Good Growth, Bad Growth, Ugly Growth

From our friends at FEASTA:

Greens have no need to be against growth. They just have to be against the main type of growth taking place at present. If firms can produce a greater value of goods and services without:

-reducing the number of people they employ
-cutting wages and other emplyee benefits
-increasing the amount of energy and raw materials they use
-needing more transport services
-shifting the distribution of income in favour of the better off
-releasing genetically-engineered organisms into the environment
-patenting life-forms
-using technologies that make work less interesting and fulfilling
-increasing the amount of waste that goes to landfill or into the environment
-driving smaller firms out of business or damaging local economies
-allowing chemicals which are not quickly and harmlessly broken down into safe and stable constituents to leave their factories.
-purchasing goods or services from parts of the world where prices are subsidised because environmental, social or working conditions are significantly inferior to those in the countries they are supplying
-increasing human, animal or plant exposure to nuclear and electro-magnetic radiation
-making production and supply systems less sustainable than they are already
-and several more conditions you'll be able to think of yourself!

...then the growth that results is fine. But if any of the above conditions cannot be met, and the damage done in consequence is not heavily outweighed by gains in other areas, their expansion proposals have to be trenchantly opposed.

The fact that so many conditions have to be satisfied before we can be reasonably sure that growth will turn out to be beneficial says a lot about why the process has been so damaging recently. As the old song says about a good man, good growth is hard to find.

Quite a list. If you can produce more without firing people? That shouldn't be too tough. If you can produce more without cutting wages? Again, that whole "labor supply curve has an upward slope" thing is bound to help here.

On the other hand....without using more transportation? I can produce more AIDs drugs, but if they have to be shipped to AIDs patients, fuggedabowdit. Let those lazy jerks hobble over to the factory themselves.

Amazing to me that comfortable middle class people are the ones worried about income distributions being distorted by growth. Poor people are too busy helping the world economy grow, by trying to make money and feed their families, to worry about that load of donkey wash.

So much of the Green economic program isn't a program at all. It's just institutionalized envy.