Realizing Our Economic Maturity.

Maturity?

In our individual lives, growth precedes a long period of maturity, which is recognized as both the goal of growth and as a process itself. To mature is both to achieve a certain size and to achieve a certain standard of behavior.

Economic Maturity?

Our  physical economy can’t grow forever on our finite earth. Despite those feeling a healthy economy must always grow, nothing healthy grows forever - such cancerous growth wouldn’t fit on this planet. Common sense heeds calls for healthy economic maturity, yet many economists fail to understand.

    Economic Growth with Physical Maturity?

    Some claim society can become mature physically while continuing to grow economically, but we know economic growth without physical growth as inflation. There’s the sound argument that value can grow separate from physical growth; a growth in quality versus quantity. Does conceding this surrender to full separation of economic growth from physical growth? Certainly products can improve in value apart from changes in product mass. But the needed research changes the physical world, and thereby increases entropy. Real value intrinsically has a physical component. Yet this physical component may even shrink with growth in quality, value and economy. One can distinguish between such massless economic development and economic growth which intrinsically involves physical increases. Would such economic development with physical maturity satisfy the economic requirement for ‘growth’? Can such development be systematically massless, or does the needed physical exploration cost render even economic development intrinsically linked to physical growth? In any event, ‘economic growth’ is too imprecise a term for increases in value with physical maturity.

Realize?

Here the word can have two meanings; first, to achieve; second, to become aware of something. Both meanings fit; economic maturity might be achieved in our city, and we might become aware of economic maturity and it’s appropriateness.

Why Realize Economic Maturity?

    What’s wrong with economic growth forever? The problems with this fiction are many:
    1) It won’t fit. Our earth, having a definite size, can sustain a limited physical economy. More industry than this degrades the environment upon which that industry relies. Others argue that economic growth need not accompany physical growth, but isn’t that merely inflation? Stagflation, where inflation accompanies no growth, shows that these two are separable, but stagflation isn’t economic health. Eventually sanity calls for economic health without physical growth. But when should we begin to consider what amount of economic activity is mature? Perhaps, as air’s carbon pollution exceeds limits of climatic stability, upon which our food supply depends, now is not too early.

    2) Economic growth promises social equality, but has delivered increasing inequality consistently instead. Piketty showed that growth accompanied worsening inequality thoughout Western economic history. If growth doesn’t give poor folks a better chance, why bother? Why crowd things; things needed by us and our children?

    3) Accepting false limits weakens, but accepting real limits can strengthen by focusing limited resources where real, but limited, opportunity exists. Clear language can help us distinguish false from real limits, and false from real opportunity.

How Do We Realize Economic Maturity?

In one meaning of ‘realize’; to understand and acknowledge, we might realize economic maturity (in the sense of physical maturity), when we see that it has grown to it’s ultimate desirable size.

In another meaning of ‘realize’; to achieve, we might realize economic maturity (maturity in the sense of full ethical development) by seeing beyond preoccupation with growth; with economic ‘bigness’ to better, more ethical measures, based on qualities, not quantities.

Do societies have lifespans? Every society that previously existed did. What limits that lifespan? What extends that lifespan? What does a society need to ‘live’? Let’s ask the students of history; the historians.

How to better equality without overgrowth has been explored by prominent ecological economists Herman Daly http://www.steadystate.org/eight-fallacies-about-growth/, Joshua Farley, Hazel Henderson and in recent work by Tim Jackson. Let’s apply this wisdom to understanding how we can better our real fate.