Abstract
To understand why governments have not taken the evidence of the costs of and limits to growth seriously, it is first necessary to understand the nature of these problems. This requires conducting an immanent critique of the currently dominant concept of economic growth, involving a review of the key literature and arguments relating to both the ecological and social costs of and limits to growth. It is demonstrated that although the pursuit of growth is widely believed to be in the best interests of society, in many developed countries, the environmental and social problems caused by growth increasingly outweigh its benefits. This fundamental contradiction provides the normative basis for the meta-theoretical and discursive critique of the commitment to growth in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
GDP calculations can be made in three different but formally equivalent ways. First, a country’s GDP can be determined by aggregating all incomes (wages and profits) earned from the production of domestically owned goods and services. Second, GDP may be viewed as the total of all expenditures made in consuming goods and services. Third, GDP can be regarded as the sum of the value added by the production of economic goods and services (Jackson 2002). Sometimes these figures are quoted in terms of Gross National Product (GNP). Unlike GDP, GNP includes the incomes earned by citizens and national companies overseas.
- 2.
Hamilton (2003) estimates this figure at somewhere between 5 and 15%.
- 3.
The first law of thermodynamics ‘govern[s] the conversion of energy from one form to another, the direction in which heat will flow, and the availability of energy to do work. It is based on the concept that in an isolated system anywhere in the universe there is a measurable quantity of energy … This is the total kinetic and potential energy of the atoms and molecules of the system of all kinds that can be transferred directly as heat’. The absolute level of energy in an isolated system ‘can only be changed if the system ceases to be isolated…[through] the transfer of mass to or from the system, the transfer of heat…to or from the system, or by the work…being done on or by the system’ (Daintith 2009b). The second law of thermodynamics states that ‘the entropy of a closed system increases with time’, where entropy is ‘[a] measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. [I]n a closed system an increase in entropy is accompanied by a decrease in energy availability’ (Daintith 2009a).
- 4.
For a summary of other recent studies that show that peak oil has already, or will soon occur see Heinberg (2011).
- 5.
On the outsourcing of ecological externalities see Andersson and Lindroth (2001) and Rice (2007).
- 6.
This paradox was first identified by the British economist Jevons (1865), who in the mid-1860s pointed out that efforts to conserve English coal reserves by increasing the efficiency of steam engines ended up making steam power cheaper compared to human and animal power, thus stimulating increased coal consumption.
- 7.
The Environmental Kuznets Curve is a modification of the Kuznets Curve. Kuznets (1955) proposed that in the initial stages of economic development inequality would rise up to a point at which further growth would begin increasing equality. Whilst there was some evidence for this claim in the immediate post-war period, the growth in inequality in both developed and developing countries in recent years suggests that it is not tenable (Black et al. 2009a).
- 8.
For additional critiques of the EKC hypothesis, see Brekke and Howarth (2002) and Jackson (2009a).
- 9.
It should be noted that in this basic form, the Commoner–Ehrlich equation does not account for regional differences in environmental impact, population density, affluence or the biophysical throughput of specific national or regional economies (Victor 2008.) The IPAT identity, therefore, should only be used to generate iterative calculations on a global scale.
- 10.
The IPAT equation can be expressed as T = I /PA. If I is 0.15 (i.e. emissions reduced by 85%), P is 1.49 (i.e. population increases by 49%) and A is 3.26 (i.e. 3% growth per annum compounding for 40 years), then T = 0.031 (i.e. a reduction of biophysical throughput per unit of GDP of 96.91%). For calculations of a range of environmental impact scenarios using the IPAT identity see Ekins (1994).
- 11.
Another way to illustrate this point would be to say that if the whole world were to aspire to global incomes commensurate with EU levels within 40 years, and have these grow at 2% per annum, the global economy would have to increase by 15 times its present size by 2050 (Gilding 2011).
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Ferguson, P. (2018). The Problem with Economic Growth. In: Post-growth Politics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_2
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