{"id":2363,"date":"2010-12-05T08:06:04","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T15:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/?p=2363"},"modified":"2010-12-05T08:09:33","modified_gmt":"2010-12-05T15:09:33","slug":"a-comment-on-growth-fixation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/a-comment-on-growth-fixation\/","title":{"rendered":"A Comment on &#8216;Growth Fixation&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Comment on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iied.org\/sustainable-markets\/blog\/growth-fixations\">&lt; iied.org &gt;&#8217;s <em>Growth Fixation<\/em> posting by Tom Birch<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Just want to add two quick things here:<br \/>\n[1] This short-sighted preoccupation with economic growth, as part of national policy, is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.  When GDP measures were initially introduced as a regular feature of national accounting (which was only in the 1940s), they were at first used towards highly specific objectives &#8211; admittedly, back then, stimulating employment was frequently one of them.  And those were the dark-ages.  For an example of what I mean by this, look no further than the words of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau at Bretton Woods (1943): \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 [it is an] elementary economic axiom \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 that prosperity has no fixed limits. It is not a finite substance to be diminished by division.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d  By the 1950s, economic growth had become an end in its own right.<br \/>\n[2] In addition to the substance of Rachel&#8217;s linked article, Japan provides another powerful lesson for those enlightened few [yes, that&#8217;s us] that have come to see economic systems as subsystems of the geobiosphere: it is that a significant decrease in GDP energy density can be achieved while maintaining a high GDP.  That is, the Japanese managed to markedly decrease their *per-dollar* carbon footprint to one of the lowest in the developed world without actually *lowering* their output.  They pulled this off mostly in the decade prior to the commencement of the current recession.  It may not be zero-growth, but it&#8217;s certainly a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Comment on &lt; iied.org &gt;&#8217;s Growth Fixation posting by Tom Birch: Just want to add two quick things here: [1] This short-sighted preoccupation with economic growth, as part of national policy, is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. When GDP measures were initially introduced as a regular feature of national accounting (which was only in the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/a-comment-on-growth-fixation\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A Comment on &#8216;Growth Fixation&#8217;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-growth-inequality","category-recession-mmvii"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2363"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2383,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363\/revisions\/2383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}