The Innate Nature of Economics - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 52

the location of transportation corridors; on the inequalities of wealth and
income; or on relations with other nations. Fostering uninterrupted growth
has become the effective public religion. No matter what the economic ques-
tion or the problem might be, continued growth is extended as the solution.
Perpetual growth has become a societal requirement for both economic the-
ory and practice in several ways. First, the individual imperative for Rational
Economic Man demands it. Individuals and the communities within which
they operate value a culture of continual accumulation. Second, businesses
and the producing sector seek to produce ever more goods and services, and
to grow in size as a result. Ever-increasing business profit is revered as a
good and necessary component of all this.
Observe the current joint crises we noted in establishing the premises of
this topic. All one hears in the media is the necessity of “getting this country
growing again” and “putting people back to work.” This is an appealing
siren song, because people clearly want to work, and they clearly want to
consume. There is the occasional mention of climate change , but in the cur-
rently charged political atmosphere, it is often just a question of whether it
is even real or not.
It is our firm opinion that current climate change is demonstrably real, as
evidenced by the global melting of glaciers and arctic sea ice, and that we,
as a society, are destined for deep disappointment if we rely on the tradi-
tional growth ethic to restore prosperity. Economics as religion is a barren
and tragically misleading philosophy.
There are many directions the analysis could go from here. Beginning
from the basic nature of economics as a discipline, we have raised questions
about equity and fairness, environmental effects, national economic goals,
and foreign policy—virtually all of the most important questions facing our
society. The majority of these threads will be traced more fully in later chap-
ters, but the role of this chapter has been to set the stage by identifying the
core of economics as a discipline: what is assumed, how it is employed, and
what it can logically be expected to cause through its use. In order to pursue
these ideas in more depth, we turn now to focus on the notion of consumption .
Endnotes
1. John Gowdy. Introduction. In: Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, John Gowdy (ed.),
xv-xxix. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998; Marshall Sahlins. The Original
Affluent Society. In: Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, John Gowdy (ed.), 5-41.
Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.
2. The foregoing two paragraphs are based on: Rebecca Adamson. People who are
Indigenous to the Earth. YES! A Journal of Positive Futures. Winter (1997):26-27.
3. John Gowdy. Introduction. In: Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, John Gowdy
(ed.), xv-xxix. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.