Rethinking Growth: What is growth? Is it a temporary process to arrive at a state that we will then want to maintain? Or is growth a process which is itself desirable and is supposed to go on forever? Right now nobody defines a state of sufficiency. [...] The idea of steady-state economics is that growth really should be a temporary process to arrive at some level of sufficiency. [...]
our GDP, our national accounting system, does not separate costs and benefits of growth. Pollution, for instance, is not subtracted as a cost of growth. In fact, the expenditures and efforts to clean up pollution are added as a benefit. This is a strange, asymmetric entry into the accounts, because if you’re not going to count the cost of pollution, then you shouldn’t count its cleanup as a benefit.
