"Perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell." -- Paul Ehrlich
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John Zeger
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I am new to blogging and making public comments but would like to receive positive or negative feedback on what I have to add.
Every economist, politician, policy maker, corporate manager, etc. that I have listened to all had the same thing to say. They all want to see growth. Here I am not only referring to population growth but also economic growth, GDP, production, profits, deliverables, market share etc. They wring their hands in despair over a paltry 2% growth. They want to see 5%, 8%, 10%.
Simple mathematics tells us that any percentage of growth is an exponential rise. The only thing that changes is the length of time it takes whatever to double. A growth rate of 1% will take 70 years for the population to double while 7% would take 10 years. Any amount of growth is clearly not sustainable. It is just a question of time when we hit the physical limits.
My primary concern here is economic growth and I argue that the reason we experience peaks and valleys in economic activity (what economists like to call "economic cycles") is entirely because we set ourselves up with high expectations with high economic growth, only to have to suffer through times of economic slowdown which occurs as a natural correction.
What is so wrong with a concept of zero growth? I would like to see this as the acceptable norm so that in the long term economic cycles would be straddling above and below this norm, say +2% and -2%. The effect of this would be that population, commerce and the economy would find the appropriate equilibrium level and we would experience smoother economic cycles.