These are the CASSE blog articles on economic growth.
That an economic activity has to be profitable is considered a truism, something taken for granted and not reflected upon. But what if the opposite is the case?
When I first took up small-scale organic farming in the 1970s, I spent a lot of energy on developing new methods and machinery to increase my productive efficiency. The early organic advocates went a long way to assure growers, farmers,
Students and scholars of steady-state economics must have noticed, by now, that the Degrowth movement in Europe has attained far more traction than the steady-state movement has in the USA (or anywhere). Degrowth is the banner under which thousands have assembled at numerous conferences for almost two decades now, demonstrating a durable unity. Major European news outlets such as The Guardian report on Degrowth doings; even prominent American outlets including Bloomberg have taken note.
The year was 1965, and on the morning of July 9 in Geneva, Adlai Ewing Stevenson II prepared for his final speech to the UN. A former Governor of Illinois and presidential candidate, what he was about to say might still become his greatest contribution. But we’re in danger of forgetting it.
What Adlai Stevenson proffered the world that day was a metaphor. A simple yet powerful idea that,
I didn’t set out to coin a phrase, but “trophic money” will be far handier than “money derived pursuant to the trophic theory of money.” The trophic theory of money is that money originates via the agricultural surplus that frees the hands for the division of labor into all the other economic activities, most basically manufacturing and services. It’s a theory of money that reflects not only the trophic structure of the economy—with manufacturing and services built upon a base of agriculture and extraction—but the fact that money is meaningless unless we have an agricultural surplus at the trophic base.
Karl Marx thought of history as progressive, moving from aristocracy to bourgeois capitalism to socialist revolution to communist utopia. While neoclassical economists such as Alan Greenspan and Paul Romer might not agree with Marx on much, they do agree that history tends toward progress. Today, nearly everyone on the political left and much of the political right is “historically progressive,” even if politically conservative. They all seem to believe that our children will inherit a more prosperous,
Over the last week of January, it was hard to miss the headlines: “Reddit vs Wall Street,” “Reddit Sparks Wall Street Crisis,” “The Reddit Traders Who Took On Wall Street’s Elite.” The GameStop phenomenon, fueled by the Reddit forum “WallStreetBets,” was pitched as a David vs Goliath story where a group of ordinary citizens took on the elites and won.
On September 23, 2019, a 16 year-old girl fearlessly sent a message to world leaders at the UN Headquarters: “We’ll be watching you.” Though Greta Thunberg had become a household name at this point for her school-strike movement, this speech would mark her as the voice of a generation, garnering 4 million views and a designation as “Time’s 2019 Person of the Year.” Though her whole speech is moving,
To most people, the idea of a steady state economy is misunderstood at best and completely unknown at worst. Outside of economic, environmental, and academic circles, steady staters are hard to come by. The idea of a steady state economy is not yet mainstream and is shied away from in the media, general politics, education, and culture. Economic growth has been sold to generations as the remedy to all our ailments.
In a world of vexing issues—and our topic this week is certainly that—population growth might just be the most ironic. That’s because it should be among the simplest of issues; almost trifling in its mathematics. Yet opinions about it are beset with political, economic, and even some technical controversy.
For steady staters it seems perfectly clear: Population must be stabilized for the sake of societal well-being and even mere sustainability.
“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” Those were the principles that underlaid most of the Tsarist governments in the final 80 years of Romanov rule. It was a slogan and a belief system, Russia’s version of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Eventually, under the leadership of a poor autocrat, Nicholas II, it would lead to the Russian Revolution and the brutal murder of Nicholas and his family. Yet between its coining in 1832 and the Revolution in 1917,