Growth: naked cake-ism

 "Growth" as a substitute for willingness to pay for what you want, has been around for at lest 60 years. It is a prize example of "having your cake and eating it." I first came across it in the campaign for the 1964 election when the then  Labour leader, Harold Wilson,  assured us that the UK could build the New Jerusalem with a modern infrastructure, effective social services, vibrant local government, well financed health and education services, without it  costing the voters  a penny.  

It would be financed out of  growth.  

Growth would be achieved  by setting up a government planning department  which would replace the uncertain progress achieved by hit and miss private enterprise.

 Labour won the election and  the Department of Economic Affairs under their Deputy Leader George Brown was set up as an antidote to Treasury staidness.  Eventually the project was blown off course by "events."

Most developed economies had, however, achieved and continued to achieve substantial growth in the 30 years after 1945.  The French called them "les Trente Glorieuses.".  The most outstanding success was Germany.  Most others achieved  a  modest annual average of around 3%.  As R A Butler, an earlier Tory panjandrum, pointed out, this enabled us to "double our standard of living in 25 years." 

However, from the mid 1970s such rates of growth became difficult to maintain.  The backlog of the war years had been eliminated, new technology had been absorbed, the economies with lots of peasants (eg France) had transferred them to the more productive industrial sectors (the UK hadn't many peasants so used immigration from the Commonwealth instead) and the economies had matured.

Nevertheless the struggle for growth continued, largely becasue it seemed to be the essential to maintain full employment.

But for those who cared to look.the writing was on the wall from the early 70s   The "Club of Rome "  (unrelated to the EU, I believe) published "The Limits to Growth" which claimed that current rates of growth among the developed countries, with less developed countries catching up, would exhaust the planet's resources and make it uninhabitable through pollution.  Their conclusion  was; "Either civilisation or growth must end." 

There have been many more recent and more readable accounts since.  In particular I recommend:

Prosperity without Growth, Tim Jackson, Earthscan, 2009

 

 Enough is Enough, Dietz and O'Neill, Earthscan, 2013

 

 Dan O'Neill is (or maybe was) chief economist of CASSE, the Center (it's American) for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy.  You'll find all about it here: 
https://steadystate.org

 

O'Neill was for some years on some sort of secondment from CASSE and ran seminars at Leeds University, at which I was a regular attender.

 

In "The Spirit Level"  Wilkinson and Pickett (Penguin 2009) show  that in the UK the fruits of growth have been unequally  shared (most go to the already rich) and the resulting inequality leads to less healthy and happy societies. 

So it beggars belief that the British government, so prone to claiming that the UK is "world leading," continues to advocate (as though they had just discovered it) not just "growth" but "Grow Growth, Growth" as the solution to all their their and our problems. 

 

Although they normally (they are suffering from an aberration at the moment) solemnly preach that the government must not borrow excessively  becasue that would place an unfair burden on future generations (which isn't true, but that's a topic for another post) they don't seem in the least worried about passing on a poisoned planet to those precious children and grandchildren.

 

For a while it is possible to compromise by advocating "sustainable growth,"  such as investing in renewable sources of energy.  Alarmingly, for this government, any sort of growth will do, even permitting fracking and re-licensing exploration for oil in the North Sea.

Future policy needs to concentrate on reducing the adverse impact of the existing pie, and looking for more equitable ways of sharing it.

At present our major parties are light years away from this.