Vision: A Focus on Growing People's Well-Being, Rather Than Profits

Photo Credit: all-free-download.com

Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption: all must go continually up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It is widely believed that growth is always worth the price that must be paid for it—even when it undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, and our sense of place and continuity.

The Limits of Growth

But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for billions of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy hollows out communities and the environment; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make us and the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.

We need to reinvent the economy, not merely restore it. The roots of our environmental and social problems are systemic and thus require transformational change. Sustaining people, communities, and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped for byproducts of an economy based on market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation. That is the paradigm shift we seek.

For the most part, reformers have worked within this current system of political economy, but what is needed is transformative change in the system itself. The case for immediate action on issues like climate change, job creation, and unemployment extension is compelling, but the big environmental and social challenges we face will not yield to problem-solving incrementalism. Progressives have gone down the path of incremental reform for decades. We have learned that it is not enough.

Growing Jobs and Well-Being, Not the Economy

It is time for America to move to a post-growth society where working life, the natural environment, our communities and families, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of ever-more growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with our country’s compelling social needs; and where true citizen democracy is no longer held hostage to the growth imperative.

Many of the policies that would help grow the kind of society most of us want to live in would actually slow GDP growth. For example, if productivity gains are taken as shorter worktime, personal incomes and overall economic growth can stabilize while quality of life increases. Juliet Schor points out that workers in Europe put in about 300 fewer hours each year than Americans.

Other policies that would point us in the right direction:

• greater labor protections, job security, and benefits, including generous parental leaves;
• guarantees to part-time workers and combining unemployment insurance with part-time work during recessions;
• restrictions on advertising;
• a new design for the twenty-first-century corporation, one that embraces rechartering, new ownership patterns, and stakeholder primacy rather than shareholder primacy;
• incentives for local and locally-owned production and consumption;
• strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements;
• rigorous environmental, health and consumer protection, including full incorporation of environmental and social costs in prices—for example through mandated caps or taxes on emissions and extractions;
• greater economic and social equality, with genuinely progressive taxation of the rich (including a progressive consumption tax) and greater income support for the poor;
• heavy spending on neglected public services;
• and initiatives to address population growth at home and abroad.