.> believing that their duty would be to
> seek a purposeful reduction of American
> productivity and competitiveness,

Are you automatically assuming that "growth", of the type favoured by all US economic policies in the last 30 years, is necessarily equal to "better"? Because I think you also have to take into account the percentage of the world's oil supply that the US consumes to get that 20%, and what will happen when it (1) gets more expensive (2) goes away. (1) will certainly happen in my children's lifetime, and possibly (2) as well.

Perhaps "sustainable" should be an equal consideration to "growth"? Or at least should be seriously discussed?

sPh

The growth model has been thoroughly debunked, that some are still trotting it out is a sign of how far removed the conventional wisdom of economists (and wannabes) is from current thinking.

To recap:

1. The world s a finite place and growth cannot continue. The main purveyor of this obvious truism has been ecological economist Herman Daly. Here's a sample of his writings:

Sustainable Development

2. The level of US economic activity depends upon importing raw materials from elsewhere and selling into foreign markets. This hasn't been free trade or fair trade, it has been set up to benefit the US. The push back from elsewhere is becoming widespread. This has ranged from the protests at WTO meetings (and holding the Davos meeting behind fortifications) to the complete breakdown of the Doha round of negotiations.

3. Consumption at the US rate (or even a reasonable fraction of the rate) cannot be extended to much of the rest of the world. There just isn't enough "stuff" to go around. The rising tide argument was false when applied to the US and it's false on the international level as well.

4. Excessive consumerism coupled with overpopulation is contributing to climate change. Proposing that others join in such wasteful practices will just bring things to a head sooner.

5. There are several strata of economic development and conflating them is not useful. Those making under $1 per day (about 1.2 billion people) need one set of solutions, those "out of poverty" by the UN's measures (about $2 per day) need another set of remedies. And the developed countries need to migrate to a sustainable economic and political model, not to pursue never-ending growth. This is a difficult transition as I explain in this short essay:

Planning For a Steady State (No Growth) Society

One of the favorite tricks of politicians (especially conservative ones) is to promote ideas like the "rising tide" theme which are based upon hope and a better future. So those in need must wait for the magical day to arrive while the wealthy get to enjoy there status now. This gambit has worked for millennia there is no reason for people to stop selling this snake oil now.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Growth policy and foreign policy in the US in not for the Common Good of the country it is for those who support the politicians!

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

DG:

Arguing that an 18th Century philosopher got his mathematics wrong (he compared an arithmetic progression to a geometric progression) implies that all such future projections are also wrong is a false analogy. We know a lot more now about natural resources, mathematics and demographics.

Unlike the eternal optimists I try to back up my claims with citations. For a sampling of recent information just look at the top stories on The Oil Drum blog. If you have any issues with the data they present take it up with the authors, the site allows comments.

JPF:

The issue is not that we are running out of energy in the absolute, it is that we are running out of energy at a price that will permit our current style of consumption. Fossil fuels will run out sooner rather then later. Can the world substitute solar energy (wind, tides, sunlight) to replace this? Theoretically yes, but the efforts to do so are not currently in place.

Beyond this there are shortages in other materials. The most critical are fresh water and arable land, but various raw materials are also starting to become an issue. I suggest reading up on Helium, Tantalum and several of the rare earth materials in demand for semi-conductors.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

My interpretation of Michael Porter has always been a broader one, that of economic value added, rather than today's disparaged concept of growth.

It misses the point to look solely at the "growth" concept in terms of volume of physical goods generated, GDP, or some traditional measure. True growth has never been growth for growth's sake.

Trying reframing comments by replacing "value added" for "growth" or "productivity."

Value added is a concept that, if used with intellectual honesty, can encompass sustainability, efficiency, and technological development.

Economic change has always been limited by a combination of physical (resource supply) and intellectual (technology) constraints. These two factors have always worked together in economic change, with each imposing limits on the other. Any optimization model for value added will sub-optimize the underlying factors, and it is flawed logic to cherry-pick the component factors.

Value added pivots on defining what is included in the economic impact of any human activity. Definitions should include a reasonable set of parameters for what activities cost, and those costs should be captured with production (i.e., so corporations will not profit excessively without paying the total cost of damages/depletion), especially without factoring in equitable distribution.

We do everyone a disservice by using labels like "growth" and "sustainable development" in the absence of the deep challenges of analysis and representative policymaking.

It is not arguable whether the planet can support an indefinitely growing population--of course it can't. But there is a lot of room for certain kinds of growth, and growth will inevitably extend off-planet.

The conditions remaining for the planet-bound are not guaranteed to be pleasant, though. There will be plenty of disputes over resources, as practicalities and economics put the brakes on hoped-for improvements in living conditions.

But as long as individuals seek to be better off than their neighbors there will be some kind of economic competition and growth. A steady state for use of resources is possible, in principle, but there will never be a steady state regarding personal wealth.

Unfortunately, the main driver for increasing one's personal wealth is not the pursuit of happiness. Rather, it is precisely the desire to be doing better than somebody else. And as long as women select successful males as mates we will continue to be competitive (and unhappy).

I offer myself as exhibit A. I have already been through career and marriage, with grown likely to do OK. Why do I still wish to achieve some kind of fame or success? I blame my genes.

The view from the inside, however, is that it's much more interesting to struggle than to stop and meditate until death. And consider that if people were always content, we would not have either Beethoven or Einstein.

Ah, I knew you'd be all over me with the evolutionary argument.  I wonder to what degree the data bears this analysis out, though.  Two suggestions for how it might not:

1. If the study (I will find and read it soon) is correct that residents of poor nations are no less happy than residents of rich ones (with plenty of caveats about the possibility of measuring happiness objectively across cultures), it certainly indicates, at least, that the mechanism you reveal must be local and concrete - wouldn't one assume, in a global mass media world dominated by images of western luxury, that envy would eat into the happiness of the global poor?  Further, given that the disparaties in developing nations are more vivid, if not actually more real, than here (there may be fewer super-rich, but they eat up a much larger part of the national wealth in many developing countries, and have the cars, guards and fortressed lives to show it), shouldn't happiness correlate most closely with the size of the middle class?  You would think a country like Japan, where the disparities are least, would be happiest.

2. It certainly seems possible not to be made unhappy by a low place in the status competition.  I'm surrounded by corporate lawyers and I-bankers, but I don't think I'm any less happy for it (of course, that's because I see them go to work many summer days while I am walking to the playground in my flip-flops with my first cup of coffee).  If public policy were based on maximizing happiness, wouldn't it naturally include, for instance, greater expenitures for mental health?  And wouldn't people who are confronting their status-based unhappiness have occasion to overcome it? 

Those that suddenly became extinct became so from an external event, literally extraterrestrial.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Think we agree that happiness is not correlated with wealth. I was pointing out that the striving was unlikely to cease.

Setting genes aside, we have no evidence that human character has changed much in the last few thousand years. (We do have evidence of genetic changes like lactose tolerance.) So either with or without genetic arguments it seems safe to assume that striving is a relatively permanent charcteristic of humans.

Here's the deeper question: Is happiness good? There are utility arguments; if the population is happy revolution is not a worry. But there are counter-arguments, like I mentioned, that being content usually coincides with relaxing and no longer striving. Maybe nice for the now-relaxed individual, but what if he was likely to write a great novel? Or find a new drug? Or whatever?

Personally, I like the tumult, even if I grow weary at times. If we were too happy, we'd still be in the trees. 

Of course, if you were Hunter S. Thompson or Uncle Duke, the drive to write a new novel and find a new drug intertwine. Or did you mean invent a new drug? :-)

--
Howard

"Those who cannot remember the past may have inhaled too much."

Rather, it is precisely the desire to be doing better than somebody else

I think that's probably right - certainly, the sacrifices that come with significant jumps in income beyond a certain point aren't conducive to happiness (I'm thinking of a corporate lawyer friend of mine who once went to work on Tuesday morning and came home Friday afternoon).  Another way to think of the drive might be that the driving force here is depression - if the evolutionary psychologists are right (some of them, and not others, anyway), depression is a mechanism to keep unsuitable individuals from competing fruitlessly for social roles they cannot adequately fill.  One response to this would be to stop trying and find something that makes you happy; but in the modern world, where competition for the roles we fill is amplified by mass media connections, another likely outcome is that we just keep trying compete, focusing on beating out others to distract ourselves from those who are beating us.

But I wonder how this will fare:

And as long as women select successful males as mates we will continue to be competitive

I'm not sure how hard-wired this is - to some degree, the ongoing success of feminism will be telling.  On the one hand, one thing that has changed in the generation since women entered the workforce is that there is greater stratification in marriage - couples tend to have more similar income and education, etc.  On the other, more men are staying home to take care of the kids, whether temporarily or permanently, full-time or part-time.  And let's face it: lots of women marry losers (aren't most of us kind of ramshackle when they take us on?).  I'm inclined to think that mate selection has a lot more to do with social context than genetic endowment - when women's welfare is entirely dependent on men, they are more likely to pick based on the perceived success of potential mates; when they have their own, not so much.

Who says struggle and happiness are opposite sides of the coin?  Life is a struggle; if you don't enjoy it as such, how happy can you be? 

Chemistry students at my undergraduate college invented a new recreational drug.  Physics students operated a small nuclear reactor.  I (a humanities student) hoped that Chemistry and Physics majors didn't socialize with one another very much.

Perhaps it's as well you forgot that it was the chemistry guys in high school that liked to make things go bang.

And a classmate of mine synthezied LSD, in something like 80 steps from inorganic components. It was legal when the project began, but illegal by completion in spring of '69. (He got an A+++ on this HS senior project.)