For the best part of three centuries, there has been a consensus about the goal of economic policy. Since the dawn of the industrial age in the 18th century, the aim has been to achieve as rapid growth as possible.

It’s not hard to see why there has been this focus. Growth has raised living standards, increased life expectancy, improved medical care and resulted in better educated, better fed populations.Indeed, it is a mark of how successful rich western countries have been in lifting people out of poverty that developing countries are keen to have what we’ve had. If faster growth means cleaner drinking water, more children in school and fewer mothers dying in childbirth then the world’s poorer nations want more of it. But there’s an obvious problem. If developing countries are to have the same – or even remotely the same – standards of living as developed countries, that means a lot higher use of resources and additional pressure on the planet. It means an increase in energy use and the risk of an irreversible global climate crisis.Given the existential threat posed by global heating, the concept that growth is good is being seriously challenged by those who say policymakers should be aiming for zero growth or even degrowth economies, ones that are shrinking. Make no mistake, it is a good thing that the accepted wisdom is being questioned. The idea that faster growth is the solution to every problem is no longer tenable. Robert Kennedy famously said that gross domestic product measured everything except that which makes life worthwhile, and his words resonate now even more strongly than when he uttered them in 1968. That said, achieving a steady-state economy or degrowth is not going to be easy. Far from it, it will be hellishly difficult.For a start, it will mean changing the way we think about economic success. Political debate is conducted by parties that vie with each other to promise voters the best growth strategy. Language matters, so when GDP is rising, that’s good news, and when it is falling, it is bad news. Countries are judged by where they sit in international league tables of growth. Faced with the choice between higher use of fossil fuels or having the lights go out, governments have opted for the former. The only way to make a steady-state economy achievable is to harness an anti-poverty strategy to a pro-planet strategy.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/17/growth-addiction-climate-crisis-economic-policieses         

How about this solution to the problem of GROWTH.  About Doughnut Economics | DEAL. The Doughnut is the core concept at the heart of Doughnut Economics. Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist.      https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics

An end to infinite growth and blind consumerism

Jonathon Porritt Comment  The Guardian The last time we were going through a serious economic downturn (in the late 1980s and early 1990s), the environmental agenda was fairly frail. Mrs Thatcher might have "got" climate change, but very few people knew what she was talking about. Energy and food prices were relatively low, and the idea that there were serious "limits to growth" in the offing was restricted to hardcore greenies. It's very different now. Twenty years of accumulated evidence on a host of environmental issues leaves little if any room for doubt as to the need for rapid and radical change. This is reinforced by soaring energy and commodity prices. Nonetheless, most pundits are still persuaded that the current economic downturn will kill off today's heightened interest in the environment. They may be right, though the most recent Guardian/ICM poll showed that concern about climate change is still high, compared to concerns about the economy. However, if environmental issues do come off the boil, I believe it won't be because of the economic downturn but because our politicians refuse point blank to accept the true implications of today's converging environmental crises. Responses of mainstream politicians are geared entirely to carrying on doing what we do today but in "much less environmentally damaging ways". There is still no challenge to the dominant model of progress; no fundamental questioning of the idea of permanent economic growth; and no serious interrogation of the mounting societal and moral costs of debt-driven consumerism.These naked emperors would still have us believe that we can "decouple" the worst effects of permanently rising per capita income from the kind of environmental damage that it is causing.....read on                 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climatesummit/story/0,,2290987,00.htm

McKibben  To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower? The degrowth movement makes a comeback. How to find joy in mitigating climate change. Nate Hagens, the director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future, ran the numbers: “One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price. To call that energy revolution liberating hardly suffices. Suddenly, people could easily venture beyond their villages, or build dwellings large enough to afford some privacy, or stay up all night if they wanted to read. After four thousand years of economic stasis, we were suddenly in a world where the average standard of living doubled in a matter of decades, and then doubled again and again and again and again. And we liked it so much that it became the raison d’être of our political life. But a critique of growth was emerging in the postwar years as well, most concisely in a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome titled “The Limits to Growth.” A team of M.I.T. economists used computer models (then something of a novelty) to show that, if we kept growing at the then-current rate, the planet could expect ecological collapse sometime toward the middle of the twenty-first century. That prediction turns out to have been spot-on: a report published in Nature on the last day of May concluded that we have already exceeded seven of eight “safe and just Earth system boundaries” that it studied—from groundwater supplies and fertilizer overuse to temperature. “We are moving in the wrong direction on basically all of these,” Johan Rockström, the paper’s lead author and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters.And so the “Limits to Growth” critique has reëmerged, fifty years on, and with new vigor......read more of this revealing and incisive article by Bill Mckibben..... https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/to-save-the-planet-should-we-really-be-moving-slower?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_McKibben_07052023&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5e2bb2c62a077c05ea0a9723&user_id=59734366&hasha=284acdf0ea1b080a3966b6c47b8c38c0&hashb=a4ccd8de508e6a2ad52eb405268d00c48cb0e5a6&hashc=7a51910293749398eff22b8bf795b4f5ed4d3ebff046adf7c9ebf33811a9eca8&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_ClimateCrisis                

Guess What Has Decoupled from Economic Growth?July 13, 2023 by Greg MikkelsonSomething new and troubling is happening as economies grow across much of the globe. In contrast to prior decades, when human health improved as global GDP swelled, the link to health progress has been broken. No longer is economic growth delivering a health dividend, it seems. Meanwhile, another metric, the health of the environment, has continued to deteriorate with economic growth. We now face a  “ghastly” global environmental crisis, in the words of an esteemed lineup of scientists. The new reality raises an urgent question: Are the benefits of economic growth starting to run their course, even as the downside of growth gallops ahead? Health No Longer Improving with GDP.......Average levels of human health have undoubtedly risen and fallen many times over the past two million years as social and ecological conditions have changed. Around ten millennia ago, the shift from gathering and hunting to the practice of agriculture caused health to take a turn for the worse. But in the 20^th century public health measures reduced the toll taken by infectious disease, and life expectancy increased dramatically. Health progress continued into the 21^st century and until recently had a statistical association, albeit a weak one, with economic growth. Then, halfway through the last decade—five years before the onset of COVID-19—health stopped generally improving with the rise in GDP. For example, in the USA averagelife expectancy started to fallwhile GDP per capita continued to rise. A more comprehensive metric, called Healthy life expectancy takes into account not only the average length of life, but also the average duration and severity of disease over the course of life. On the flip side of the disconnect between health and growth, healthy life expectancy has risen since 2014 in a number of countries with falling GDP per capita, like Argentina, Lebanon, and Namibia. To track the relationship—or lack thereof—between GDP and health, I analyzed the most comprehensive statistics published by the Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network (GBDCN). The GBDCN is the world authority on healthy life expectancy and provides data for the years 1990-2019. Across 102 countries and the 25-year period 1990-2014, healthy life expectancy rose by an average of one-sixteenth of one percent for each percent of growth in GDP per capita. This is quite a weak (but statistically significant) relationship. Such a link is detectable over shorter time scales as well, including the five years 2010-2014. But after 2014, the relationship between economic growth and health progress vanishes. For the period 2015-2019, there is no statistically significant relationship, positive or negative, between GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy. The same goes for the average degree to which people suffer from disease while still alive. (The statistic used to track this suffering—”years lost to disability”—has increased more than can be explained by increasing average age alone.) The reasons health no longer improves with growth likely differ between countries. But it stands to reason that the environmental damage wrought by economic growth has something to do with it. Let us turn now to this topic. Environment Still Degrading with GDP.......Across the same 102 countries and 30-year time period, environmental impacts have continued to mount with GDP. From 1990 through 2014, use of raw materials (actually overuse, given its contribution to ongoing breaches of planetary boundaries) increased by an average of nearly two-thirds of a percent for each percent of growth in GDP. From 2015 through 2019, the relationship between GDP and material throughput not only persisted but worsened, with material footprints expanding by more than one percent for each percent of growth in GDP.     https://steadystate.org/guess-what-has-decoupled-from-economic-growth/?blm_aid=126510