Most world leaders seem to believe that economic growth is a panacea for many of society’s problems. There are many links between our society’s addiction to economic growth, the disturbing ecological crisis, the rapid rise of social inequality and the decline in the quality of democracy. All these are deeply interconnected processes.
- Greater economic growth on its own does very little or nothing at all to enhance social well-being.
- Reducing income inequality is an effective way to resolve social problems such as violence, criminality, imprisonment rates, obesity and mental illness, children’s educational performance, population life expectancy, and social levels of trust and mobility.
- Societies that are more equal do much better in all the aforementioned areas than more unequal ones, independent of their GDP.
- Unchecked capitalism tends to increase inequality and undermine democratic practices. The focus of a successful social policy should be to reduce inequality, not to grow the GDP for its own sake.
- Our frenetic economic activity has already transgressed ecological planetary boundaries. If current trends continue, humanity will soon face dire and dramatic consequences.
- Constant economic growth is a biophysical impossibility in a limited biosphere, and the faster the global economy grows, the faster the living systems of the planet collapse. This growth increases inequality and undermines democracy, multiplying the number of social problems that erode human communities.
- We have created a dysfunctional economic system of growing the pace of production and consumption, destroys the ecological systems upon which it depends. And when it does not grow, it becomes socially unsustainable. In a game with these rules, there is no way to win!
- Breaking the spiral of socio-ecological disaster is easier than we think. We do not need a new planet to colonize, but only to change the way we frame things.
- The economy is a subsystem of the ecology, not the other way around. If we begin to organize our priorities according to the biophysical reality rather than the market demands, it quickly becomes clear that our dominant economic system is absurd because it destroys the ecosystems that are the source of its wealth.
- In a desirable economic model the goal is to serve the well-being of communities and ecosystems and not to accumulate capital. At a global level we cannot afford to grow at all since we need to reduce economic throughput to be sustainable.
If the rich nations in the world keep growing their economies by 2% each year and by 2050 the poorest nations catch up, the global economy of more than 9 billion people will be around 15 times larger than it is now. If the global economy then grows by 3% to the end of the century, it will be 60 times larger than now. The existing economy is already environmentally unsustainable. It is utterly implausible to think we can “decouple” economic growth from environmental impact since technological advancement have only increased our impacts on the planet, not reduced them. The GDP – the monetary value of all goods and services produced in an economy – is a deeply flawed measure of progress.
