one day a lot of people may
start asking . . . why? But there's more to it. The intellectual case
against growth is building up on two fronts: the environmentalists on
one side and the psychologists and renegade economists on the other.
I guess most people know that the Deep Green environmentalists have
been muttering against economic growth for some time. They think we
simply can't go on chewing up natural resources, generating waste and
destroying eco-systems at the rate we are.

Their arguments become more powerful when the economists so
proudly remind us of how rapidly the world's two most populous economies are
growing. Do we really believe the environment could withstand 2.3
billion Chinese and Indians attaining a material standard of living
even remotely approaching that of the West? Dr Hamilton, director of
the Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute, is probably
the country's leading environmental economist. But 'Growth Fetish' gets
to its second last chapter before it mentions the environment.

Rather, his book is about the challenge to economic growth arising
from the psychologists’ burgeoning study of happiness. Once a
country's material living standard passes a certain minimal level,
the psychologists simply can't find a correlatlon between economic
growth and "subjective wellbeing". Nor do they find that the rich are
notably happier than the poor. And they’re making progress in
explaining this unexpected finding. Part of it is that humans'
expectations adapt so quickly to their improved circumstances.
Another part is that our comparisons of our income aren't absolute
(as economists assume), but relative.

What we care about is how our income compares with other people's,
what it says about our social status. And the more micro reform
succeeds in raising our income, the higher proportion of it we devote
to "positional goods", to things that demonstrate our status -- homes
in good suburbs, imported cars, fashionable clothes, private schools
and private hospitals. The trouble with this is that, contrary to the
economists' assumptions, it's a zero-sum game -- I can advance my
position in the pecking order only by pushing someone else back.

To this Dr Hamilton adds the contention that, far from the market
system existing to serve the consumer, the producers bombard us with
advertising and other marketing intended to con us into keeping up
our consumption. Perversely advertising (as well as the TV programs
and movies that come between the ads) does this by making us
unhappy and dissatisfied. It shows us how poorly our lives compare with those
of the beautiful people and holds out the delusion that a tub of
margarine or a Rolex watch is the thing that will finally make us
happy. It plays on our easily manipulated emotions, knowing full well
how incapable we are of rational decision-making. 

If this is true, it turns the assumptions of economics on their head. It means we're
being conditioned into consuming more merely so production can keep
growing. 

But while these ideas strike some people as illuminating,
liberating and worthy of more thorough exploration, it's not hard to
see why others - like Mr Egan - find them so threatening and
dangerous. For most of us, the pursuit of growth and material advance
is the organising principle for our world view. It's the object of
the exercise, determining the role of government and the way
economies should be managed. More to the point, for many of us the
pursuit of income and material gain is the organising principle for
our lives. We can't imagine how we'd hold the show together without
it.

As for economists, the pursuit of growth is so deeply ingrained in
their thinking that they find the contrary idea utterly
disorientating. (Which is why they try so hard not to think about
it.) What's the alternative to growth? How would you manage the
economy, and to what end? Would the population also have to stop
growing? What if it didn't? Where would the extra jobs come from? Is
an economy that doesn't grow one that doesn't change? Wouldn't we
find such stagnation suffocating? And who’s to say that, if we topped aiming for a continuous growth, we wouldn't end up with continuous contraction? Our limited experience tells us economies
that keep getting smaller are not happy places to be. 

These are questions to which most economists have given zero thought - though
the leading environmental economist Herman Daly, of the University of
Maryland, has given them considerable thought. For his part, Dr
Hamilton has no grand design. His starting point is not that we
should try to stamp out growth, just that we should stop aiming for
it. It's an appealing notion. If only we could get our big
business people to calm down a bit. If we stopped whipping ourselves
quite so hard, maybe that would make our lives better rather than
worse.

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Russ Grayson
Media services:  journalism-print/ online/ photo
pacedge@magna.com.au  Phone/ fax: 02 9588 6931
PO Box 446 Kogarah NSW 2217 Australia
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