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Dear Garry, Ivo......
following the various exchanges of emails during the last days and weeks, I would like to stress the following points :
- In the introduction to my report to the Club of Rome in 1993, I already stressed that : "What in the seventies was interpreted essentially as a problem of limits to general economic growth, appears increasingly as the description of the end of the the great cycle of the classical industrial revolution. This is what the simulations of Jay Forrester and Denis Meadows point to ; not to the end economic groth as such, but the end of one sort of economic growth.......(today we should recognize that) the service economy is the major battle for risk taking, (that we must reconsider ) the supply side ( technology and development ) ....Risk as a positive factor....an attitude of mind ..for stimulating progress....( " The Limits to Certainty " , Kluwer Academic Plublisher ")
- contributing to a new "Wealth of Nations revisited" is therefore the central focal starting point
- an introductory note on this issue is herewith attached ( excuse me from those who already received it )
- 20 years ago such issue was obscured by the controversies on the "limits to growth", and then by the stampede on the environment ( ecology ), sustainability (a new word for long term ) and finally by the "global warming". Many such concerns were and largely are sill important. But sometimes I have impression that humanity is desperately trying to find a new ideology and new ways to experiment power........see the controversies of these last weeks on global warming datas, with a new kind of entrepreneurs ( as usual looking for money, which also can in many cases - not always - be right and proper ).
- so let's follow the exemple of Adam Smith ( the founder of classical economics and a moral philosopher ) rather then that one of Al Gore. Smith started low key his book by analysing how in practice a pin was fabricated. We should in a similar way analyze from real practice ( a not even by Samuelson ) how productive activities are today organized and yield which type of results........Economics was built as a practical consequence of the classical industrial revolution, it is not a discipline - as it pretends to be today - of general historical applicability.......The main goal remains: producing real wealth....And of course, human nature introduced and will introduce many polititical/ideological side roads: let's try to make this explicit... ( ah...the way of the soft sciences is full of traps !!! )
Best wishes
Orio
Korten's reply to Orio
Allow me to suggest that before trying to figure out what kind of economic growth might be sustained forever in an environmentally constrained world, it is more productive and appropriate to apply our mental energy to figuring out how best to meet the needs of all the world's people within the regenerative limits of Earth's biosphere. Whether a particular indicator of economic throughput goes up or down in the process of achieving this goal should be irrelevant.
I realize, of course, that the current economic system is designed to collapse if it is not growing. But that is an artifact of faulty system design choices. Because these system defects result from flawed human choices, they can be corrected by better choices. Identifying the necessary and appropriate changes is another worthy intellectual exercise. I suggest, however, that a simple perpetual expansion of economic output of any kind is not in itself either an answer nor an appropriate goal.
David
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