Above all you said we are now in a phase that requires effective demand and material input in order to provide regular annual growth (without which our economies, and I would add our societies, appear to be in danger of ceasing to function). That the finite character of resources threatens the material input. (One might also wonder to what extent unequal distribution does not endanger the demand side).
But you say that the solution is an economy (a society, since I stubbornly refuse to separate the two) that can deal with growth or no growth. That must obviously be concerned with technological change - though here I'd want to ask where we would be steering our technology. First and foremost, I'd see a growth or no growth scenario possible through technological progress in food production (the basic material input) that ceases to diminish finite resources. This is a call for a kind of super-organic agriculture. There is enormous room here for technological change. There are other "green" activities (as suggested recently by John Edwards). And they go with a fairer distribution of wealth that would give the "folkview" that the dole-out is fair (nothing like fairness for seeming fair!) - and would maintain stable demand.
Great diary, Bruce, thanks.
But you say that the solution is an economy (a society, since I stubbornly refuse to separate the two) that can deal with growth or no growth.
I'm an American Institutionalist, as much as I'm anything along 'ist lines, so I define economics as the study of the material provisioning of society, "the economic" as whatever aspects of society are involved in that, and "the economy" as social systems, if any, that are dominated by economic aspects of society.
So society > economic > economy
I understand that traditional marginalist economists that make up the current mainstream of my profession have a tendency to lapse into:
society < economic = economy
... but that understanding does not mean that I sympathise with that.
The use of the term "economic" with respect to economic growth here is because the economy is a subsystem, where it exists as a reasonably coherent subsystem at all. The idea of economic growth itself involves far more ambiguity than most marginalists seem to recognise, since they so commonly draw their shifts of production possibility frontiers as being pure inward and outward shifts where it seems to me that it is more common for production possibility frontiers to shift outward in some directions and inward in others at the same time.
Going from there to saying whether there has been a growth or decline of a society as a whole presumes far too much quantification of qualities ... I am confident that the challenge is beyond my capacities.
With respect to those I have read who seem to think the challenge lies within their capacities ... on what I can ken, it appears to be beyond their capacities as well.
In any event, the problem of a society that can accommodate one or more periods of substantial economic growth in a generation, while also being able to comfortably cope with the lack of economic growth for an indefinite number of years in a row within that same period ... that's a bigger problem than the one of the economic-subsystem-of-society, aka economy, begin able to cope with that.
For the simple reason that having a social capacity alway requires having the economic capacity plus more. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
