The Economy Without Growth?

There was an interesting essay in March's Harper's magazine, The Fear of Fallowing: The Specter of a No-Growth World by Steven Soll who discussed three book about economics. I found his discussion of Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future particularly interesting. I always wondered why economies "had" to grow, why not become more efficient-like the idea that Japan's population decreasing means that they have to let people immigrate to continue their economic production,why not scale back or get more efficient? Soll states:

McKibben believes that we can thrive, not just survive, without growth. The view may not be popular, but it is gaining. Robert Solow, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987 for innovations in growth theory, now calls himself "agnostic" as to whether growth can continue, and is cheerfully willing to contemplate a zero-growth economy. As Solow said to me, "There is no reason at all why capitalism could not survive without slow or even no growth. I think it's perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever." This does not mean that productivity wil ceas to increase our quality of life; it means that people might find it increasingly costly to turn productivity into the kinds of things they are now accustomed to buying with their earnings. "It is possible," says Solow, "that the United States and Europe will find that, as the decades go by, either continued growth will too destructive to the environment and they are too dependent on scarce natural resources, or that they would rather use increasing productivity in the form of leisure. There is nothing intrinsic in the systems that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state."

Comments

[Edward]

The more I learn about climate change, and a new one for me - 'Oil Peak', the more I think it is desirable to have zero long term economic growth - even a downward correction for a while to cut out the fat. This should be combined with negative population growth for a while too, something else that's considered bad by the many one dimensional thinkers out there. Doesn't it seem odd in a finite world that we think we can grow indefinitely? Are humans so clever that we can always find new ways of extracting more out of the same? Somehow I don't think we're nearly that clever. We've got away with it for a measly 200 years since the industrial revolution, and I think the writing's now on the wall that we're going to out-grow our own powers of innovation.