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o the economy added half a million jobs last month, and everyone is celebrating the nice surprise. Mostly I join in this, but I can't help reflecting on where our unquestioning commitment to growth leads long-term. Perhaps because I'm just now reading David Wallace-Webb's excellent and terrifying book on global warming, The Uninhabitable Earth. (If that title doesn't give you the gist, the first sentence will: "It is much, much, much worse than you think." Then four hundred pages of eloquent, massively researched explanation of why everything you love is dying.)
Now that 40% of Americans no longer believe in democracy, economic growth figures as probably our sole remaining idol, the one Unquestioned Good everyone can agree on. Both parties look to economic growth as the chief panacea that is supposed to solve all our problems, making us rich enough to afford better roads, spiffier airports, universal health care, and so on, while making income inequality less of a problem because "a rising tide lifts all boats." Much as we dream that winning the lottery would solve all of our personal problems, we imagine that economic boom times will solve all our social and national problems.
Republicans and Democrats agree in this, differing only in minor points of emphasis. Both parties take the economy's pulse obsessively, measuring everything under the sun with boatloads of micro-statistics, daily and hourly, on the unspoken assumption that these are the true measurements of our well-being. A rise or drop of a few percentage points in the stock market or rate of inflation is taken as the weightiest of political omens, and we accept that presidents will be judged largely on "the performance of the economy," though they can do little to affect that performance in the near term. Meanwhile everything this mighty machine of the economy DOES comes at a certain environmental cost. The reality behind the good statistics is one of forests cleared, air polluted, droughts prolonged, and weather warmed, even when production methods are mainly clean, enlightened, and state-of-the-art.
In most ways, I confess, I'm still an unrepentant capitalist. I love my truck, my big yard, my good health care, my long life span, all the good things that "progress" so readily bestows on an average bloke. But all the evidence that the party simply can't last (not to say, a real-time apocalypse) pushes me at least halfway over to socialism, maybe even further. It's time to question the way that capitalism endlessly repeats its promises but never really fulfills them; the way its radical commitment to hyperproduction and hyperconsumption never solves the problem of poverty but, at the very best, renews it at a higher level; and above all the way our endless pursuit of material advancement threatens our own long-term survival.
Bottom line: economic growth is not the answer. Redistribution is, along with the kind of meticulous (and yes, maddening) regulation that leads to environmental damage being priced at its true cost. We won't really be on the road to climate stability until we can celebrate statistics that show the economy shrinking, not growing. Don't hold your breath, though; or rather do, because that air you're breathing is polluted, by a 95% probability according to Wallace-Webb.
