Buchanan, M. (2014) “Economists Are Blind to the Limits of Growth“, Bloomberg View, 05 Οκτωβρίου.
For all their calculating nature, economists are surprisingly optimistic about humanity’s ability to have as much prosperity as it wants. Express concern about the negative impact of excessive growth on our planet’s ecosystems, and many will simply chuckle and say you don’t understand what growth means.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, for example, chides natural scientists for thinking of growth as a “crude, physical thing, a matter simply of producing more stuff.” They fail to appreciate, he suggests, that growth is about innovation and deciding which technologies and resources to use.
Allow me to explain why I am one of those scientists who are preoccupied with the physical. Economists are correct in saying that growth doesn’t necessarily require more pollution, more carbon pumped into the atmosphere or more deforestation, even though we’re getting all of the above today. Humans can learn, and we might figure out how to grow differently in the future, separating the benefits from the environmental costs.
There’s just one crucial exception: energy.
Growth inevitably entails doing more stuff of one kind or another, whether it’s manufacturing things or transporting people or feeding electricity to Facebook server farms or providing legal services. All this activity requires energy. We are getting more efficient in using it: The available data suggest that the U.S. uses about half as much per dollar of economic output as it did 30 years ago. Still, the total amount of energy we consume increases every year.
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- Niehues, J. (2014) “Cross-country differences in perceptions of inequality“, VoxEU Organisation, 28 Σεπτεμβρίου.
- Pilkington, P. (2014) “Is Economics a Science? Dogmatic Economics Vs. Reflective Economics“, Fixing the Economists Blog, 22 Σεπτεμβρίου.
- Ahir, H. & Loungani, P. (2014) “‘There will be growth in the spring:’ How well do economists predict turning points?“, VoxEU Organisation, 14 Απριλίου.