quarter. Although many people will sigh with relief (especially politicians in power), the percentages are so small
that little can be concluded about the longer-term trends. For all we know, this could be a temporary upswing on a flat long-term trend. These politicians would love this to be the sign that we’re ‘heading back to growth’. They see it as largely their role and their mantra to achieve economic growth. Their belief (or at least their hope and the reason they think they’ll be re-elected) is that growth = new jobs and other tangible signs of prosperity. In turn, this prosperity is meant to solve poverty. Unfortunately, some evidence suggests that, despite growing prosperity in many countries, the poor and vulnerable sections of society still remain poor and vulnerable. For an example of evidence about this, see "What has really happened to poverty and inequality during the growth process in developing countries?", a paper from the ILO. The following diagram is from the report.
Growth without other measures does not solve these problems. Indeed, in some ways it exacerbates them because it makes the gaps between the richest and the poorest more visible and therefore socially painful. It’s a shame that this doesn’t spur politicians to take stronger action on social justice once they’re in power, rather than just assuming that growth will solve it. Perhaps, counter-intuitively then, politicians should instead work to
restrict growth, work towards a‘steady-state economy’ or for actual shrinkage of the economy. This way, the gap
between the richest and poorest would become smaller and social justice wouldn’t appear to be such a problem, assuming the social welfare safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable could be successfully maintained at suitable levels despite such economic conditions.
It’s worth reflecting for a few moments on the consequences of our historical love affair with economic growth and why we might have become so attached to it over the centuries. In a conversation about money, credit and the economy recently, an Alderman of the City of London recently asked me what our lives would have been like today if we had not had decades (centuries, in fact) of growth fuelled by the concepts and practices of modern banking. “Well,”I said, “our standard of living would not be as high as it is today, but then again we wouldn’t be facing
as severe a challenge to live within the planet’s limits to support us, and might not therefore be facing catastrophic climate change, among other sustainability issues. Our task to address these issues would not be as great, our legacy to our children and grandchildren not as frightening”.
There’s a practical consideration here, in that we would miss our current wealth if we had it taken away now. However, would we have “missed” our ability to achieve our current standard of living if we had never grown fast
enough to achieve it? Can you ever miss something you never had (or never knew could exist) in the first
place?
It is debatable whether we can (or have a right to) feel aggrieved to miss out on future increases in standard of living (through future growth) if we forego that growth from now on (assuming we have any choice in the matter).
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that resource (and ecosystem) constraints are affecting us in many ways (including climate change) and these effects can only get stronger as the global population grows (even if it peaks at 9 or 10 billion compared with the 7 billion alive today).
On the other hand, we shouldn’t assume that the recent recession is strong evidence of the effects of ‘limits to growth’ kicking in at a planetary level. It would take a decade or two of solid trend data to convince most people that these limits were kicking in at a whole-economy and global level. Having said that, I wouldn’t know what the statistical analysis would tell us is the number of years of continuous recession that would have to occur before we could say, with statistical certainty, that these limits were being reached and a permanent shift had occurred in the underlying drivers of the economies around the world.
Economists and mathematicians might at this point talk about ‘relevant ranges’, ie ranges of operating conditions, measurements etc within which the rules, within which we might have to date assumed we have been operating, are ‘valid’ (ie an accurate way of describing the real world and predicting the future). Outside these ranges of conditions, however, new rules and calculations govern our world (and our economies). In fact, these ‘new rules’ were always there in the economists’ calculations – it’s just that their size and impact on the end results were so small that they made no difference‘within the relevant range’. Once outside the relevant range, those numbers become big enough to become key drivers of the end results.
So, have we stepped outside these relevant ranges yet? This is the key question, for me. It leads on to questions about reversibility. If you’re outside a relevant range, can you get back inside it, or are there connected effects and
consequences that drive your position further and further outside, and possibly accelerate them towards new operating ranges or equilibria? This gets into the realms of talking about ‘tipping points’, being those points where the system is tipped from one range or equilibrium into another one (which might possibly be more hostile to human existence). Hence, if there is such a ‘tipping’, and if one can predict it in advance, isn’t it also sensible to examine whether there is reversibility, ie an ability to act to reverse previous trends and ‘tip back’ to the previous range and
equilibria? If there is reversibility (with confidence) , then it would reduce the pressure to avoid the tipping point. It would seem sensible to avoid a knee-jerk reaction to the tipping point in some circumstances, for example if this could only be done with excessive haste and inefficient redirection of massive resources. Perhaps this line of reasoning might increase the argument for research, analysis and planning for the tip-back under those circumstances.
In fact, irrespective of the above argument, it seems a no-brainer to increase reversibility wherever possible in ecosystem elements or components, as this increases the likelihood of tipping-back the whole system (or preventing its tipping-over in the first place). A simple and practical example of this is reversibility conditions placed
on development of land, such as in the Lammas development in Wales. The greater the number of reversible situations we can put in place, the greater the number of levers we have that can be pulled to prevent a tipping
point being reached or to tip us back after one has been reached. So perhaps a slightly easier concept to sell than “sustainability” might be “reversibility”.