Growth for growths sake will kill us all! We have adapt one economic fact to be self-evident, on the unshakable conviction that the only way to grow the middle class is to grow the economy! It’s unclear — even if we decided the benefits of turbocharged growth outweighed the very real ecological risks — that it would be possible. As Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” amply demonstrates, the era of 4 or 5 percent growth in the developed countrieswas a historical exception, and we’re likely to be heading back to an era characterized by slower growth and steadily increasing income inequality. In other words, we need to rethink our political strategies for an economic situation likely to be dominated by stagnation and decay. Traditional economic policies, both left and right, assumed that growth could drive robust progress toward a more equal society. Aggressive growth is impossible ecologically and implausible economically. We need economic strategies at the local, state and national levels that prioritize community benefit over corporate gain, and which presume a need for local resiliency instead of depending on uncontrolled growth. We also need to develop new strategies to democratize wealth in the face of extreme inequality. Like the programs developed in “the state and local laboratories of democracy” that led to the New Deal, numerous experiments percolating across the country in the “new economy” — building cooperative and community-owned businesses, developing locally focused supply chains at a municipal and regional level, building new forms for public ownership of essential services like banking and power generation — may just point the way. The end of growth poses a long-term systemic challenge, and such explorations suggest that a new direction may be quietly being explored in the midst of economic and ecological degradation. It is a direction that is likely to accelerate as economic and social pain of the decaying economic system continues to force Americans to explore solutions that take us beyond the tired nostrums of the past america.aljazeera/opinions/2014/4/economic-growth-climatechangeinequalityneweconomy.html
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 17:14:00 +0000
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