Is current level of growth even sustainable? (regarding environment, lifestyle issues --stress, depression, etc.--, quality of production, time for people to adapt to new paradigms, etc)?
How about less "growth" and better distribution, more quality, less rat racing?
1:Creating something that lots of people want and increasing the wealth for everyone.
2: Cornering the market and hoarding something that people have a need for.
The first benefits everyone. The second makes someone rich at the expense of other.
Zero-sum game would feel like a huge improvement for most.
FTFY
Part of my point is that there are more than enough resources, what's needed is better distribution. Plus some scaling down the over-consumption of crap.
Besides this "taking it from someone else" is already the case with the growth model, were not only a tiny fraction of the population has a huge percentage of the world's wealth (debt aside, I know those arguments too), but people can be making $1000 Armani suits for 12 hours a day in the third world just to have the same, or even worse, quality of life as they did before their country was forced into globalization.
For centuries the growth depended on plundering the third world, as colonialists, neo-colonialists, slave owners, democrary-bringers etc, plus heavy internal forcing of people (e.g. the rural population) to become factory workers.
Now we've come to the point technologically that we don't need all those people anyway -- not even the service industry which we invented as a stop gap to have people employed.
That's because you use "quality of life" as if it meant purchase power or access to gadgets.
And even that's wrong -- people in the 50s could support a family of four/five and get their kids to college with a single office job. Present day middle class, not so much.
In fact it has been shown time and again that wages have been stagnating (when corrected for inflation) since the seventies or so.
Second, it is absolutely nuts to suggest the average American citizen was better off in the 1950's. 1950's America still had a substantial amount of truly crippling poverty, it had millions of citizens who had almost no chance at that great office job due to their race or gender, and life expectancy at birth was lower by almost a decade.
And yes, that's before you figure the months of salary to buy, say, a refrigerator, that the median wage earner can now afford on a week's pay. A refrigerator, by the way, that will be larger, last longer, and use substantially less energy than the one from 1955.
Or the huge growth in sales of air travel, entertainment, dining... luxuries in the 1950's that are commonplace today.
Yes, access to cheap credit makes it easy to bid up the prices of scarce resources like slots at good colleges or houses in desirable areas, but the average American isn't paying out of pocket much more for those things as a % of their income than they were 70 years ago. And of course the colleges are much nicer places to live and study than they were, and the houses are bigger and better constructed.
> For centuries the growth depended on plundering the third world,
Really? You think colonialism is the main driver of economics growth?
Egypt has enough sunlight to provide all the clean energy needed to provide its citizens with first world quality of life. It just needs the funds to build/install the panels to collect that sunlight.
Yeah, really. It was the big enabler for all the growth that later turned into the "industrial revolution", and continued to provide a huge percentage of western GDP well into the 20th century, directly (as exploited and plundered places) and indirectly (as markets for example).
Cheap oil, for one, is always good to ensure for one's country.
At some point it became economically inefficient to enslave countries with close to 2-3 billions of inhabitants, and the cold war had changed the political climate anyway, but not so much that countries won't participate in post-colonial power games.
It's no accident that it's exactly the countries that did the plundering (the colonial powers) that rose up into prominence, and the ones that were plundered that got the short end of the stick.
Explains the top 1% and the actual drop in slices of pie. The issue we have is we don't even realize in the States that our pie slice is smaller but the amount is slightly larger. So our pie is a few percentage points down but we have $3,000 more so no one notices.
If someone produces the same 5 widgets/month for 10 years, their business has not grown yet they've been creating resources the whole time.
The two are only equivalent when we assume that income matches expenses (no savings), which is a fundamental problem with the modern economy.
Growth gets you that.
Growth has made it possible to buy a fridge, an oven, a vaccum cleaner, a dishwasher and a washing machine, all for relatively trivial amounts of money. Together they made it possible for litterally millions of women to persue their dreams (whether that is to have a career, start a business or just spend more time with their children). I have no idea what kind of magic the future could hold, but I find it extremely destressing that anybody could even ask that question.
Oh and if you don't why a washing machine is necessary, http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...
We live in a hyper-financialized economy. That means everything relies on (cheap) debt. A lot of debt repayment plans relied on "everything is awesome" as economic prediction, as a justification for the initial investment. What happens to all those financial plans when growth predictions impact reality like a bug hitting a windshield? That might be a little problem.
Top to bottom, from the worlds largest alternative oil source projects down to housing bubble mortgages and high credit card balances. Oh no fears the predictions show high growth into perpetuity that'll take care of everything eventually. Until it doesn't. Whoops.
There is also the ongoing implication of lie to me once shame on you, lie to me twice (or five times in this example) shame on me. So you can make deals based on lies about the future one time, two times, three times. But its getting to the point that future predictions are now assumed to be lies, and that has major effects on current deal making. Whats the effect on your commission today for selling a loan balance based on now-2% vs a couple years ago selling a much higher loan balance based on now+3%? Can you even sell loans now? Can a hyperfinancialized economy survive a debt market freeze up? A lot of players won't. Get the printing presses fired up for the inevitable bailouts...
(Yes, growth is ultimately unsustainable, but I think there's a long way to go in bringing up e.g. large areas of Africa to Chinese growth levels)
I agree with the sentiment about distribution, quality, etc., but it's a completely separate domain, and I think it's crucial not to mix them.
>that lowered forecast eventually prove too aggressive.
As you mention better distribution is key, I would add this could spark more spending and therefore growth.
When with a bit of planning and foresight it could all be avoided.
Is a shame