It doesn't seem to get the attention in the media and academia that other disagreements get, but economic growth is a fault line between some people. It seems like I have heard some people saying that only a switch to zero or negative economic growth will save humanity and the Earth. Other people say that continued economic growth will resolve all of our ills and that any call for less than economic growth is harmful, stalls progress, and sets us back.

After re-reading parts of Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (6th edition), by Richard H. Robbins, here is my present understanding:

1. The oil that keeps capitalism running is money. Money is not just some tool--in capitalism it has a magical, mythical power, kind of like Adam Smith's invisible hand. Everything under capitalism is about money.

2. Commodity money, such as a piece of paper that could be exchanged for gold, limited economic growth to the supply of the commodities it was tethered to.

3. The switch to fiat/credit money left almost no limits on the supply of money and, therefore, potential economic growth.

4. To keep up with all of the loans, debt to be repaid, dividends to be payed to investors, etc. that are the result of this massive money supply, there has to be perpetual economic growth.

5. Countless global problems--poverty, starvation, the spread of disease, terrorism, and others--can be traced to this need for perpetual economic growth.

6. The culture of capitalism masks things like the externalities in 5. This masking/concealing of the problems it creates is built into capitalism. For example, Walt Disney World, the most-visited tourist attraction in the world, was designed to downplay/obscure in the minds of visitors the damage that capitalism does / has done to the environment, indigenous peoples, etc. and encourage them to keep spending money as consumers.

7. Finally, and most importantly, it is a fact that the supply of money greatly exceeds the value of physical materials available to be commodified.


Basically, the problem is money.

All of this has led me to come up with a possible compromise: Limit the supply of money in each nation-state to the value of all physical materials the nation-state has available for commodification plus, say, 10% of that.

Biologists, chemists, engineers, geologists, physicist, etc. could keep an inventory of everything available--timber, coal, natural, gas, soil, water, wildlife, etc. and calculate how much of it could be commodified in some way with available technology. Like the census in the U.S., a national accounting could be done at regular intervals such as every ten years. The institutions that control the money supply, such as the Federal Reserve in the U.S., could then adjust the amount of money in circulation, interest rates, etc. accordingly.

The extra 10% would give a little room for research and development, innovation, new technologies, etc. and, therefore, modest continuous economic growth.

The reason, I now understand, that we continue to increasingly wreck each other's lives and wreck our habitat with producing and consuming "stuff" is that we have far more money to hand out and grab like candy than we have the present ecological means to safely, justly convert that money into goods and services. And the people who have all of that money expect something from it--lenders expect to get it back plus interest; investors expect dividends; consumers expect stuff that they can buy with it; etc.

If we don't want everything to implode--ecological collapse; global social unrest and disorder; etc.--our only hope may be to maintain continuous economic growth but make it based on more of reality for a change. I have described one way that I think that could be accomplished.