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Can we talk seriously about economic growth?
The true nature of economic growth
Tom Purdom
In her response to my review of Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit, Connie Briggs voices one of the standard concerns raised in discussions of economic growth.
"Humankind isn't the only consideration here," she writes. "Economic growth is detrimental to many other life forms on the planet."
I share many of her feelings. I've been a conservationist since 1951, when my impressionable teenage mind encountered a book called Our Plundered Planet, by the conservationist Fairfield Osborne. I'm currently a card-carrying member of the Nature Conservancy and have been, at various times, a member of the Sierra Club and the Greater Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition.
Many people think continued economic growth demands the brainless production of more and more material goods, until the earth is covered with automobiles and shopping centers. But the important statistic isn't total output. It's output per labor hour.
Until the 19th Century, 80 percent of the world's population worked on the land. That nameless crowd produced just enough food to feed themselves, plus a small surplus that supported the remaining 20 percent. Today, 2 to 3 percent of the workers in the American labor force produce so much food that obesity is a national health problem.
Making things vs. making decisions
The same process is taking place in manufacturing. According to The Economist, U.S. manufacturing output, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been doubling every 30 years. But the number of people employed in manufacturing has remained about the same.
That steady increase in output per labor hour means fewer people must spend their lives growing food and making things. One of the biggest changes in our economy has been the shift from jobs that produce material goods to jobs that provide services.
Some 75 percent of American workers now work at service jobs, which place less stress on the environment because they usually require smaller quantities of energy and raw materials.
The switch to service jobs doesn't mean we're all flipping hamburgers at McDonald's. Service workers include psychiatrists, high school basketball coaches, lawyers, accountants, cable guys, plumbers and electricians, truck and bus drivers, financial advisers, musicians, pet therapists, heavy equipment operators, wedding arrangers, salespeople, security guards, just about anyone who works in health care and education, and most of the 22 million Americans who work for federal, state and local government.
My free-lance life
The rise in society's wealth creates other effects too. Some people opt for more leisure. Others take on lower-paying occupations that they find more satisfying.
The great luxury of my life, for example, has been my 55-year career as a free-lance writer. I've been able to pursue this odd, economically marginal vocation largely because I've been content to live on a lower-middle-class income.
Fifty years ago I might not have settled for my position on the American economic pyramid. Today, dong so merely means that I forego middle-class accoutrements like a car, a house in the suburbs and vacation trips.
The richer the greener
As societies become more affluent, they also become more willing to allocate resources to environmental improvements, like habitat preservation and cleaner air and water. Rich societies tend to be greener than societies that are still lifting their people out of the kind of rural poverty celebrated by pundits who have never fed a chicken or slaughtered a rabbit.
Birthrates usually drop as societies become richer— another plus for the environment. Economic development surrounds people with incentives to limit their families. If you put off marriage and child bearing, for example, you can go to college or try a riskier career. If you have only two children, you can send your own kids to college and enjoy family vacations and doodads like video game systems.
No surprise, then, that in the world's poorest countries, like Somalia, the average woman currently adds six children to the world's population during her fertile years. In the U.S., the current fertility rate is 2.06 children per woman. In Europe, it's lower than the 2.0 replacement rate.
(Mussolini once built a public housing project in Italy that included electric lights, radios and other modern amenities. Then Il Duce discovered the tenants had decreased their production of future Fascists. He tore out the wiring and the birth rate rose.)
Possible dream
Two centuries from now, the earth could be a garden, inhabited by a few hundred million humans, with the poorest of those humans living better than today's multimillionaires. I described such a society, in fact, in my first science fiction novel (I Want the Stars, Ace Books, 1964). I have encountered no evidence since then that it's an impossible dream.
Of course there's no guarantee that this vision will come to pass. As I said in my review, we could still blunder into a fatal trap. Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most optimistic visionaries of the last hundred years, once opined that we humans may be just smart enough to get into trouble, and not smart enough to get out of it. Time will tell.♦
To read a related comment by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
"Humankind isn't the only consideration here," she writes. "Economic growth is detrimental to many other life forms on the planet."
I share many of her feelings. I've been a conservationist since 1951, when my impressionable teenage mind encountered a book called Our Plundered Planet, by the conservationist Fairfield Osborne. I'm currently a card-carrying member of the Nature Conservancy and have been, at various times, a member of the Sierra Club and the Greater Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition.
Many people think continued economic growth demands the brainless production of more and more material goods, until the earth is covered with automobiles and shopping centers. But the important statistic isn't total output. It's output per labor hour.
Until the 19th Century, 80 percent of the world's population worked on the land. That nameless crowd produced just enough food to feed themselves, plus a small surplus that supported the remaining 20 percent. Today, 2 to 3 percent of the workers in the American labor force produce so much food that obesity is a national health problem.
Making things vs. making decisions
The same process is taking place in manufacturing. According to The Economist, U.S. manufacturing output, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been doubling every 30 years. But the number of people employed in manufacturing has remained about the same.
That steady increase in output per labor hour means fewer people must spend their lives growing food and making things. One of the biggest changes in our economy has been the shift from jobs that produce material goods to jobs that provide services.
Some 75 percent of American workers now work at service jobs, which place less stress on the environment because they usually require smaller quantities of energy and raw materials.
The switch to service jobs doesn't mean we're all flipping hamburgers at McDonald's. Service workers include psychiatrists, high school basketball coaches, lawyers, accountants, cable guys, plumbers and electricians, truck and bus drivers, financial advisers, musicians, pet therapists, heavy equipment operators, wedding arrangers, salespeople, security guards, just about anyone who works in health care and education, and most of the 22 million Americans who work for federal, state and local government.
My free-lance life
The rise in society's wealth creates other effects too. Some people opt for more leisure. Others take on lower-paying occupations that they find more satisfying.
The great luxury of my life, for example, has been my 55-year career as a free-lance writer. I've been able to pursue this odd, economically marginal vocation largely because I've been content to live on a lower-middle-class income.
Fifty years ago I might not have settled for my position on the American economic pyramid. Today, dong so merely means that I forego middle-class accoutrements like a car, a house in the suburbs and vacation trips.
The richer the greener
As societies become more affluent, they also become more willing to allocate resources to environmental improvements, like habitat preservation and cleaner air and water. Rich societies tend to be greener than societies that are still lifting their people out of the kind of rural poverty celebrated by pundits who have never fed a chicken or slaughtered a rabbit.
Birthrates usually drop as societies become richer— another plus for the environment. Economic development surrounds people with incentives to limit their families. If you put off marriage and child bearing, for example, you can go to college or try a riskier career. If you have only two children, you can send your own kids to college and enjoy family vacations and doodads like video game systems.
No surprise, then, that in the world's poorest countries, like Somalia, the average woman currently adds six children to the world's population during her fertile years. In the U.S., the current fertility rate is 2.06 children per woman. In Europe, it's lower than the 2.0 replacement rate.
(Mussolini once built a public housing project in Italy that included electric lights, radios and other modern amenities. Then Il Duce discovered the tenants had decreased their production of future Fascists. He tore out the wiring and the birth rate rose.)
Possible dream
Two centuries from now, the earth could be a garden, inhabited by a few hundred million humans, with the poorest of those humans living better than today's multimillionaires. I described such a society, in fact, in my first science fiction novel (I Want the Stars, Ace Books, 1964). I have encountered no evidence since then that it's an impossible dream.
Of course there's no guarantee that this vision will come to pass. As I said in my review, we could still blunder into a fatal trap. Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most optimistic visionaries of the last hundred years, once opined that we humans may be just smart enough to get into trouble, and not smart enough to get out of it. Time will tell.♦
To read a related comment by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
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