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Is growth always good?
BALA BALASUBRAMANIAN
We live in a world today that is obsessed with economic growth. Little thought is spared to its relevance or to the cost of this growth. The moot question is whether an obsession with growth is indeed such a desirable end as it is made out to be. Growth does have an important role to play. However, what we need to think about is whether there is a point of balance to stop at.
Nature offers some important lessons here. Every organism on this planet grows and needs to grow. However, after a point it reaches a state of balance and stops growing. This state of balance is both at an individual and collective level. And when something does not stop growing, we call it a cancer. In many ways the same applies for economic or material growth. There is a point at which it has to stop and a balance has to be established. That is a fundamental necessity.
Relentless race
However, today what we see around us is a relentless race for growth. Every country wants to keep growing faster than the rest. Every corporation wants to grow faster than its competitors. There is never seen to be such a thing as too much growth.
Most individuals have no end to their material growth ambitions. While countries at the low end of the economic scale do need growth to surmount basic survival imperatives till they reach a level of affluence where they can free their minds from basic questions of survival and security, the problem starts when prosperous nations fret over lack of growth.
Recently I was watching a news report presenting a certain country in a sorry plight due to its paltry decimal growth rates over the last decade or so. Given the grim portrayal, the reporter could well have been talking about Somalia. But it so turned out that he was talking about Japan, a country with one of the highest per capita GDP levels!
The disappointment evidently is about the fact that the people of Japan are not splurging more and more way beyond their already high consumption levels. We should realise that Japan has perhaps reached that desirable state of balance, which should be what every country should aspire to. Growth from this point should be defined not in economic terms but in terms of their other contributions to the world — spiritual for example.
One may ask: what do we lose by growing? The answer is quite simple. The world. Let me explain. Most of the growth we see around us draws on natural resources. Let us take an example of a corporate, which manufactures, say, soaps. The purpose of the corporate is to grow. The strategy adopted by this corporation is all about how to make its consumers consume more and more of its product. It is not just about fighting for share, but also about increasing per capita usage of the product. And marketers thrive on the dharma of making people want things they never wanted. Looked at purely from a capitalist point of view, this may be the right thing to do.
But what does it mean to the world? Every extra bar of soap a person consumes increases demand for the oil and many other natural resources that went into it. So we are ultimately increasing the pressure on natural resources in the name of corporate growth for even an innocuous product like soap. Likewise every product and service directly or indirectly puts pressure on the planet’s natural resources.
All talk about global warming today just scrapes the surface of the problem and the most visible part of it — the emissions. What it does not yet address is the impact of all the effort that goes towards increasing per capita consumption and whether it is indeed necessary.
We need to realise that if humanity is not to be seen as a cancer on this planet we need to achieve a state of balance with respect to consumption and consumption led growth and rethink our goal of relentless material growth.
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