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The Strange Necessity of Infinite Economic Growth
Nov 13, 2018

Despite intuitive claims to the contrary, infinite economic growth is not just possible — it’s essential for human flourishing.

In an article for Foreign Policy, the anthropologist Jason Hickel has recently called for an end to global economic growth, as the only way to avoid total ecological destruction. He argues that so called ‘green growth’ — the idea that we can decouple intensive resource use from economic growth — is a myth. George Monbiot has shared a similar concern, echoing previous warnings by influential writers Naomi Klein and Paul Ehrlich.

I’m going to focus on Hickel’s work, since it contains several related misconceptions that are nonetheless highly intuitive. In his article and across his other writings, Hickel makes three key basic claims:

1. There are hard physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources. It follows that infinite economic growth is impossible on our physically finite planet.

2. Empirical studies are showing that we cannot ‘decouple’ resource use from economic growth, meaning we will run out of resources if economic growth continues.

3. We can maintain high living standards even with zero global economic growth.

Let’s look at each claim in turn.

1. Is infinite growth impossible?

In his article, Hickel claims that there are strict physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources, which means pursuing economic growth in the form of rising GDP will eventually exhaust all resources on the planet. Hickel relies on conclusions from three empirical studies that purport to demonstrate this, which I will unpack in my response to his second claim. But here I just want to clarify what exactly economic growth is. By doing so we can understand why economic growth does not in principle depend on unsustainable resource depletion, before examining if such future growth is an empirical plausibility.

‘Economic growth’ refers to the increase in, and improvement of, goods and services that are useful to human beings. This is often conflated with what is called ‘extractivism’: which is the obviously finite process of extracting material resources from the Earth to sell on the market. The former is a necessary process for the continuous flourishing of humanity, the latter erroneously conceives of nature as, in Naomi Klein’s words, a ‘bottomless vending machine’.

Since the Earth consists only of a finite amount of matter and energy, we clearly cannot indefinitely consume its contents without eventually drowning in waste or starving to death. But even this obvious insight contains a misconception. We never actually ‘consume’ matter and energy in the first place. We are forever bound by the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that matter and energy are never created or destroyed, only transformed.

This brings us back to economic growth. Fundamentally, it is the process of human beings transforming matter and energy into more valuable forms via the development of theoretical and practical knowledge. It is ‘economic value’ which increases exponentially, measured (very)roughly by GDP. The crucial point is that while the extraction of finite physical resources cannot increase indefinitely on a finite planet, economic growth actually can.

Steven Pinker describes the infinite potential of economic growth eloquently in his book Enlightenment Now:

‘…it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place. They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground.’

Of course, it’s abundantly clear from history that most civilisations have failed miserably to generate and implement the requisite knowledge to provide for the needs and desires of their citizens. This brings us to Hickel’s empirical claim: that our own current trajectory is leading us to disaster.