[lbo-talk] from growth to quality of life

[Gar Lipow]

On 2/10/06, Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
>
> 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

Right. There is nothing wrong with greater quantities of consumers
goods when they don't come at the expenses of social goods. A
socialist democracy would not gets us completely out of the problem,
but since in such a society both benefits and social costs are more
evenly distributed, it is a lot easier to obtain social consensus
insist that growth occur in a socially and ecologically responsible
manner. And given social control of the means of production, it would
then become  easier to enforce such requirements than under
capitalism.  That is not the same thing as saying that reform under
capitalism is  impossible. It is difficult, but would only be
impossible of ecological sustainability required a true steady state
economy, with zero ecomic  growth, rather than  a lowering of material
intensity, producing growth in ways that not only don't add to
ecological damage but reduce it.