From Peter Brooks
Thomas Hogg says your discussion on the perils of growth (18 October, p 40) is naive – but it seems to me that it is he who doesn’t understand the situation (8 November, p 20). The point at issue is whether or not an exponentially growing economy is sustainable. Instead of attempting to refute the case that it is not, Hogg argues that a static economy won’t be popular or simple to devise.
This is not rational. Some unpopular arguments are true, just as some popular ones are false. Even if it were true that a static economy is unachievable this wouldn’t constitute evidence that growth is sustainable, but merely evidence that the economy will grow until civilisation collapses.
Unemployment is not the only way to limit output: reducing working hours is also an option. Hogg’s requirements, such as “creative destruction” driving innovation, could be met if businesses competed for market share and on the basis of productivity per worker hour. Government would meanwhile ensure resource use remained stable through legislation to reduce working hours.
This will only work, of course, given international cooperation to ensure that nation states compete on a level playing field.
Advertisement
From Peter Brown
Thomas Hogg suggests using economic incentives to create more sustainability. On the same page Andrew Clifton provides some ideas (8 November, p 20). I suggest that we should recognise the limited availability of non-renewable resources by making them available only for rent.
To do this would be difficult, but not impossible. It would create a chain of recycling from raw material to consumer, and encourage long-lasting products designed to be dismantled and reused – as proposed by Herman Daly (18 October, p 52).
In the case of fuel, which cannot be returned, users would rack up charges indefinitely for their use to date. The promise to introduce such a charge gradually at some time in the future should affect behaviour.
York, UK
From Damien Flinter
Thomas Hogg writes that your authors “do not appear to understand the dynamics of the capitalist model”, before launching into a selective eulogy of “creative destruction” as a high-tech, industry-spawning dynamo generating ever-increasing circles of prosperity and social evolution. He then disparages an all-knowing central agency that might regulate his utopian market; one that no contributor had actually suggested.
The figures I have say that close to a billion of our 6.7 billion population are living in hunger, and 10,000 children a day die in Africa from starvation.
Perhaps Hogg has better data: if not, I hope he might consider that there is objective evidence of fundamental systemic pathology in the capitalist model. It will require teamwork and radical rethinking of our presumptions and rationalisations if the world is to avoid degenerating into a series of warring totalitarian regimes, like those created by the last global economic meltdown.
Or perhaps he might ask the Aboriginal peoples of his native land to present data on the centrifugal social effects of centripetal wealth accumulators on the destructive side of his creative equation.
Headford, Galway, Ireland
Braintree, Essex, UK
