Sandwichman wrote: > To be more specific, GDP growth refers to an aggregate that contains > both goods and crap. This is not controversial. It is simply glossed > over in media and political shorthand. The more quantitative growth > becomes the imperative, the less consideration can be given to the > quality of that growth. Crap growth comes at the expense of good > growth. It draws resources away from socially necessary production.
I assume that "quantitative growth" here refers to growth in GDP. If so, the quantitativeness of that growth refers to growth in the dollars and cents (or rupees) spent on goods and services in the market (corrected for the effects inflation, of course). That is, we're talking about the growth of the production of exchange-value, i.e., growth of commodity production, production for profit rather than for use. But somehow the role of commodity production and production for profit gets forgotten, though likely not by Tom. > We are coming to the end of the third decade in which US governments > have fostered the production of crap for the sake of growth. A > reduction of that crap would lead, by itself, to negative growth even > if at the same time it freed resources for improving the quality of > life... Has the ratio of the value of crap production to that of non-crap production (the rate of crap value) risen in the U.S.? I don't know. Are data on this subject available? One piece of evidence is to look at the Genuine Progress Indicator, a perhaps-misguided effort to calculate the aggregate use-value produced by the economy. The per-capita GPI's has stagnated at the same time that per-capita real GDP has grown (approximately 1970 to the present). Since the GPI nets out pollution costs, this suggests that Tom's hypothesis is true. However, it seems that the main reason for the widening gap between these two numbers is increasing inequality of the income distribution, which also reduces the GPI relative to the GDP. If we think of crap production in terms of pollution, I'd guess that there's been distributional shifts: there's been a shift from regulated polluting (e.g., deep-shaft coal mining) to polluting in ways that aren't regulated as much (strip mining, mountain-top removal) -- and there's been a shift from polluting in the US to polluting in third-world (or ex-third-world) countries who export their products to the US (and Canada, etc.) Of course, since GDP has risen in the US, the absolute amount of pollution has likely risen there. > It is not simply a matter of being for or against "growth". agreed. > It is > primarily about being for health care and against prisons, for > education and against war, for nutrition and housing and against > plutocratic ostentation. Agreed. I don't know anyone on this list who would disagree (except one). > In the neo-liberal political economy, the > goods are expendable because they don't pack the same GDP punch as the > crap. I'd bet that the neo-liberals don't care at all about GDP. What they care about is their profits and the profits of their sponsors. They care about the part of GDP that goes to them. > This is rationalized as "the trade off between equity and > efficiency." It's no such thing. It's a trade off between quality and > crap. But if growth is your only criteria, by all means, go for the > crap. The usual interpretation of this alleged trade-off is in terms of the distribution of income and wealth vs. the growth of total income and wealth. It's used as part of trickle-down economics: give us (the rich and their paid advisers) more and more, forgetting about distributional issues like helping the poor and in the end, everyone will gain because the economy will be able to produce more for everyone. If the rich spend more on crap (or benefit more from crap production) than the rest of us, maybe Tom's interpretation works. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
