It's not All or None

Bill,

With regard to the article behind Paul Ehrlich's quote, the cogency of your critique speaks for itself. So much so that its author, Eduardo Porter strongly supports your argument. He writes:

    "Whatever the ethical merits of the case, the proposition of no growth has absolutely no chance to succeed. For all the many hundreds of years humanity survived without growth, modern civilization could not. The trade-offs that are the daily stuff of market-based economies simply could not work in a zero-sum world... 

Let’s examine what our fossil-fueled growth has provided us. It has delivered gains in living standards in even the poorest regions of the world. But that’s only the beginning. Economic development was indispensable to end slavery. It was a critical precondition for the empowerment of women. Indeed, democracy would not have survived without it. ....the option for everybody to become better off — where one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss — was critical for the development and spread of the consensual politics that underpin democratic rule... 

Zero growth gave us Genghis Khan and the Middle Ages, conquest and subjugation. It fostered an order in which the only mechanism to get ahead was to plunder one’s neighbor. Economic growth opened up a much better alternative: trade. The Oxford economist Max Roser has some revealing charts that show the deadliness of war across the ages. It was a real killer in the era of no growth. Up to half of all deaths among hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists and other ancient cultures were caused by conflict...

Naomi Klein, a champion of the leftward fringe newly converted to the environmental cause, gleefully proposes climate change as an opportunity to put an end to capitalism. Were she right, I doubt it would bring about the workers’ utopia she appears to yearn for. In a world economy that does not grow, the powerless and vulnerable are the most likely to lose. Imagine “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max” and “The Hunger Games” brought to real life."

So a trip back to the Stone Age may be what some of the no growth fanatics are advocating, but it's certainly not what Porter is arguing for, or me either. 

Eli