[lbo-talk] from growth to quality of life

[Nathan Newman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
-In a socialist society, in contrast, constant growth isn't a do-or-
-die imperative...People
-can then concentrate on improving their quality of life, translating
-gains in productivity into products of better quality (rather than
-simply more and more products, quite often of inferior manufacture)
-and, more importantly, more, more, and more leisure, which is the
-highest form of social wealth.

This seems an odd polarization between quantity of goods and quality.  A 
laptop is smaller than a desktop computer, yet often costs more and 
therefore counts as more "growth" in traditional measures.   So the 
production of a laptop is both a quantitative increase in growth and (I 
believe) an improvement in quality.

Ipods get more expensive as they get smaller, so that's a drop in total 
square inches of "stuff" but a qualitative and quantitative gain in growth.

And the push for growth in the world doesn't just come from capitalism but 
from both desires of people for many of these new goods (I personally like 
my IPod and laptop and don't think that's about consumer fetishism) and from 
the more dramatic needs of the world's poor who actually could use some 
basic quantitative expansion of various goods.

Obviously, the form of the planning to get that growth could be and should 
be improved, but the idea that socialism gets us completely out of problems 
of democratic demands for growth seems unconvincing.   I suppose "growth" 
can be redefined as all its purely negative aspects, but that seems not 
particularly useful.

Nathan Newman