Nooooo. No no no no no. A million times no.
Growth is always created by innovation, not by mere transfer. The overall standard of living has gone up over time. Some places faster than others, but that is a function of many things, mostly whether or not they embrace economic freedom (as well as other types of freedom, of course).
The overall standard of living has gone up because the standard of living in China and India has gone up, countries where the middle class has expanded explosively. Take them out of the equation and you will see that the standard of living has not gone up as much in the rest of the undeveloped world.
Many countries in Africa, for instance, have enormous natural resources - the richest in the world - and still these countries are the most poor, the most unequal, the most un-free, the most corrupted and the most over-exploited countries in the world. How can this be? It's not as their natural resources are left untouched. These countries are so poor because their wealth is sucked out of their country and goes into enormous economies in North America, the EU, China and India. These African countries are staying poor in order for economies in the industrial world to prosper.
The tax revenue in countries like Nigeria, Republic of Congo and Angola is about 6 % of their GDP. With enormous resources like that (diamonds, metals, gold, minerals, oil) and with almost no taxes, the economy should be blooming, using your logic that low taxes equals more money to invest. But it's not. In fact, these economies are almost not growing at all. There is no economic growth in that part of the world because the growth is taking place elsewhere in other expanding economies.
Before they embrace economic freedom they need democracy and a chance to develop without their land being plundered by the industrial world.
Sadly, this idea is not new. Every now and then someone like Thomas Malthus (who was the inspiration for Ebeneezer Scrooge, by the way) or Paul Ehrlich, makes the simple mistake of thinking that we cannot go on the way we have. And they always use the same misguided logic: we're just going to grow and grow, and we can't support more people or more things. Usually they invoke the spectre of overpopulation. The thing is: they've always been horrendously, terribly wrong. Nothing Malthus wrote about came even close to coming true. Ehrlich wrote his book, The Population Bomb in 1968, and was dead-wrong in all his predictions then, as well.
Tim Jackson dismisses Malthus entirely. Basically because Malthus made his calculations and predictions based on the facts he had in the 18th century (interesting that you are choosing such an old and, apparently, out dated scholar to prove me wrong). Malthus didn't realize the importance and potential of the technical evolution and that it actually slowed the population growth down. Today we can see that the overall resource consumption is growing faster than the overall population growth. In fact, the energy intensity, how much energy it takes to produce the total global economy, has sunk to 33 % of what it was in 1970. We are extracting more from the resources. This might lead you to believe that we are being more responsible in how we use our resources. We're not. The carbon dioxide emissions have increased with 80 % since 1970 and with 40 % since 1990. Since 2000 they are increasing with 3 % every year. Which is the wrong direction to go according to many, including myself and the IPCC.
[EDIT]This implies that even though some of us are trying to reduce the impact we have on nature and climate change, the carbon dioxide emissions - caused by the use of unsustainable energy and materials - are increasing, when logically, they should go down. Again this illustrates how the blind faith in economies that are constantly expanding are leading us into a dead end. We are creating ways to extract more energy from less raw material, we are taking measures of precaution to reduce our effect on nature, and still we're causing more, not less, damage. For sustainable economies to be a reality, not an utopy, we need to slow down our outtake and our tireless endeavour for constant economic growth. To put it simple, when measuring the prosperity or the sustainability of an economy, we have to take other factors than just economic growth (GDP) into consideration. This applies for the rich countries in the industrial world, of course. I'm obviously not denying that economic growth is necessary in poor, undeveloped countries where material standards are a small fraction of what you and I enjoy every day.
(Of course, these arguments presupposes an understanding and at least some belief in that there is such a thing called "climate change", and I know that some American conservatives dismisses it as a hoax altogether).
I don't know about Ehrlich and you are not specifying exactly what it is that he's wrong about so I can't say anything about it.
Ehrlich's failings even come with a very satisfying exclamation point, because a professor named Julian Simon challenged him to a wager to test his theories. He said that he could pick any raw material he wanted and he would wager with him that the price of it would go DOWN over time, rather than UP, as Ehrlich predicted based on his theory about growth and eventual scarcity. Ehrlich picked five materials and set the deadline a decade later. When the deadline came, ALL five had gone down, just as Simon had predicted, and Ehrlich paid up. It was a completely definitive rebuke.
[EDIT]Tim Jackson doesn't deny that the price of raw materials has gone down. It's actually not that strange. Since we have sophisticated the methods by which we locate and extract the raw materials from nature, but the material in itself is the same (raw zinc is still raw zinc), the prices must go down simply because it's easier to get the material than before - even though the supplies of raw materials are decreasing. With a purist capitalist logic, that doesn't take in consideration how much material we actually have left or how much damage the process causes in nature or for the people living in the countries with the resources, but only taking in consideration how much new capital you can create with the capital you already possess, the prices must go down. The irony of it, though, is that the "supply and demand" principle still applies. The illusion that the laissez-faire capitalists are trying to make us believe in, though, is that the supply is never-ending which motivates lower prices on raw materials, when the supply is actually very much a limited resource. If we took these factors into consideration, and the people who live in the countries with the natural resources actually were paid decent wages and nationalized their mines and refineries, the prices would definitely go up and we would have to start paying the price for our over consumption. Which would lead to less consumption, and less damage to the ecological system, which is the fundamental source for our livelihood.
So, why have such predictions always been wrong? It's actually pretty simple: the naysayers always forget that human beings do not just consume, they also produce. They innovate. Right now, we use way, way more energy than we ever have. Someone 200 years ago could have used the same sort of analogy you just did, to explain how many planet earths we would need if we doubled our population. Well, we have, and we're still on just the one earth. The reason is that these sorts of doomsday estimates always assume a steady rate of resource consumption. They always forget that, with each passing generation, we use energy more efficiently, and find new sources of it. This has always been true.
There's a book by Alf Hornborg called Myten om maskinen in Swedish. I think it's called The Myth of the Machine or The Power of the Machine in English. I haven't read it yet, but the main thesis is that it's a myth that machines and technical innovations inevitably leads to reduced outtake from our natural resources. What Hornborg basically is saying is that the time, money and energy that you save when you develop a new machine to do something quicker, cheaper and with less energy is used up by far during the process of developing and constructing the new machine. The fact that the new machine is doing the job of the old machine cheaper and faster is creating the illusion that this also means that it
saves energy and resources.
[EDIT] To clarify: Producing new machines does not necessarily lower the raw material and energy consumption. On the contrary, it's the other way around. Because of what I said earlier about a faster growth of natural resources outtake compared to the lowered degree of energy intensity, we are making more machines than before to do a lesser amount of work than before. We are creating smarter machines in a dumb way. Very dumb.
The idea that there is some finite amount of wealth that we simply devour over time does not hold together any way you care to analyze it. It does not work in theory, and it has never been true in practice.
That's not what I said. You're talking about redistribution of wealth. I'm talking about using up the resources that we need for producing wealth to be distributed. I'm saying that this process is escalating, i.e. we are using up the resources faster and faster - and it's creating economic growth for the already rich while the countries that possess the natural wealth are not getting any piece from the cake.
Closed Thread
Whaddya say? His stuff is freely available only and written simply and concisely for both the expert and laymen alike.
Because his logic is very straightforward, and he's got a way better track record than the Malthuses and the Ehrlichs of the world, who trot out the same old flawed logic about growth and unsustainability every handful of generations, regardless of how terrible such predictions fared the last time around. Sometimes it's little more than misanthropy masquerading as analysis.
