Most people take it as gospel that modern economies must see “growth” in order to be healthy. Why is this?
Growth — as defined by an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — is a measure of all goods and services produced, but does not account for human health or environmental degradation. So, as has been pointed out elsewhere, when someone gets cancer or a forest gets cut down, the GDP goes up! This obvious flaw has led some economists to try to define “growth” differently, in more humane terms.
I’ve been skeptical about the rationality of the exponential economic growth doctrine, so I asked Thomas Masterson, an economist at Bard College (and one of my professors last summer at the Center for Popular Economics Summer Institute held at Smith College), what he thought: Are we really as dependent on economic growth as political and economic elites insist that we are? Maybe growth is actually necessary for employment, since the population keeps increasing and all those extra people need jobs? Won’t we eventually hit a wall if we continue to pursue infinite growth since there are a limited amount of natural resources on Earth? What happens when these resources run out? In an informative and playful piece, Masterson dealt with some of these questions.
