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A Bear, a Priest, and a Comedian walk into a Finite Planet

So when you hear an environmentalist say something like, “We live on a finite planet, so we can’t have unlimited economic growth,” what they’re actually revealing is that they don’t understand what economic growth means. -- Paul Krugman, "Why Growth Can Be Green", 2023-02-17

What does economic growth mean? I mean, sure, if a number has been pulled from their car-seat interface, certainly that number could be imagined to go up forever, especially if there are political reasons for it to do so, or maybe because their religion says it has to. Religious arguments aside, someone at an internet retailer once advised me that the graph should always go "up and to the right" when presenting to the powers that be. Not sure why; clearly any rational consumer of information should be able to digest news about reality and not lash out at the messenger. Right?

Granted, there is probably more science to the number than I am making it out to have; the number doubtless started out with the best of intentions, now well paved. Maybe it was Thomas Piketty who suggested, however briefly, that possibly the number should perhaps one of these years maybe sometime account for the ecological costs--topsoil tweaks, aquifer issues, all those superfund sites that somehow magically appear as tasks to the taxpayers but certainly not those of the Golden Divine Parachute club--they've already cut their losses, and run. Look at the recent ownership changes of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system, for example. Want to take any guesses as to what happens when that game of musical chairs is over?

There is precedence for such adjustments to the number: the number is already fiddled around with. Krugman touches on this,

because government statisticians believe that recently produced cars are better in several ways than older models are, and try to estimate how much people would have been willing to pay for those improvements

which I understand to be "hooked on hedonics" or the notion that because the TV remote now has three buttons instead of two, the economy has improved, and thus number go up. I also understand that some have called economics a "dismal science." Can't imagine why. Or what about--you had better sit down for this--a TV remote with 30 buttons? Number go up. Or what if instead of a remote a buggy app for a smartphone that milks the consumer for all their data before the company pulls the cloud plug and renders the TV inoperable? Congrats, number go up.

Question: are you better off for all that growth? And who isn't?

So if it is okay to fiddle around with an imaginary number due to improvements--real or imagined--why is it not okay to adjust it due to detriments? Shouldn't the number be updated to better reflect our understanding of reality? Again setting aside any religious belief in infinite growth, there could be political reasons to not account for the biosphere. For example, the wrong political party may gain power should the number not go up as desired. Or maybe when accounting for the biosphere under a "business as usual" scenario, reality tracks the "Limits to Growth" model pretty well (uh-oh?). This may not be what someone who believes in "never enough" wants to hear, and anyways their guru debunked that study years ago, didn't you know?

If one does touch on religion, things get...weird. See for example the "Doctrine of Discovery"--a papal bull market, so to speak. Oh, your slaves converted? You still own them. How very imaginative! Money, especially in excess, looked down on by the religion? No problem, simply modify the religon to be totally fine with that. How utterly self-serving, or perhaps they have worn the God of Mammon as a hat for too long, and the digestive fluids have thus...

tags #politics