Growth IS the Elephant in the Room

The addiction to growth is pathological.

Our civilisation is now caught in the grip of the monster of the ideology of growth to such an extent that it’s going to take us a lot further until a paradigm shift is forced to occur. Countries like Australia may see populations in excess of 10 million in Sydney and Melbourne, and Lagos in Nigeria may reach 80 million plus by the end of the century. Even with population decline globally due to reduced fertility catching up with the aging population later this century, this will not necessarily register in urban hubs, like Lagos, and countries like Australia because of the ideology of expansive growth.

Growth doesn’t bring more prosperity, it brings with it more entrenched stratification abd more detailed and nuanced stratification with more proliferation of social, economic and infrastructural issues. Growth takes in negatives as a positive through aggregation; it doesn’t register time wasted in traffic as a negative due to increases in money spent on petrol, public transport, cars and roads, etc. Growth also creates more problems that need to be solved, such as crime and health; the monotonic response is to throw more growth at the issue of crime, health, infrastructure, and poverty, etc., which includes socialised programs as well as more economic growth generally as the ideology of growth equates growth with wealth and prosperity. Yet the problems are a concomitant of growth. The small town has a small amount of entropy and a great potential for growth; a big city has many social and infrastructural issues, which presents a need for growth. The problem is insoluble and the problems percolate and diffuse through society meeting us all in the future dystopia.

All the while, the wealthy and the higher echelon of the elite, are differentiating themselves within the opportunities that growth presents: elite housing, the commodification of clean air, quiet spaces, rank-ordered post codes, status sensitive consumer discretion, flagship technology access, and more heavy-handed segregation via gated communities/smart cities, etc. All this wreaks of structural stratification as the poor receive a trickle down of wealth, technology, infrastructure, and social programmes, while their low rank remains relatively stable—but for the exception of upward social mobility opportunities afforded to a few.

If we are ever to have stable societies, we have to get past growth as a fundamental to the economic system. Growth and stability are incompatible as growth depends on disruptive technologies and programmes that generate stratification and more growth, thus compounding the issue.

In a world with a shrinking population, which it will be throughout next century, the world economy will need to shift gears into a ‘negative growth’ economy at some point, and indications that this is already underway are evident, considering the flagging economy, close-to-zero and also negative interest rates, and the hemorrhaging of money from the FED.

What will delay the reconfiguration to a negative growth economy and a stable scientific complex world civilisation not based on neoliberal excess in consumerism, growth and stratification, will be the following:

The growing population for much of the rest of the century, particularly in Asia and Africa, all of which can be funnelled into population growth in developed countries;

Increasing urbanisation and the technological and infrastructural requirements associated with this.

Urbanisation provides the need for more infrastructural growth while, at the same time, undermining fertility, so urbanisation sows the seeds for the end of positive growth.

While the world population rises, the ideology of growth still has a chance to wreak havoc on the world by industrialising farming on the largest scale ever, tending towards saturated consumerism throughout the entire world, cheapening of products through proliferation, and reducing the quality of goods and services for the lower-ranked masses, while allowing the wealthy and those who will able to engage in upward social mobility to stratify and differentiate themselves through their purchasing power and discernment.

Grrrrreat!!