On 6/18/08, Gar Lipow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My counter metaphor is that capitalism is not acromegaly, but simply > adolescence. Many adolescents have huge appetites, often needing > unbelievable amounts of food. They grow amazingly fast. They tend to > flail around, often extremely destructively. A fair number of > adolescents manage to exercise sufficiently bad judgment that they die > of bad choices - for instance drunk driving. Whatever we mean by > socialism, I don't think we mean that humanity should stop growing, > merely that growing needs to include growing up.
Economic growth is already a metaphor. Before seeking greater clarity through specificity of the metaphor, it is useful to ask what the semantic limits of the metaphor are. Just what is it that "grows"? And in what sense is that growth "economic"? What grows are incomes and assets measured in dollars. Growth in income and assets has traditionally been associated with something we could call "prosperity" or "economic welfare," which are composed of subjective experiences and are thus unquantifiable. The ruse that "economic science" uses to get around the incommensurability of subjective experience is laughable in its circular justification. Since you can't compare subjective utilities, you must take it as given that a larger dollar volume of incomes and assets represents an improvement in total welfare. The economic part of economic growth is thus economic only by edict. In other words, it isn't. The association between growth of assets and income and prosperity is strictly contingent. Although we may become accustomed to the association and thus think of it as normal, there can be growth without prosperity and prosperity without growth just as there can be love without marriage and marriage without love. Of course, to assume that growth in income and/or assets is intrinsically incompatible with environmental sustainability is as groundless as to assume that prosperity and growth are joined at the hip. All that would be necessary would be to redefine what counts as income or as an asset and you can have all the environmentally-friendly economic growth you want. The key to that redefinition is given in the observation that "wealth is disposable time, and nothing more." -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
