#steady-state

So what happens when we stop shopping? This is the great conundrum. The economy is built on consumption and the early obsolescence of things provide jobs, and keep the economy ticking over. How do you manage a transition, if people stop spending? Before, you could always rely on technological advance. People could stop buying buggies, and the buggy manufacturers went out of business, but people bought cars instead, and car makers prospered. But what happens if they stop buying something — and buy nothing to replace it? If men stopped shaving, thousands of workers would be laid off, because their jobs are to make razors and razor blades and batteries for shavers, and shaving cream and lotions, and devising marketing campaigns for shaving systems. This dilemma is replicated in every industry, in every town, in every region, in every country. Andrew Revkin, The New York Times’s wise ecology correspondent, pondered the question not long ago, though he put it this way: How do you grow an economy without the jobs and the taxes that these unnecessary things produce? And he added: “The market, unfortunately, does not differentiate between good and bad. If the people want junk, the market will provide. So we have to fall back on the conscience of our business leaders.” In which he was surely being sardonic. But in Revkin’s question lie the seeds of an answer. He asked, how do you grow an economy without the taxes and jobs… ? The beginning of the answer surely is, don’t grow. As Tim Jackson puts it, “consuming less may be the single biggest thing you can do to save carbon emissions, and yet no one dares to mention it. Because if we did, it would threaten economic growth, the very thing that is causing the problem in the first place.”

Growth has filled the world with us and our products. I was born in 1938, and in my lifetime world population has tripled. That is unprecedented. But even more unprecedented is the growth in populations of artifacts — “our stuff” — cars, houses, livestock, refrigerators, TVs, cell phones, ships, airplanes, etc. These populations of things have vastly more than tripled. The matter-energy embodied in these living and nonliving populations was extracted from the ecosystem. The matter-energy required to maintain and replace these stocks also comes from the ecosystem. The populations or stocks of all these things have in common that they are what physicists call “dissipative structures” — i.e., their natural tendency, thanks to the entropy law, is to fall apart, to die, to dissipate. The dissipated matter-energy returns to the ecosystem as waste, to be reabsorbed by natural cycles or accumulated as pollution. All these dissipative structures exist in the midst of an entropic throughput of matter-energy that both depletes and pollutes the finite ecosphere of which the economy is a wholly contained subsystem. When the subsystem outgrows the regenerative capacity of the parent system then further growth becomes biophysically impossible. But long before growth becomes impossible it becomes uneconomic — it begins to cost more than it is worth at the margin. We refer to growth in the economy as “economic growth,” — even after such growth has become uneconomic in the more basic sense of increasing illth faster than wealth. That is where we are now, but we are unable to recognize it. Why this inability? Partly because our national accounting system, GDP, only measures “economic activity,” not true income, much less welfare. Rather than separate costs from benefits and compare them at the margin we just add up all final goods and services, including anti-bads (without subtracting the bads that made the anti-bad necessary). Also depletion of natural capital and natural services are counted as income, as are financial transactions that are nothing but bets on debts, and then further bets on those bets.

Our way of life is unsustainable

Steady-State Operation