“The fruits of growth are beginning to rot.” That’s the premise of this admirable and stimulating book, and, looking around us, who can doubt it? While species vanish and plastic replaces fish in the oceans, “the economy” – generally taken to be synonymous with Gross Domestic Product – grows and grows. Clearly, we are measuring the wrong things, and drawing the wrong conclusions. We believe we are getting wealthier while in fact we are getting poorer.
Trebeck and Williams argue that we have “arrived” – we now have an economy that provides enough wealth for everyone to live a healthy and satisfying life. They describe growth beyond that level (which was reached, globally, in 1978) as “uneconomic growth” – economic activity that creates additional problems, adding to the mountains of garbage we have already created, for instance. Or it is “failure demand,” economic demand generated by our attempts to repair damage that could easily have been avoided, and may not even be possible to repair. We would not have to cleanse the air, water and soil of pollutants and toxins if we had been wise enough not to discharge them there in the first place.
Furthermore, our wealth is not shared fairly and equally. Many people have too little, while a few have far too much. The rising tide did not lift all the boats; many of us work outrageous hours and struggle to get by. That gives rise to the consumption of “consolation goods,” products that really are designed to console us for having grudgingly spent our lives in pointless and damaging labour rather than on the things that really matter to us. One thing that we do measure – and don’t attend to – is the strange phenomenon of falling life expectancy in the world’s wealthiest country, the United States, due to “deaths of despair” – suicide, alcoholism and other addictions.
