Post-Growth

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Description

From the Wikipedia:

"Post growth (also known as post-growth) is an overarching approach to global futures that looks to proactively respond to the limits-to-growth dilemma.[1] The limits-to-growth dilemma refers to the fact that, on a planet of finite resources, economies and populations cannot grow infinitely.[2][3]

The foundational points[1] that connect “post growth” perspectives are:

  • Acknowledging limits to economic and population growth.
  • Recognising that, due to these limits, it is necessary to embrace shifting beyond economic growth as a goal.
  • Shifting focus from current metrics of success such as GDP to new ones such as GNH (Gross national happiness), the Happy Planet Index, and/or other well-being indices.
  • Using wisdom gained in the growth-based economic era (and before it) in order to transcend to sustainable futures.
  • Thinking and acting according to values of cooperation, sharing, social justice and ecological stewardship, on local as well as global levels.


The term “post growth” acknowledges that economic growth can generate beneficial effects up to a point but beyond that point (cited as $25,000 GDP/capita by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better), it is necessary to look to other indicators and techniques to increase wellbeing.

Post-growth can be distinguished from similar movements (such as degrowth, steady state economics, post-materialism) in that it focuses on acknowledging, supporting and building on the sustainable initiatives, systems and products that are already in place.[1] Post growth advocates try to encourage, connect and further develop these existing ideas and actions. In this way, "post growth" does not specify the answer to the limits-to-growth challenge, as “steady state economics” and “degrowth” do, but rather seek to understand and address this challenge from a complex systems perspective that is constantly evolving. With this holistic complex systems approach, post growth deals with all aspects of self and society (such as psychology, human nature, human evolution, cultures, social systems and economies) and the interrelation of all of these aspects. Accordingly, the post growth concept also advocates solutions that are appropriate with regards to place, time, resource and cultural factors. Therefore, post growth initiatives take shape in very different ways under different circumstances.

Post growth can be considered an asset-based approach to community development, applied not only to community development but across a wide range of categories and in response to limits-to-growth challenges, as it seeks to build on the cultural and technological assets that already exist and are facilitating the emergence of post growth futures." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_growth)


Principles

"This list represents Post Growth Institute’s “Starting Positions,” the facts and opinions that are the basis for our organization.


1: All people can live one-planet lifestyles in ways that bring increased peace and prosperity from the personal to the global scale

There are a myriad of inspiring and empowering initiatives occurring worldwide that serve as examples of what our world can look like if we move beyond current trends that focus on personal gain, private profit, materialism and economic growth. By highlighting, connecting and supporting these initiatives we can help accelerate our global transition towards sustainable and resilient prosperity.

2. One-planet lifestyles acknowledge physical limits to economic growth on a planet with finite resources

Economies exist within the physical environment. Their existence relies upon the continued use of natural resources like water, forests and agricultural land. These natural resources are either non-renewable (limited in total amount) or are produced at a rate that is limited by the environment’s ability to regenerate them. The other side of this is nature’s ability to absorb the wastes that we produce. If economies produce waste faster than nature can absorb that waste, we undermine the planet’s ability to sustain human existence.

We are already using natural resources at a rate higher than that at which they are naturally renewed and creating wastes faster than nature can absorb them (known as ecological overshoot). Continued economic growth will only worsen this predicament. One-planet living acknowledges that we can, and must, mould our economies to fit within the limits imposed by our physical environment.

3. One-planet lifestyles acknowledge the pressures a growing human population, with highly inequitable patterns of production and consumption, place on a planet with finite physical resources.

Every human on Earth must consume natural resources to live. If we are to survive and thrive into the future, we must together consume within natural boundaries and produce less waste than nature can absorb. Some of us are consuming far more than our fair share of resources and producing excessive waste, while the total population is growing. We need to address inequalities and find ways to maintain a better balance.

4. One-planet lifestyles also acknowledge that advances in technology do not mean we can keep growing indefinitely

Technology cannot create something from nothing. For example, technology can’t change the fact that there is a limited amount of oil; it can only squeeze a little more use from existing reserves. In a world with more people and higher rates of consumption, increases in technological efficiency can, at best, buy us more time before such gains are cancelled out by further growth.

Globally, improvements in the efficiency of technologies, or even leaps to other substitutes, have not been able to offset overall increases in resource consumption and waste. In fact, these improvements in efficiency have, in many cases, driven more wasteful attitudes and increased overall consumption (see “Jevons Paradox”). Rather than relying on technology alone, we must challenge the obsession with infinite growth on a finite planet." (http://postgrowth.org/about/starting-positions/)


More Information

Bibliography

Via [1] :

  • "If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.” In “Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities,” Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian environmental scientist, complains that economists haven’t grasped “the synergistic functioning of civilization and the biosphere,” yet they “maintain a monopoly on supplying their physically impossible narratives of continuing growth that guide decisions made by national governments and companies.”
  • "In the influential book “Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow,” Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, in England, calls on Western countries to shift their economies from mass-market production to local services—such as nursing, teaching, and handicrafts—that could be less resource-intensive. Jackson doesn’t underestimate the scale of the changes, in social values as well as in production patterns, that such a transformation would entail, but he sounds an optimistic note: “People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff. Another world is possible.”
  • "Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston and the author of “Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success.” As his subtitle suggests, he thinks that slower rates of economic growth in advanced countries are nothing to worry about. Between 1950 and 2000, G.D.P. per person in the U.S. rose at an annual rate of more than three per cent. Since 2000, the growth rate has slowed to about two per cent. (Donald Trump has not, as he promised, boosted over-all G.D.P. growth to four or five per cent.) The phenomenon of slow growth is often bemoaned as “secular stagnation,” a term popularized by Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary. Yet Vollrath argues that slower growth is appropriate for a society as rich and industrially developed as ours. Unlike other growth skeptics, he doesn’t base his case on environmental concerns or rising inequality or the shortcomings of G.D.P. as a measurement. Rather, he explains this phenomenon as the result of personal choices—the core of economic orthodoxy. Vollrath offers a detailed decomposition of the sources of economic growth, which uses a mathematical technique that the eminent M.I.T. economist Robert Solow pioneered in the nineteen-fifties. The movement of women into the workplace provided a onetime boost to the labor supply; in its aftermath, other trends dragged down the growth curve. As countries like the United States have become richer and richer, Vollrath points out, their inhabitants have chosen to spend less time at work and to have smaller families—the result of higher wages and the advent of contraceptive pills. G.D.P. growth slows when the growth of the labor force declines. But this isn’t any sort of failure, in Vollrath’s view: it reflects “the advance of women’s rights and economic success.” Vollrath estimates that about two-thirds of the recent slowdown in G.D.P. growth can be accounted for by the decline in the growth of labor inputs. He also cites a switch in spending patterns from tangible goods—such as clothes, cars, and furniture—to services, such as child care, health care, and spa treatments. In 1950, spending on services accounted for forty per cent of G.D.P.; today, the proportion is more than seventy per cent. And service industries, which tend to be labor-intensive, exhibit lower rates of productivity growth than goods-producing industries, which are often factory-based. (The person who cuts your hair isn’t getting more efficient; the plant that makes his or her scissors probably is.) Since rising productivity is a key component of G.D.P. growth, that growth will be further constrained by the expansion of the service sector. But, again, this isn’t necessarily a failure. “In the end, that reallocation of economic activity away from goods and into services comes down to our success,” Vollrath writes. “We’ve gotten so productive at making goods that this has freed up our money to spend on services.”