Made in America: The Unsustainable All-Consuming Global Free-Market ‘Utopia’

Abstract

Economic policy narratives have tended to place emphasis on the necessity of pursuing economic growth, achieving year-on-year increases in production, increases in the value of the goods and services produced by commercial corporations and the economies of nation-states, a necessary corollary of which is that rates of consumption, in turn, have to rise to absorb growth in production. The strong implication conveyed in economic policy narratives is that ‘growth is good’, that ‘more’ is necessarily better. But the idea that economic growth is necessarily beneficial is questionable. Economic growth may have the potential to produce material and moral benefits insofar as the production of more goods and services, ceteris paribus, may lead to an increase in material standards of living, promote an increase in opportunities, enhance tolerance, improve social mobility, and perhaps even raise the prospect of greater commitment to democracy (Friedman, 2006). But much depends on what is produced, the terms and conditions under which things are produced, how commodities and services are socially distributed, and, increasingly, what impact production and consumption have on the environment (Starke, 2004).