Living the 'good life' demands a Steady State Economy

It is dramatic, but humanity stands nervously and with decided uncertainty in shadows cast by a pall of serious environmental degradation.

Herman Daly.

The world shudders as man, who equates success with growth and has long enjoyed a free ride, can hear the banker, nature, saying “enough is enough”.

Rather than reach for an economy that is always expanding, it is time we reset the economical thermostat and attuned ourselves to understanding and living with a Steady State Economy.

Growth for the sake of yet more growth, an author and professor of environmental studies and politics, David Orr, says is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea.

Author and Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist, David Suzuki has said: "Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal."

One of the founders of the field of ecological economics and a leading critic of neoclassical growth theory, Herman Daly, has defined a Steady State Economy.

He says it is: “An economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance ‘throughput’, that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption.”

A Steady State Economy, therefore, aims for stable or mildly fluctuating levels in population and consumption of energy and materials. Birth rates equal death rates, and production rates equal depreciation rates.

Complex? Probably, but no more than that which would confront us if we sat down now with a blank slate to design what exists; a process that has unleashed massive inequality and equally distressing environmental ruin around the world.

What we have works for a rich minority – less than one per cent of Americans control most of the country's total wealth, and although Australia is different, it is similar.

A Steady State Economy would inherently embrace a redistribution of wealth, arriving at a point at which rewards were not recognized in dollars, rather in happiness and contentment enabling an escape from the proven pointless rigour of the traditional measure of economic success, the Gross National Product (GNP).

The GNP is simply the flow of money, that in no way separates good from bad and so payment to skilled workers is measured just as is the cost of providing relief to communities damaged by recent tornado in north-east Victoria; repairing flood damaged Numurkah or Nathalia; restoring large swathes of Victoria drowned in flood waters or attending to the death and damage of Victoria’s Black Saturday fires.

A Steady State Economy makes the good life possible, uninhibited growth condemns it.