Various surveys suggest that while economic growth has more than tripled in countries like the UK and U.S. since 1950, data regarding life satisfaction reveal that people have not become any happier.
Happiness and life satisfaction apparently increase with income, but only up to a point. Once people’s basic needs are met and they have enough goods and services, economic growth fails to improve people’s well-being.
Economic growth has also failed to deliver lasting solutions to unemployment and poverty. Despite our continual pursuit of economic growth, the unemployment rate has bounced up and down over the last forty years. Jobless growth has become a common occurrence. Even with the 24-fold increase in the size of the global economy over the past century, more than one billion people in the world still live on less than $1 per day. Someone is profiting from global economic growth, but it’s not the world’s poor.
The continued pursuit of economic growth therefore must be questioned and consigned to the waste bin.
Sustainable Economy
The challenge is to figure out how to sustain economies that already have enough goods and services, without relying on economic or consumption growth.
A steady state or zero growth economy represents just such an alternative. It is an economy that aims to maintain a stable level of resource consumption and a stable population. It is an economy where energy and resource use are reduced to levels that are within ecological limits, and where the goal of maximising economic output is replaced by the goal of maximising quality of life.
It promotes durability and longevity over the disposable and short term. It means making things last longer before they’re re-used or recycled.
An emphasis on high quality of life means that economic growth takes a back-seat to things that really matter to people, like health, well-being, secure employment, leisure time, strong communities, and economic stability.
It will require us to ‘re-engineer’ the way we manufacture goods. It requires us to re-use existing materials. For example, the aluminium smelter at Corpach, Forth William no longer uses raw bauxite as there is a sufficient supply of aluminium cans to meet its needs.
It means us re-thinking about what is important to us. And it means political parties rewriting all their policies to make a sustainable economy a reality.
