When discussing the growth issue, especially from the perspective of degrowth, one argument comes up regularly. This argument can be termed “infinite happiness” and it goes something like this: economic growth might be restrained or needs to be restrained for various reasons but surely no one wants to put an end to growth in creativity, quality of life, and happiness. This is then usually followed by the demand to provide a new indicator for societal well-being, going beyond GDP and including all sorts of hard-to-be-tangibles. And that new indicator obviously can grow without harming the environment, diminishing social cohesions and making lots of people unhappy.
I used to follow this argument but not anymore. First of all, it is a distraction. It distracts and diverts the discussion from the issue of growth as a cultural and historic phenomenon, as a psychic prison of people’s minds and a constraint to our imaginative capacities to create a world (and an economy) without it. If we can have infinite happiness and know how to measure it, everything can remain pretty much the same. The economy can grow happiness, people can grow their creativity and love, and our new GDP can also increase all the time. This is the decoupling narrative with a smiley. And as we know from the real world, decoupling does not work on a global level, on an absolute scale. There is not the slightes empirical evidence for it. Measuring happiness and letting it grow infinitely just as we used to do with GDP does not absolve economic activity from its ecological and societal impacts. If happiness is connected to material things, which it will be to a certain extend regardless how you define it, it will leave a mark on the planet. That an economy of happiness will, by definition or some kind of magic, lead to a smaller ecological footprint is just that: magic. No one has made a sufficient case that by measuring happiness and all the other things, growth will cease to pose a problem.
But there is more to it. The assumption of infinite happiness is deeply flawed. If we accept that GDP cannot grow indefinitely due to ecological, economic and social constraints, how can we think that happiness can? In fact, has anyone really thought through the idea of growing happiness? What does it actually mean to say “I am 5% happier than last year”? What does it say about my relationship when I state “I love my wife 300% more than at the time we got married”? And even more so: what would it really mean for the concept of happiness if we can become happier all the time? When I have a 3% increase of happiness per annum, I will double my happiness every 24th year. By the time I turn 72 I would then be eight times happier than in my first year as a toddler. It may well be that I can enjoy life differently and most probably I have a more rich and fuller experience than when I was a baby. But to say it increased eightfold, what am I actually saying with that? Well, nothing. It is completely meaningless because happiness does not work that way. There might be a narrow band of happiness where it works in an analogous way. Where an increase in whatsoever will really increase my happiness gradually. But for most of it, happiness is digital: I am happy, or I am not. The same it is with love. To be happy, to be in love is a special quality. Its very nature is about its difference from the state of unhappiness or feeling of not being loved. If it could be increased by percentages it would cease to be what it is.
There is no infinite happiness, it is a distraction from the issue of growth and it is deeply flawed when you think about its implications for more than a second.
You’re right, Andre, but there is a simpler and more fundamental explanation.
The growth imperative emerged out of the post-Great Depression anxiety about maintaining full employment. Economists argued that continuous improvement in labor-saving technology made it necessary for the economy to grow to maintain full employment (Harrod, Domar). It was not initially growth for growth’s sake but growth for jobs’ sake.
Eventually, that full employment imperative got taken for granted by policy makers and central bankers who became more concerned with fighting inflation to maintain the real value of assets. Economists argued that the economy required a “natural rate” of unemployment or it would go into an inflationary spiral (Friedman, Phelps).
Notwithstanding the shift in emphasis from maintaining full employment to fighting inflation, job creation remains the popular legitimizing rationale for growth. The problem with redefining what is measured to “creativity, quality of life and happiness” is quite simply that those qualities have, in economic theory, nothing to do with job creation. This is not to say there is no relationship whatsoever between employment and happiness but that there is no causal quantitative relationship such that an x% increase in happiness could be expected to generate approximately a y% increase in aggregate employment.
Thanks for your comments, I like them! There are two different topics here, one is on the origin of growth if you like, the other is the “happiness” stuff.
Growth as I see it is an historically contingent phenomenon. It occured after WWII on the scale, we came to know it today – and assume that this is the “normal” state of economic development. Keynes and others were not so much concerned with growth (understood as the long term expansion of supply and demand in an economy) but with overcoming unemployment as you rightfully argued. Growth as we know it, as a large scale economic phenomenon happened after WWII in a “historic singularity” for the economy: mass production capacities in the US that had to switch from wartime to peacetime production; the need to employ homecoming GIs; the Marshall Fund pumping money into reconstruction; the shift towards consumer products thus giving rise to what we now call “consumer capitalism”; a stable monetary regime with Bretton Woods; and of course the start of the Cold War. Only through the convergence of all of these “instances” the growth economy came into existence. The rest is truly history. And as with all historic developments that have a start, it will have an end.
On a sidenote it is interesting to see that employment creation has mainly been achieved by increasing labor productivity, being able to pay higher wages, spurring demand for consumer products and thus continuing the growth spiral while at the same time, through economic expansion, creating jobs. You could also have chosen, instead of increasing wages, to cut working hours and create jobs through that. But this of course would not have resulted in the growth rates we observe in the post-War years. It was politically, maybe due to the system conflict between East and West, not possible to create jobs in such a way. For the workers it would have been equally fine. This is also important in my view as it clearly states that there are no “natural laws” in economic development like a natural growth rate or a natural rate of unemployment. Just as all human development, the economy is changing along historical trajectories, political environments, and of course unexpected shocks changing the whole game.
Just some minor remarks on happiness and my arguments. To think of happiness, or pleasure, or joy or any other deeply human emotional state as infinite is conceptually flawed. It just does not make sense. And the reality that apparently a lot of people do believe the opposite, that it can grow infinitely, is a sign for how strongly our psychological and cultural infrastructures, our worldviews and mindsets have been distorted by the fixation on economic growth. When there will be a time after growth, and I am convinced that this will happen rather sooner than later, it will come as a mental and cultural shock, something that will irritate us just as much as the printing press, books, religious wars, the rise of science and other phenomena have irritated people from the 16th century onwards.
Thanks André. My favourite bit is the digital (I call it binary) language. This extends from love and happiness to growth, allowing clarity on the available options.
I’d suggest a future focus on the next couple of decades since the options for growth will change beyond then (though let’s hope love and happiness remain perennial).
Good to look at why growth got wired into political economy. Employment is in the list, though I wouldn’t put it near the top. At the top I’d put wanting to get (re-)elected and herd thinking (among politicians, advisors, lobbyists and everyone else). The top item uses growth as a magic shield against the global collapse dynamic, “hey forget that I’m not even trying to stop the big problems, look at all the great stuff I’m doing for growth!”.
Given this you could ask whether politicians really feel they have any option about growth and whether growth and reversing the global collapse are really mutually exclusive.
BTW 5 and 8 do make 13 don’t they? Your captcha said I’m wrong!