I have been taking a Coursera online course, “Understanding Economic Policymaking” taught by Gayle Allard, Professor of Economics at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Davis, and has been teaching in Spain since 1988. The final week of the course includes discussions of the nature of growth as a perpetual measure of economic health. I wrote this piece in the forum for that set of lectures. Comments are, as always, welcomed.
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As Professor Allard has suggested, perpetual growth by developed countries/regions is unlikely, improbable, even impossible. Imagining a no-growth economy in, for example, the US or UK, Germany or Japan, is difficult, since we build our plans, hopes, and dreams on growth, on savings and investments that produce real increases. It is easy to imagine many outcomes of a no-growth economy, from adoption of egalitarian principles to imposition of “those who have, deserve to keep” economic and financial distributions. Somewhere in the middle of that must be a balance that could be achieved, with some wiggle room, such as the “sufficiency” concept of Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Inequality”, and/or adjustments to the market concepts we hold, recognizing the inequality of some markets and accepting the equalizing implications of markets in the absence of general economic growth. One thing, though, must be accepted – that business and commercial failure is an acceptable result of progress, that such ideas as “too big to fail” and other monopolistic concepts are obsolete, that anti-trust and pro-competition laws and regulations must be implemented and strongly enforced. This does imply the necessity of government intervention in the economy – something that Adam Smith foresaw and that too many “conservative” economists abhor. We the people, with deep consideration, must be able to control society, rather than give in to obsolete theoretic constructs that have failed to account for the reality of a developing and evolving world.