"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," wrote Edward Abbey, the famously misanthropic environmental activist, in 1968. To call Abbey—who celebrated eco-sabotage and advocated banning cars in National Parks—a pessimist would be understating the matter. Today, though, his words seem prescient.
Twentieth-century economics was built on the mantra that growth is good—and more growth is even better. The famous Kuznets curve, which appeared in 1955, purported to show that as a country went from poor to rich, its level of inequality would rise and then fall, like the climb and drop of a rollercoaster. Capitalism might not be a perfect system, we were told, but it was better than the alternatives.
But something has gone awry. Global wealth is soaring, but so are global carbon emissions. Deforestation, mass extinction, and the collapse of fisheries vie for headlines with who said what at Davos. The economy and the environment turn out to be two sides of the same coin. The notion of the former as a kind of magic perpetual-motion machine that defies the limitations and physics of the latter has been revealed for what it is: a ruse. Increasingly, our neat economic models—with their "rational actors" and "trickle down" flows of capital—seem not just dated but useless.
[For more on this story by KEVIN CHARLES FLEMING, go to https://psmag.com/economics/ar...ic-success-all-wrong]
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