Excerpt from a discussion with James Gustave Speth, Dean of Envrionment and Forestry at Yale University - April 16, 2008 (Read the entire speech.):I want to focus on a different area, perhaps more controversial area, and that is the need to challenge economic growth itself and to challenge the consumption on which it depends. I believe that the new environmentalism has got to challenge the overriding primacy accorded economic growth. We need to explore instead moving to a post-growth society.
The never-ending drive to grow the overall economy can undermine our families, our jobs, our community,the environment, our sense of place and continuity, even our mental health because in the end it's says always that somehow this growth is going to make us better off with better lives. I think there's now good reason to doubt that this is so at least in the well-to-do countries.
Some ecologically minded economists have said that what we have in our affluent world today could be called uneconomic growth where the costs if you could measure them, the environmental costs, the social costs, all of the costs of additional increment of growth, are so great that they outweigh the measured benefits in GDP. And, many studies now show that in affluent societies, increased income is not being translated into greater satisfaction with life, greater sense of well-being, or happiness among the people.
I know that Brookings has a role in some studies which were noted in today's "New York Times" that take a somewhat different look at some of the issues about happiness and growth and life satisfaction and growth. I haven't had time to see the studies, but I think the most compelling evidence is the work that has been reported in a number of countries, advanced affluent countries, which looks at the progress or lack thereof of life satisfaction, or subjective well-being, of happiness, in one country as GDP per capita has gone up.
In my book I present data from Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, which shows that during this past few decades as GDP per capita has skyrocketed in all of our countries, satisfaction with life, subjective wellbeing, sense of personal happiness, has flat-lined.
3 comments:
Many of us have known for a long time that growth for the sake of growth (ah la chamber mentality) is bad growth. Miami-Dade is a microcosim of bad growth. Growth NEVER pays for itself. Tax income is miniscule compared to the cost of servicing new growth (roads, water/sewer,police,schools,and fire, not to mention quality of life). It is even more absurd when we don't need this new growth. We can't even absorb what is here now.It is telling that farmland uses about 30 cents for every tax dollar they pay while residential uses about $1.40 for every tax dollar collected.Duh. It doesn't take a genious to figure out that development does not pay for itself. Government's response to this growing deficit is to build more. Hey let's try something different, like a moritorium for 3 years. Maybe we can catch up with the existing inventory, add to the tax roll without more infrastructure costs and put us on a more stable course. But Lennar, chambers and Lowes won't like it. It's not politically correct (read commission benefit)so it's not going to happen. Until people understand basic economics and start raising hell nothing will change.
This is not exactly a new idea.
.Not only what's mentioned above, but population figures are staggering to record heights; immigration is uncontrolable, this
country with diminishing resources, available water (quality) loss of prestine farmland, habitant extinction,low wet-land conversions to high density housing tracks all add up
to the quality of Life destruction.
Riley
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