Economic Growth & DematerializationWhat is Economic Growth?

Who benefits from it?

Where did it come from?

How can it be stopped or changed?

Can we go from Growth to Development?

Industrialism: Accumulation

• Production-for-production’s-sake• Invisibility of key factors• Centralization of production, massive

upfront investment • Focus on labour productivity : resources

substitute for human energy• Cog-labour: humans as component parts• Regulation: controls as limits• Scarcity-based: role of waste since WWII• Globalization: free trade & intellectual

property

Industrialism & Capitalism

technical financial

matter money

workplace labour market (cogs) (commodities)

Questions

• can financial and material accumulation be severed?

• does the profit-motive need to be the main economic driver?

• does use-value always need to be a spin-off, side-effect, by-

product, or trickle-down of monetary accumulation?

• can markets be driven by social & environmental values?

Markets and MaterialConnection between needs,

wealth & markets.

the Invisible Hand: worked...

1. for an economy focused on meeting primary needs—simplicity.

2. in a situation of relative scarcity

3. in the absence of sophisticated information technology

Class Society

...based in relative scarcity:

1. control of scarce resources & ...

2. monopoly of high culture

...by a minority.

The Threat of Abundance

• Productivity boom of the Roaring Twenties– output outdistances worker wages

• Crisis of effective demand & structural overproduction: Great Depression as a reaction to potential abundance.

• White-collar work, universal education: the threat to cultural monopoly.– increasingly social character of production; rise of

industrial unionism

Propping Up Effective Demand after WW II

• The Waste Economy: suburbanization, permanent war economy. The artificial reproduction of scarcity. The Effluent Society.

• The Paper Economy: planned inflation and the establishment of the debt-based economy. The economic treadmill.

The Postwar Waste Economy

Permanent War Economy

The Suburb Economy:

Oil / Autos / Subdivisions

“The greatest misallocation of resources in human history.”

…James Howard Kunstler

The Next Phase (post-1980) : Casino Capitalism

• 70s: Costs of waste come due

• Rise of the Info economy:– new source of effective demand:

producer services– new sources of empty wealth

creation: in effect redistributing real wealth from poor to rich.

Financialization of the Economy: diversion of information revolution into new forms of waste.

Living in De-Material World

Redesign not controlsDirect focus on human (& environmental) need

The Service Economy:Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)

encouraging provision of services not stuff.

Servicizing (voluntary EPR).

The “Lake Economy”: economic biomimicry:sectoral orientation: regenerative food, energy,

manufacturing, c ommunications.

New forms of economic security

Conscious support of the Commons

Disarming the autonomous power of money

Building a community/ecosystem base: localization.