Thanks to Phil Wollen for this OpEd by Tom Flynn. See http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=flynn_28_1
Beyond Ponzi Economics
Tom Flynn
I'm not an economist, and I've never played a political scientist on TV.* But I peruse their literatures, and I'm puzzled by how seldom their discussions seem to focus on a problem that I consider desperately important. If I'm wrong-either because the problem is being tackled or because it's less important than I think-I hope the economists and political scientists among our readers will set me straight.
The problem I have in mind is the ad dictive dependence of human eco no mies and political systems upon growth. Across history, the societies that successfully delivered "the good life" for their members have been societies engaged in growing in terms of population, wealth, physical territory, or natural resources. We associate growth with economic vigor, cultural vibrancy, and advances in human welfare. Stasis, or even growth that's too slow, heralds malaise. Real shrinkage is often accompanied-or caused-by soc ial or economic collapse, military conquest, or epidemic disease.
Consider Western Europe's welfare states and the creaky U.S. system of private pensions and health care. Both work best when population and wealth are increasing-when each generation can count on richer and more numerous successors to absorb its members' retirement costs. Similarly, in the business world, an organization whose revenue or market value does not increase each year is viewed as failing. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner used to say, "If it's not growing, it's going to die."
As far as I can tell, in human history there's never been a polity, economy, or institution efficient enough to deliver aspects of the good life without the steady drip-drip of growth.
One sign that the social sciences are not yet mature is that human beings still don't know how to create establishments that can excel without growing a percent or so each year. Idealists say "Small is beautiful," but we haven't figured out how to achieve "Small is workable." This would pose no problem if limitless growth were possible. But it's not, at least while humans remain constrained by the finite resources of planet Earth.
It worries me that the best social and economic systems human beings have devised are all-let's admit it-glorified Ponzi schemes. As a group, we might call them "Ponzic establishments." For them to thrive requires incessant growth, and that is ultimately unsustainable.
As best I can tell, few social scientists consider this a problem. Little effort seems to be focused on developing post-Ponzic establishments-social, economic, and political structures able to sustain a humane society through a period of real shrinkage.
That also worries me, because there are good reasons to think real shrinkage might be desirable-maybe even inevitable. Specialists have been warning about overpopulation since the 1950s. (In FI's August/September 2004 issue, I followed the lead of some leading population activists and called for a long-term target of just 2.5 billion humans; in his new best-seller The World Without Us, Alan Weisman notes that an even lower target of 1.6 billion persons could be achieved as early as the year 2100, given an admittedly unlikely global one-child policy. Mean while, scientist James Love lock, father of the Gaia hypothesis, worries that a collapsing ecosystem may be able to support as few as 500 million humans long-term.) Over population anxiety is out of fashion, so we seldom hear about the 1995 metastudy in which Joel Cohen, head of Rockefeller University's population lab, cross-correlated fourteen estimates of the planet's capacity to support human life. The experts' median high and low estimates for an indefinitely sustainable world population (given realistic assumptions about available technologies) ranged between 2.1 and 5 billion people. Of course, we're way past that: there are now more than 6.6 billion of us. United Kingdom scientist Sir Davis King told a parliamentary inquiry last year, "It is self-evident that the massive growth in the human population through the twentieth century has had more impact on biodiversity than any other single factor." Researcher Gigi Richard stated the obvious: Earth's population must "be reduced in order to be sustainable."