When should growth stop?

Switch on the news almost any day, and if it’s about the economy the chances are you’ll see a panel of politicians and ‘experts’ discussing how to get ‘growth’. They  never seem to question why after centuries of ‘growth’, we still need MORE, and why without it we can’t even just maintain the jobs, healthcare, etc. we have now. Standard economics texts don’t question this either – they simply assume that perpetual growth is possible and desirable; one such textbook asserts that the idea that “exponential growth in the economy will eventually use up the fixed stock of resources” “seems more of a concern for a course in astrophysics, or perhaps theology, than for a course in economics”.

Try this growth experiment ...

To test whether exponential growth can continue indefinitely, try this experiment: 

Take an A4 sheet of paper and fold it in half. That’s a 100% growth in thickness: it has doubled. Easy wasn’t it! But try folding it in half again, and then again … it doesn’t take many folds before it becomes impossible. That’s because with 10 folds, it would be 1024 sheets thick – just over two reams of paper, or about 10cm. Were it possible to fold it 20 times it would be about 100 metres thick, and after 42 times would reach from Earth to beyond the moon.

Even small percentage rates of growth are unsustainable

A 100% growth rate is very high, but at far smaller percentages, exponential growth still eventually leads to very large numbers. In 1900 world population was 1.65 billion. Since then the annual growth has varied between about 0.5% and 2%. Those seemingly quite small annual increases have brought us to a world with 8.2 billion people. Many built-up areas were farms and woodland as recently as when our grandparents were born; this video[1] shows the growth of London and especially the dramatic expansion from the late 19th century to the late 20th.  It is believed that world population growth will tail off this century, but what is certain is that it will eventually have to end. Even at just 1% a year, we would have 60 billion humans in 200 years time. It is almost inconceivable that the Earth could support so many - disease, famine or war would prevent it - and even if it could, nobody in their right mind would wish it.

Aviation growth alone, threatens to wreck our chances of combating climate change

Aviation is currently growing at about 4.3% a year. At present, aviation annually causes about 3.5% of human-induced global warming. But if that 4.3% growth rate is maintained, then in just 55 years time, the industry will be ten times bigger (in 100 years time it would be 67 times bigger). Imagine the impact of ten times the airports, planes, pollution and global warming emissions. Any efficiency improvements are unlikely to offset more than a fraction of the harm. Since most of the world’s population (about 80%) have never been on a plane, and just 1% of the world’s population who fly frequently[2] cause half of aviation’s carbon emissions, there is a huge potential market for the industry. Of course, long before the world becomes one giant airport, something will stop aviation growth: it might be deliberate policy to protect the environment, resource shortages, economic collapse brought on by climate change, or some combination of these.

Ask them this!

When it comes to growth then, the maths is simple. Exponential growth is impossible, especially on one small planet. The only question is how and when it gets stopped. Our aim should be to stop it before it makes our planet a wretched place to live, or worse, uninhabitable.

So if a politician tells you more growth is needed ask them this:

"When should growth end? When cities have joined up into one continuous conurbation? When the world population reaches 10 billion or 20 billion or 50? When there are no wild spaces for nature left?"

The only acceptable answer to ‘when should growth stop?” is ‘now’ – not everywhere and uniformly, but urgently in the case of the worst excesses of consumption, because they are so damaging. The argument that growth is the only way to lift people out of poverty – ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ – ignores the reality of gross inequality. The richest half of the global population get 91.5% of the world’s income (more than half of that going to the richest 10%) while the poorer half get 8.5%.[3] Suppose you want to double the income of the poorest half. If you give the increase only to them, that’s an 8.5% increase in worldwide consumption. But if instead you double everybody’s income, then it’s a full one-hundred percent increase in consumption – insanity on a planet that’s already in an environmental crisis at current consumption levels. (Far better of course would be to provide the increase by redistribution, with no overall growth in consumption.)

The choice is upon us

We have already waited far too long. Some fifty years ago, shortly after the publication of ‘The Limits to Growth’[4], the French philosopher André Gorz, summarised where we were heading: 

“Capitalist civilization leads people to consume, on the one hand, that which destroys, and on the other hand, that which repairs the destruction. This fact is the mainspring of the accelerated growth of the past 20 years. But the damage is getting greater and greater and the repairs, in spite of their size and cost, are less and less effective.”[5]

The traffic that pollutes our cities, creates markets for masks, air-purifiers and asthma treatments. Junk food creates markets for diets, gyms and the treatment of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Global warming creates markets for air conditioning, flood defences, irrigation.

We have to decide. Do we choose to end growth and give ourselves a chance of creating a decent sustainable economy, or do we carry on until forces beyond our control put a stop to us.

[1] Animated Map on youtube showing the growth of London from its origins as a Roman town, to the modern megacity of today.

[2] Frequent flyers are those who travel 35,000 miles or more a year, equivalent to three long-haul flights a year, or one short-haul flight per month.

[3] World Inequality Report 2022

[4] The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, is the result of study by an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The message of the book still holds today: The earth’s interlocking resources – the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100, if that long, even with advanced technology. 

[5]  From ‘Ecology as Politics’ by André Gorz, South End Press, Boston, 1980 (First published as Ecologie et politique by Editions Galilee, Paris, France.)

The ideas in this article and much more, are explored in 'An Economy of Want', which re-writes macroeconomics taking the physical world and environmental limits into account. The eBook edition is regularly free: see home page of this website for dates.