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The Connection Between Population, Income, and Health

July 3, 2019 /5 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by
by Max Kummerow

For hundreds of years, economists have debated whether population growth is good or bad. Malthus said exponential population growth increases labor supply, so wages fall until starvation, war, or plague stops growth in numbers. Marx said capitalism causes poverty and hunger, so population growth is good, because “every stomach is born with a pair of hands”, bringing revolution and justice closer.

Nearly 200 years later, Garrett Hardin and Julian Simon were still debating the same question.

“Be Very Alarmed!” Introducing the Global GDP Meter

June 27, 2019 /5 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by
by Brian Czech

Backed by an ominous sound clip and a rapidly churning GDP meter that comes out of nowhere, “Be alarmed… Be very alarmed!” are the opening phrases at CASSE’s new landing page. You’ll see what we mean shortly; please allow us an introduction to describe this new approach.

The landing page is actually a 30-second animation prefacing our “regular” website. It is designed to be three things:

  • Alarming
  • Crystal clear
  • Distinctive and memorable
Why Sound the Alarm?

The World Fertility Transition: Moving Toward a Steady-State Population

May 29, 2019 /1 Comment/in , , , /by
by Max Kummerow

“There’s just too many of us and no one is talking about it.”
—Biologist Patrick Benson in Meera Subramanian’s, A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis

It is hard to imagine a growing population supporting a steady state economy. “Jobs” and higher incomes for growing numbers of people anchor the platforms of political candidates and economists worldwide.

But what about a different approach?

A Journey of No Return, Not a Circular Economy

April 23, 2019 /9 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

By Herman Daly

The economic process is not a mechanical analog that can be run forward and backward, nor a circular process that can return to any previous state. Rather it is an irreversible and irrevocable process moving in the direction of time’s arrow of increasing entropy [1]. Finitude and entropy guarantee that the economic life of our species will be a journey of no return. Therefore even a stationary economy, in the classical sense of constant population and constant capital stock, is ultimately a journey of no return, because the metabolic throughput of matter and energy required to maintain constant stocks of people and physical capital, in the face of depreciation and death, is an entropic flow from ever less concentrated sources to ever filling sinks – and both sources and sinks are finite.

The Green New Deal: What’s Really Green and What’s Really New

February 14, 2019 /11 Comments/in , , , , , , , , , , /by
by Brian Czech

Ask Americans what the Green New Deal is all about, and you’ll get two basic answers. Most often you’ll hear, “It’s about moving to renewable energy in order to fight climate change.” You’ll also hear, from a camp further right, “It’s all about socialism!”

Either way, the really green, really new feature is overlooked. What the Green New Deal is really about is the transition to a steady state economy.

“Driving” the Growth of Local Economies: Farming or Financing?

January 10, 2019 /0 Comments/in , , , , , /by
by Brian Czech

Among today’s headlines is the pedestrian-sounding “Colin Hanna: Economic growth, new jobs, strengthened pensions.” Author Hanna, surely a well-meaning soul, is pitching the merits of the private equity “industry.” The problem is, Hanna goes so far as to reference “the industry’s clear record of driving economic growth.”

Hanna’s article reminds me of the many, many (oh, so many) times I’ve read about tourism, bowling,

Neocornucopianism and the Steady State: Part I

November 9, 2018 /0 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by

By Josh Farley

Perhaps the main reason people reject the need for a steady state economy is some form of cornucopianism, the belief that technological progress will overcome all ecological and physical limits, allowing endless economic growth into the indefinite future. Cornucopianism has several flavors, and I will describe three: mainstream economics, eco-modernism, and singularity theory.

Population and the Steady State Economy

October 25, 2018 /2 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by

By Max Kummerow

Sir David Attenborough remarked in a 2011 presidential lecture to the Royal Society that “every environmental and social problem is made more difficult and ultimately impossible to solve with ever more people.” Wherever women’s status has improved and societies modernized, he said, birth rates have fallen. He begged his audience to “talk about population.”