It seems strange that I need to argue for the virtue of economic growth, but it is so. There's a strain of ethical thought which, though it usually doesn't feel it needs to articulate itself clearly, can speak and think comfortably about the evils of growth, and the desirability of limiting it. I don't want to dismiss it entirely, because there are circumstances in which I'd go hand in hand with this strain of thought. But when I do, I know the circumstances are exceptional. The 'benefits of no-growth' arguments are a very special subset, and embracing them too easily provides easy access to a broad and well-populated highway to what almost always turns out to be someone else's hell.
So I'll admit it - I love economic growth. I love its effects, and I love its means. Show me an industrial town in the back of beyond, and I feel at home. I'll deplore the pollution along with the rest of you, but secretly, my heart is at ease. Show me round a Chinese factory, and where you might see a sweatshop, I see work, and growth, and hope. It's probably in the blood.
But if so, it's there for a reason. One day in the early 1990s, I was being shown round the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong. China was still in a post-Tiananmen deep freeze, though the scariest black-is-white period of repressions was easing. I worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review at the time, and my tour of the Pearl River Delta was probably part of the process of thawing - six months after my tour, Deng Xiaoping turned up in Shenzhen, and kick-started China again. Anyway, I was being shown round someone's house - an Asia boom-town villa, with aircon, sofa and the beginnings of a a garden, complete with concrete moongate. I like gardens, so I was poking around, and I saw his compost heap over in the corner - a pile of straw beginning to moulder nicely. 'What's that?' I asked via the translator. 'Oh, it's where I used to live'.
His straw hut. The alternative to growth.
In my bones, I think people who find it easy to oppose economic growth have no experience, even at second-hand, of what poverty does. Of how poverty grinds and enslaves, degrades and dehumanizes. I don't think they really know that at a certain level, economic growth is an unmitigated ethical good. I don't think they really appreciate that the attainment of a certain level of material decency is just A Good Thing. Indeed, if you haven't got it, it's almost The Good Thing. I have no doubts about this at all: the story of my career has been watching economic growth haul hundreds of millions in Asia out of desperate grinding poverty, and into a level of material decency which empowers them in ways unimaginable to generations of their forefathers.
I was standing on the footbridge spanning the Tyne just below the Sage a few months ago, watching the sun go down. In its way it was beautiful, and I'd been reading about how the salmon have returned. But actually to me, it was a dead river - a river which all the urban geography told you was meant to be a hard-working river. Now it's got no shipyards, just the money-pit Sage arts complex and somewhere down there, some salmon. Honestly, I don't think it's progress. I'd rather sit and watch the loaded barges churn up the smelly old Huangpu.
And of course, I remember paddling in the River Holme at the bottom of the valley, which turned blue or green or purple depending on what DP Dyers were working on at the time. I remember the steam and smoke drifting down the valley. Childhood memories, yes, but also memories of a town which was once prosperous, and is now quite obviously less so.
At bottom, the point about economic growth is that for most people most of the time, it equates to increased security. And for all too many people is the bedrock need upon which all hopes and dreams, and most human relations, are either built, or founder. Certainly I can feel this deep down, because there's what - probably only three generations of ancestors? separating him from me. My ancestors' acts of bastardy on the factory floor. And there's less than a generation needed to link his industrial dreams to mine - less than a generation, masked only by absolutely necessary ship-of-Theseus multiple mental/emotional replacements.
The pursuit of security, then, is my argument for growth.
Next time I'll destroy it.
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But why is a straw hut so terrible, if it's appropriate to the climate? I've lived in mud huts; the biggest discomfort came from lack of water. Moreover, the biggest comfort came from other people, not from economic wealth. It was enough to be comfortable and at about the same level as everyone else. As The Spirit Level shows, beyond a certain degree of privation we all benefit from less growth and more co-operation.
ReplyDeleteI try to live by the Gandhi's mantra, 'Live Simply, that others may Simply Live'. I mistrust economic growth for its own sake. It's not the same as community building and community-based development and, in my experience, it encourages inequality and unnecessary conspicuous consumption.
As my new post explains, I've got real doubts about economic growth being a necessarily a good thing after a certain point. In fact, in my experience, huge bull markets are terrible things to be close to. And certainly, community-building - or 'life', as perhaps we ought to think of it - is far more fun than economic growth.
ReplyDeleteBut I do think that it's easier to appreciate that once a decent level of material security has been reached. In Guangdong, a straw hut is terrible because it rains pretty incessantly. . .