Growth Is the Problem; Equality Is the Solution

Gregory Mikkelson

doi:10.3390/su5020432

Abstract

While the world economy has become more efficient in one sense, i.e., ecological damage per dollar's worth of economic output, growth in human population size and per-capita production and consumption of goods and services have together far outpaced these gains. Grievous environmental harm has resulted, whether measured in terms of human sustainability through the ecological footprint, or non-human welfare through such indicators as the living planet index and the number of threatened species. Many have therefore called for a reorientation of economic priorities away from growth, and toward equality as a more environmentally-friendly way to enhance human well-being. In this paper, I test the merits of this proposal through analysis of a few key national economic and ecological variables across time and space. The results confirm the hypothesis that equality does far less harm to ecosystems than growth does. In fact, equality seems to benefit one crucial aspect of environmental quality, namely biological diversity.

Highlights

The Limits to Growth should have inspired “mankind” to identify and implement alternative economic systems that lack the grow-or-die imperative inherent to capitalism [1]
The bosses of our current system revolted against calls for serious action of this kind [2], and instead engineered the resurgence of corporate power known as neoliberalism [3]
(20,219) of species evaluated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN; 65,518) had become threatened with extinction [15]

Summary

Introduction

The Limits to Growth should have inspired “mankind” to identify and implement alternative economic systems that lack the grow-or-die imperative inherent to capitalism [1]. Humanity consumes more resources and produces more waste than the Earth can possibly sustain [4]—right on schedule according to the dire, cautionary projections offered by Meadows et al [5] Another essential feature of capitalism is massive economic and political inequality [6]. Because different governments have implemented such policies to different degrees, it is possible to gauge the effects of equality on a variety of health and social variables [7] These manifestly positive effects, along with concern for justice and fairness, have led ecological economists to call for a reorientation of priorities toward equality as a more environmentally-friendly route to human well-being than growth [8]. Number of threatened species indicates the effects of human economic activity on our fellow life forms

The World over Time

Countries across the Globe

Results

Discussions