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Is economic growth the problem?
May. 1st, 2004 11:24 pmAccording to Dr. Rob Lempert of RAND corporation, economic growth doesn't have to be based on growth in the amount of physical resources used. It can depend on services and other intangibles--and indeed, the United States and other "industrialized" nations have become largely service economies. Now, this doesn't mean resource use isn't increasing--it has to in order to support the still-growing world population; it's just that most of the resource-intensive production has been moved to the second and third worlds.
However, if Lempert is right, stopping the dangerous increase in the physical scale of the human presence may not require quite as drastic a restructuring of the economy as I thought. Unbounded growth may be possible if it's only growth in the production and consumption of ideas.
On the other hand, information requires matter and energy to store it, so in the long run this may not disprove the hypothesis that the economy can't grow forever.
However, if Lempert is right, stopping the dangerous increase in the physical scale of the human presence may not require quite as drastic a restructuring of the economy as I thought. Unbounded growth may be possible if it's only growth in the production and consumption of ideas.
On the other hand, information requires matter and energy to store it, so in the long run this may not disprove the hypothesis that the economy can't grow forever.
