I suggest that economic growth, regardless of the metric used to quantify it, could be useful for monitoring progress toward sustainability. GDP has been criticized as a metric of various societal values (references from Dave), but to the extent that GDP "is a tally of finished goods and services" it correctly tracks what I suggest is the fundamental limitation to sustainability: human abundance x per capita consumption (under the common economic assumption that production = consumption).
And although I like the ecocosm diagram Luis mentioned and it's incorporation of feedback loops, I disagree, with the 2nd tenet of the purported paradox (i.e., without growth the stability of governments and society will deteriorate). Current economic and financial systems (I mean the growth paradigm and the systems that support/depend upon it, not capitalism) are threatened either with or without growth because they are unsustainable. An alternative is a steady state economy, and transitioning to it, I think, could be accomplished without the deterioration referred to above. Respectfully, Mike >>> Dave Thomson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 3/15/06 11:20 AM >>> I am definitely not an economist, but I have read some discontent recently with the GDP metric (if in fact it is a real metric), so using GDP as a measure of sustainability throws up red flags in my mind.
