Relax about GDP growth: implications for climate and crisis policies

摘要

Since the 1950s many social scientists have questioned the usefulness of unconditionally striving for economic or GDP growth, particularly in rich countries. Galbraith [9] was the first to draw attention to the macroeconomic consequences of status seeking behavior and the role of advertisement, while Mishan [16] presented a for the time rather complete account of the cost of growth. Nordhaus and Tobin [18] offered a first corrected GDP measure, and Hueting [11 ] proposed a method to calculate a sustainable income. Easterlin [6] showed that despite economic growth people were not getting happier. Hirsch [10], Scitovsky [19] and Frank [7,8] wrote about social limits to growth based especially on status seeking and relative positions. Daly [3] proposed to strive for a steady-state economy with stable, sustainable population levels and capital stocks and minimal material-energetic throughput. Ayres [ 1 ] discusses four types of shortcomings of the prevailing economic wisdom about economic growth. More recently, Kahne-man et al. [13] and Ng [17] have suggested that national accounting should and can include aggregate happiness type of measures. And of course various so-called world models generated bleak pictures of the human fate [15].