Story of the Week
Opinion: Let’s free ourselves from the story of economic growth
A relentless focus on economic growth has ushered in the climate crisis. We need a better definition of well-being.
Growth rules the world. Presidents succeed or fail, companies soar and crash, and countries are invited to the table on the basis of their growth percentage.
Economic growth by the common definition is that GDP — gross domestic product — keeps getting bigger over time. GDP is an idea, and it was created to measure exports, consumption, investments, profits, wages — the total value of goods and services within a country’s borders. The current economic order uses GDP as a marker of national performance, and its growth is synonymous with a country’s financial wealth, worth, and power. For that reason, policymakers, political pundits, and economists love to propose, plan, and debate the best path for economic growth.
Nothing on Earth or in our known universe grows and lives forever. The economy and endless growth are an imagined machine-like system, unbounded by the laws that govern the rest of us. I imagine the growth-based economy beet-faced, with clenched, pounding fists, demanding more, faster, and now. A bottomless pit for a stomach, it eats with an insatiable appetite anything and everything within reach. This machine has grown so massive and powerful, I’m uncertain if it belongs to us, or if we belong to it. The machine eats and grows for the sake of its growth, with little consideration to the moral, social, or ecological costs. Though the machine and its rules are imaginary, the consequences are not: Land, resources, and life are consumed, extreme wealth and poverty, pollution, mass extinction, human death and displacement, and climate crisis are produced.
I write of growth like a story because it is: Humans imagined the growth-based economy and continue to tell a tale of its value and functions, achievements and superiority — economic growth like a God who endowed us with the power of the market, the tools of capitalism, and helped us build the modern world. Perhaps economic growth once served a rightful purpose: expanded trade networks, novel inventions, more efficient innovations, a raised standard for the quality of human life. Maybe — it depends who you ask and which story is told. Slavery and colonization are chapters in the story of economic growth too.
Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Yale Climate Connections website.
Opinion: Let’s free ourselves from the story of economic growth A relentless focus on economic growth has ushered in the climate crisis. We need a better definition of well-being. by Nikayla Jefferson, Commentary by Yale Climate Connections, Sep 22, 2023
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Sunday, Sep 17, 2023
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Monday, Sep 18, 2023
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Tuesday, Sep 19, 2023
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Wednesday, Sep 20, 2023
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Thursday, Sep 21, 2023
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Friday Sep 22, 2023
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- Opinion: Let’s free ourselves from the story of economic growth A relentless focus on economic growth has ushered in the climate crisis. We need a better definition of well-being. by Nikayla Jefferson, Commentary by Yale Climate Connections, Sep 22, 2023
Saturday Sep 23, 2023
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