The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [23]
Prosperity is also dependent on surplus. Here is an example: Imagine a family of four with a yearly income of $40,000 that is sufficient to precisely cover life’s necessities. For this family, there is a perfect balance between income and outflow. Now suppose that good fortune befalls them and they receive a 10 percent boost to their household income. This windfall will allow them to either afford to have one more child (i.e., grow) or to shower a little bit more spending on each person (i.e., economic prosperity), but they can’t do both. There’s only enough surplus money in this example to do one of those things, so they have to choose between additional growth and more prosperity. When the amount of surplus is limited, either growth or prosperity can be increased, but not both at once. “Funding” both growth and prosperity at the same time can only happen during periods when there’s enough surplus to fund both.
From this simple example, we can tease out a very basic but profound concept: Growth does not equal prosperity. For the past few hundred years, we’ve been lulled into linking the two concepts, because there was always sufficient surplus energy that we could have both growth and prosperity at the same time. But that was largely an artifact of a fossil fuel bonanza, not an intrinsic attribute of growth.
If growth in structures and population could bring prosperity, then Quito, Ecuador, and Calcutta, India, would be among the most prosperous places on earth. But they’re not. If growth in a nation’s money supply brought prosperity, then Zimbabwe would have been the wealthiest country on the planet in 2010. But clearly it wasn’t. Growth alone does not bring prosperity, and, worse, growth can steal from prosperity if there aren’t enough resources to support both.
In wealthier countries where an energy and resource bonanza can provide enough surplus for both growth and prosperity, we see both. In poorer countries that can only afford to fund one or the other, we only see (population) growth. For the past 200 years, the developed world has not had to choose between growth and prosperity—it could have both, and it did.
As long as energy supplies can continue to grow forever, there is no conflict between growth and prosperity, and we’ll never have to choose between the two. But someday total energy will decline, and the world will discover that a dogged insistence on growth will diminish its prosperity. Unless we’re careful, there will come a time when 100 percent of our surplus money or energy will be used to simply grow, and the result will be stagnant and then declining prosperity.
The inconvenient truth about growth, then, is that it only really serves us if there is sufficient surplus to fund both growth and prosperity. Once there is not enough surplus for both, it becomes a contest between the two. The risk is that our slavish, unexamined devotion to growth, so deeply embedded within our language and customs that it rarely surfaces for examination, will dictate that growth is what we seek, rather than the prosperity that we actually desire. For politicians and others who are fully invested in the status quo, seeking economic growth is on par with supporting motherhood and apple pie. For them, it’s the path of least resistance, but for the rest of us, it’s now the path with the highest risk because it may very well lead to a future of vastly reduced prosperity.
The most important decision of our time concerns where we direct our remaining energy and other natural surpluses. Choices must be made. We can either spend our surplus resources toward trying to figure out how to simply grow, or we can spend them toward increasing and enhancing our prosperity. We’re rapidly approaching the time when we will no longer be able to do both, if that time has not already arrived. My strongest preference would be to see continued progress in energy efficiency, medical technology, and