Still, should the current moderate focus on cleaner technologies, conservation, sustainability and greater efficiency grow, I could imagine the possibility of economic growth combined with reduced environmental impact so I don’t think the relationship need be entirely linear. Particularly not within the more developed nations.

I wasn’t arguing about whether various imperatives may in turn ensure that the resulting savings are “invested” in yet higher standards of living.

And this is different again from the zero sum game of (for instance) house location where one person’s meat is another’s poison and all could benefit from calling a halt to the arms race.

I fully agree with every line of your argument. Standard economic arguments apply: science is no different from other professions in that competition between self-motivated (and I would say extremely vain) individuals leads to higher effort of each concerned, hopefully to the benefit of society as a whole. So what? Did you really expect scientists to be saints and would you trust a saint?
As to work-is-joyful, I also agree that’s true for many, which makes it even harder to envisage productivity growth as leading to something else than greater use of environmental production factors. Your observation just strengthens the case that it will be tough to give up growth.

While I agree with you that the ‘arms race’ in earnings IS a driver of the phenomenon – and thus in some sense socially irrational, you do seem rather locked into the neoclassical concept of work as disutility. People do like work. So another thesis (which I think should also be considered seriously as I’m sure it’s part of the answer – yet not one you even mention) is that people get satisfaction from their work and that formula made famous by the 8 hour day – eight hours for sleep, work and play is about right. If there’s no strong reason to reduce our workload because our life is roughly in balance – we don’t.

It is for me. I suspect it is for you too. You’re not in there at work all day thinking of the money. If you were it’s unlikely you’d be much good at what you do.

Which reminds me of another point. One of the reasons you do what you do (forgive my presumption and I’m happy to retract) is the glory. You like to be thought of as smart and that’s also smart in comparison with others. Now that might be irrational for you (in some theoretical sense I’m not sure I can get my head around as it would require me to think of an ideal you who was actually not you but different) but it is (we’re all hoping) socially beneficial. Indeed, it’s a positive sum game. You might be a smidgeon less happy than your truly rational self, but the additional intellectual output you manage is worth more than your marginal disutility.

There – get out of that!

Agreed, although I might quibble with the last characterisation. Still, that’s of no matter. No, my point was simply that productivity in and of itself was a good thing. As I said, what’s done with the labour, materials and energy thereby freed at a given level of production is a separate issue.

As to the long-run, the UN population projections (which are shared by Angus Maddison and others) are for the world population to increase to about 10 billion by the year 2050 and thereafter to decrease slowly, mimickick what’s already happening in various OECD countries. Many economists believe the main reason for falling fertility levels in the West is that kids cost so much. You dont get wages out of them and their schooling lasts long and is costly. That reality is likely to start to hold for many other populations too, implying similar pressures there (which is what underlies the UN projected decline).
In order to achieve zero net growth, things are not as bad as you suggest. its true that in recent times world growth percapita has been around 3.5%, but that is most likely a catch-up phenomenon. The long-run growth figure for Europe and the US is closer to 1.5% and hence a 1.5% decline in population would suffice. That’s still a lot.

There are no projections for the very long run in terms of population so all we can do is make an educated guess. Mine would be that the world population will hit a more or less stable plateau. The reason is simple: I think it likely that in the long run countries will become sufficiently worried about declining populations that they will start to compensate parents for having kids to the degree that populations are kept stable.

Hence in the long run I think it will be about productivity growth, not population growth.

Count me amongst the people who take happiness seriously, though I prefer ‘utility’ as it summons up a couple of extra hundred years of serious thinking. I think it’s a bit of a pity that the focus on this metaphysical entity ‘utility’ ever got lost. Marshall and Pigou made a lot of commonsense saying the kinds of things that Layard’s now saying using the idea of happiness.

It seems that one man’s moral suasion is another’s intolerable coercion. I might post something on this question in the near future rather than take it further here.

Robert

I confess to having ignored population growth, which is why I couched my arguments in terms of productivity and per capita output. Once you bring population in, then everything depends on how many people we’re willing to share this continent with. Even if our own fertility rate is below 2.0, there’s still a strong moral argument to accept millions more of the world’s destitute and desperate. But while I might be willing, saint that I am, to accept a 50% cut in my consumption, I don’t necessarily have a right to demand that my fellow citizens do the same. So I put it in the too-hard basket. But I agree that it’s a big variable in the equation.

Nicholas gives the example of how economic growth allowed Sydney

Just to put it in context, the argument contained 4 steps:
1. The environment is put under increasing strain with more wealth.
2. The desire to have more wealth is an incredibly strong force within countries, overpowering environmental concerns and even religion.
3. Any environmental plan that requires joint coordination by free states involving serious impediments to growth will be subject to free riding and will fail.
4. The desire for growth comes out of rivalry between countries (in a psychological sense) and hence can only be gotten rid of if nation states are effectively dismantled.

I agree with Nick and those following his line that the weakest link is step 1. Why couldnt we have both growth and a sustained environment and simply discourage the effects of growth we dont like (i.e. taxing externalities)? The problem with the belief in the possibility of sustainable growth is that it is not honest about what people really want in terms of more wealth: becoming wealthier to many people means being able to travel more; it means having bigger houses and bigger cars; it means to consume food that takes more effort, space, and natural resources to make (i.e. meat in stead of plants); it means to have more appliances that use resources to take over more chores in the home, at work, and in travels; etc. I have stopped believing that the whole planet can have all that we here in Australia take for granted without a lot more strain on the environment. I for instance ask myself how we’re going to accommodate the wish of 2 billion Chinese and Indians who aspire to travel the world by airoplane, and the only answer I can come up with is ‘by having more airoplanes that take up more fuel, more runways, more everything’. Even if you tax them, they are not going to give up on that wish and their phenomenal economic growth is going to allow them to dominate world air travel in no less than 20 years (China apparently just ordered an enormous consignment of Russian planes). I do not see how we can be more wealthy in the sense that real people aspire to be wealthy without a lot more strain on the environment. However, I hope to be proven wrong and agree with Nick that ‘living with the problem’ is what we’re going to do as a country into the foreseable future.

The only question at issue, to my mind, is whether people be allowed to reach that conclusion themselves or have it forced upon them. Various forms of encouragement, education and example might of course all be useful in hastening the process.

1. As far as preserving the environment is concerned, what matters is that technologies are sustainable, not whether there is growth or not. If a society is using technologies that are not environmentally sustainable, then it will come unstuck whether it is growing or not, though of course the faster it grows the sooner it will come unstuck. On the other hand, an economy based on renewable energy and recycling could in principle keep growing.

2. It might be helpful as you refine your position to consider that GDP growth is not the same thing as consumption growth. An episode of GDP growth right now would be a very good thing if it happened to reflect a burst of investment in sustainable technologies, as Nicholas pointed out.

3. Like a couple of other commmenters, I doubt that competition at the national level is the motive for growth. Per capita income growth in advanced societies is largely a consequence of technical innovation, which is the outcome of a pretty chaotic process of engineers, entrepreneurs and managers seeking fame and fortune. I certainly wouldn’t want to any government policies, national or international, to be directed at putting an end to that.

4. Nonetheless, like you, and unlike most of the people who populate this blog, I take the happiness issue very seriously. Beyond a certain point, per capita GDP doesn’t make people happier in the long run, and that’s because their main motivation is to outdo the Joneses. They would be much better off using their higher productivity to decrease their working hours and concentrate on things that have a far greater potential to raise their long term happiness than material consumption, like cultivating friendships and learning the violin.

Maybe I should have said ‘the reasonable expectation of growth’ is an absolute requirement of a capitalist economy. Owners of capital look for opportunities to make it grow. That’s what motivates them. Remove that possibility and you create a zero sum economy. Any competitive activity would be directed at changing existing distributional arrangements because the creation of additional wealth would no longer be possible. We would be in a literally unprecedented situation where the old assumptions underpinning models of the economy no longer held good. A whole new range of institutions would have to evolve along with a new model of the role of the State.

I’m unable to imagine how this could be done as an act of deliberate policy, by means of any existing political arrangement. I can fuzzily envisage it happening as a response to traumatic events, but only after a prolonged period of chaos and hardship.