Economic Growth

1
Economic Growth Dematerialization

• What is Economic Growth?
• Who benefits from it?
• Where did it come from?
• How can it be stopped or changed?
• Can we go from Growth to Development?

2
Industrialism Accumulation

• Production-for-productions-sake
• Invisibility of key factors
• Centralization of production, massive upfront
  investment
• Focus on labour productivity resources
  substitute for human energy
• Cog-labour humans as component parts
• Regulation controls as limits
• Scarcity-based role of waste since WWII
• Globalization free trade intellectual property
  

3
Industrialism Capitalism

• technical
  financial
• matter
  money
• workplace
  labour market
• (cogs)
  (commodities)

4
Questions

• can financial and material accumulation be
  severed?
• does the profit-motive need to be the main
  economic driver?
• does use-value always need to be a spin-off,
  side-effect, by-product, or trickle-down of
  monetary accumulation?
• can markets be driven by social environmental
  values?

5
Markets and Material

• Connection between needs, wealth markets.
• the Invisible Hand worked...
• for an economy focused on meeting primary
  needssimplicity.
• in a situation of relative scarcity
• in the absence of sophisticated information
  technology

6
Class Society

• ...based in relative scarcity
• control of scarce resources ...
• monopoly of high culture
• ...by a minority.

7
The Threat of Abundance

• Productivity boom of the Roaring Twenties
• output outdistances worker wages
• Crisis of effective demand structural
  overproduction Great Depression as a reaction to
  potential abundance.
• White-collar work, universal education the
  threat to cultural monopoly.
• increasingly social character of production rise
  of industrial unionism

8
Propping Up Effective Demand after WW II

• The Waste Economy suburbanization, permanent war
  economy. The artificial reproduction of
  scarcity. The Effluent Society.
• The Paper Economy planned inflation and the
  establishment of the debt-based economy. The
  economic treadmill.

9
The Postwar Waste Economy

• Permanent War Economy
• The Suburb Economy
• Oil / Autos / Subdivisions

10
The greatest misallocation of resources in human
history. James Howard Kunstler
11
The Next Phase (post-1980) Casino Capitalism

• 70s Costs of waste come due
• Rise of the Info economy
• new source of effective demand producer services
• new sources of empty wealth creation in effect
  redistributing real wealth from poor to rich.
• Financialization of the Economy diversion
  of information revolution into new forms of
  waste.

12
Living in De-Material WorldRedesign not controls

• Direct focus on human ( environmental) need
• The Service Economy
• Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
  encouraging provision of services not stuff.
• Servicizing (voluntary EPR).
• The Lake Economy economic biomimicry
• sectoral orientation regenerative food,
  energy, manufacturing, c ommunications.
• New forms of economic security
• Conscious support of the Commons
• Disarming the autonomous power of money
• Building a community/ecosystem base
  localization.