End of Growth?

Every once in a while some silly fool comes out and predicts the end of growth.  The hard reality is that mankind has one core mission and that is to provide every child and adult the equivalent of a good living wage and abundance to spend it on.  In this process every such human being will also contribute directly to the common good and general wealth as an integral part of his communal virtual or real village.

Once this primary mission is accomplished and effectively institutionalized it is inevitable that surplus energy will then be devoted to increasing the population on Earth and ultimately in Space.  The Earth itself can readily support a living active population on the surface in numbers approaching 100 billion.  Terra forming Venus will provide living room for another 100 billion.  Beyond all that we can establish unending space habitats in the Asteroid belt using engineering we already have and understand.

All we have to do is establish a natural growth rate in our internal fiat currency economy of around five percent per year and stay out of the way.

To put this in terms that any can understand, we can establish 100 billion over two centuries and colonize Venus with another 100 billion in the next century.  Then we will want to think about it.

I also suspect that the decision to actually do all this was made over thirty thousand years ago.

End of growth? Remember ‘stagnationism’

Deirdre N. McCloskey, Special to Financial Post | Oct 5, 2012 7:59 PM ET | Last Updated:Oct 6, 2012 5:02 PM ET

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/10/05/end-of-growth-remember-stagnationism/#

Robert Gordon , in his paper “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?”, may be right, but the history of such pessimistic predictions is not encouraging. Environmentalists such as the recently late Paul Ehrlich believed in the 1960s and 1970s that we were doomed, but we weren’t.  Most economists in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g. John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter: not minor figures) believed in “stagnationism,” the same exhaustion of opportunities that Bob is talking about. But then world growth per capita accelerated to historically shocking levels.

The early economists such as David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill believed landlords would engorge the national product, and that anyway innovation would be small. They too were spectacularly wrong.

In 1830 Thomas Babbington Macaulay, though merely an historian, got it right: “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.… On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”

Predicting novelty is exactly as paradoxical as it sounds. I wrote in 1990 a book called If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise on that very theme. The consequences of the computer revolution, for example, are far, far from complete. But who is to say? When Orville Wright was asked what use his new airplane would have, he replied, “Sport, mainly.”

There are powerful positive reasons for believing that the frontier will move out as fast as it has in the past on account of billions of people coming on line. The more people we get in the world who have a chance, the more Einsteins and Edisons and Mozarts will emerge.  It is a point that Julian Simon, the great anti-Malthusian economist, made vigorously.

Nowadays having more people, if educated, is good, not bad. That’s what’s wrong with one-child policies and Malthusian anxieties and the like. For example, sub-Saharan Africa, with its great genetic variability, will become the centre of world civilization in the 22nd century. Count on it, a nice irony in recompense for the history of anti-African racism.

For a very rich country like the U.S. or Canada, a slowing down of the growth of best practice would not be a big deal. In other words, so bloody what?

By contrast, what is a big deal is the catching up by China and India and the rest, which will go on for the next half century or so, and is the Big Story, clouded in the press by domestic doomsters focused on the U.S. or Canada or Norway or whatever.

It is narcissistic for the rich countries to obsess so much on whether they grow per capita at ½% or 2% per year when what matters for human flourishing is mainly whether the Bottom Billion can get out of 0% per year and leap to the 7%-10% per year of China and India.