reasons. But at the end of the day, the inspiration for Bobby Kennedy’s speech at the University of Kansas remains a product of one man’s experience, insight and sentiment. Perhaps it stands no more in need of explanation than that.
‘Everything is not fine’
Almost as curious as the backstory to the Kansas address is its abiding legacy. There was plenty there of immediate topical relevance. There was much that spoke to a deeper, more philosophical engagement with the nature of human progress. But what proved persistent over the ensuing decades was a less philosophical, more technical aspect of the speech. Beyond the rhetoric lay a clearly definable measurement problem. The principal indicator of economic success used by governments is flawed.
Measurement is a gloriously technical issue. Is the measure we’re using fit for purpose or not? Do its limitations matter? Can they be addressed? How could we adjust things to make them work better? Here was something more readily fixable than our fixation on growth itself. Here was a space safe enough to permit even the cautious to flirt with Bobby Kennedy’s insights without necessarily confronting the deeper challenge they posed. It took a little time for them to show up at the party, it has to be admitted. But eventually some unexpected guests arrived.
The European Commission’s Beyond GDP programme in 2007 and the OECD’s High-Level Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress in 2014 were testament to our appetite for the technicalities of measurement. Even the World Economic Forum has been able to talk in positive terms about alternatives to the GDP. Along the way, somehow, Kennedy’s words themselves became iconic. They’ve been cited over and over again – not just by ‘lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries’ but even, occasionally, by latter-day Presidential candidates and conservative Prime Ministers.16
Discussions about measurement constitute a space of genuine policy innovation in a debate still struggling to throw off the ideological mantle of growth. Countries as varied as Bhutan, New Zealand, Finland and Scotland have begun (only recently in most cases) to develop new ways of measuring progress. Some of these initiatives provide what are sometimes called ‘satellite accounts’, never quite challenging the dominion of the GDP. Others make a genuine attempt to integrate the alternatives into economic policy and budgetary decisions.17
These conversations matter. Measurement matters. ‘If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing,’ argued the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who co-chaired the OECD group. ‘If our measures tell us everything is fine when it really isn’t, we will be complacent,’ he said recently. ‘And it should be clear that, in spite of the increases in GDP, in spite of the 2008 crisis being well behind us, everything is not fine.’18
And yet the critique of growth itself, the genuine postgrowth refrain that runs through the Kennedy speech, is far less well rehearsed. It was virtually ignored for decades by the prevailing politics. With the help of youthful activism, it has achieved more visibility. But even now it’s mainly cast as a curious anomaly, clearly at odds with the mainstream discourse. Kurz’s Davos smile spoke volumes. First, they ignore you. Then they laugh. Until suddenly the need to face reality is thrust upon us.
The stationary state
Even as Kennedy was talking in Kansas, a young agricultural economist named Herman Daly was about to publish his first mainstream paper. He had been working on it since 1965. The principal argument in ‘Economics as a Life Science’ was that ultimately economics and biology were both engaged in the study of one and the same thing: the life process itself.
It’s a sentiment that runs to the core of the arguments I want to develop in this book. An appeal to economists to understand that the economy is not a separate or even separable part of the natural world, but a ‘wholly owned subsidiary’ of the environment. Daly was in Brazil when he submitted the paper to the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, without access to sophisticated office equipment. So the manuscript was in rough copy with handwritten corrections on it. To his surprise it was accepted immediately. It appeared in print in May 1968, just a couple of months after Kennedy’s critique of the GDP.19
The timing was such an odd coincidence that I couldn’t help wondering if Daly had known about the Kennedy speech or had any connection to it. He’d only become aware of it much later, he told me. But the two direct influences on Kennedy – Carson’s Silent Spring and the writing of the American liberals – were of course familiar to him. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society in particular had had a profound impact on him as a young economics undergraduate.20
In the years that followed the publication of ‘Economics as a Life Science’, Daly began to flesh out more and more of the science that became known as ecological economics. At the centre of his inquiry was the question of scale. How could the human economy simply keep on growing when the dimensions of the planet were irredeemably finite? Ultimately, argued Daly, it couldn’t. In the early 1970s, he published the foundations for what he began to call the ‘steady state’ economy – defined as one with a constant stock of capital and a constant population. Crucially, the size of this constant stock had to be small enough that the flow of material and energy needed to maintain it lay within the carrying capacity of the planet. Otherwise it would eventually collapse. It was ‘an extension of the demographers’ model of a stationary population to include the populations of physical artifacts’, he wrote in 1974. The same fundamental idea ‘is found in [the economist] John Stuart Mill’s discussion of the stationary state of classical economics’.21
Here we arrive at one of the most curious aspects of cultural myth. Each culture is blind to its own mythical nature. We are consigned to live inside the bubble. Like Jim Carrey’s character Truman Burbank in Peter Weir’s movie The Truman Show, everything appears to be real. The routines of our life and the boundaries of our world seem immutable. From inside the bubble, growth is the irreducible norm and the concept of the stationary state looks like an insane aberration. Zoom out for a second and the roles are completely reversed. One of the founding fathers of the science of economics had written about the postgrowth economy two and a half centuries ago.
John Stuart Mill professed to a profound dislike of the society springing up around him at the height of the industrial revolution. ‘I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on, that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind,’ he wrote in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848. Of the stationary state itself he admitted: ‘I cannot regard it with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested toward it by political economists of the old school.’ On the contrary, he said, ‘I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition.’22
In other words, the great classical economist was saying this: a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.
The journey of this book
Our prevailing vision of social progress is fatally dependent on a false promise: that there will always be more and more for everyone. Forged in the crucible of capitalism, this foundational myth has come dangerously unravelled. The relentless pursuit of eternal growth has delivered ecological destruction, financial fragility and social instability.
Was the myth ever really fit for purpose?
