December 02, 2015
Eduardo Porter discusses whether a no growth economy is feasible as a solution to addressing global warming. While he is largely right about the practicality of no-growth economy, there are a couple of points worth adding.
As a practical matter, it is just simple arithmetic that a larger world population will require fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per person. For this reason, a shrinking world population, or least more slowly growing one, would make it easier to hit emissions targets.
The second point is that historically people having taken the dividend of productivity gains in a mix of more lesiure and higher income. Given the strong correlation between income and GHG it would be desirable to structure policy to give people more incentive to take the benefits of productivity growth in leisure.
There has been a huge difference in this area between Europe and the United States over the 35 years. Europeans can almost all count on 4–6 weeks a year of paid vacation, paid family leave and sick days, and often shorter workweeks. As a result, the average work year in Europe has 20 percent fewer hours than in the United States. These countries have much lower levels of GHG per person than the United States. Policies that push the United States in this direction and push Europe further in the direction of more leisure should help to reduce GHG emissions.
As a definitional matter, better software, education, and health care would all be forms of economic growth. It is difficult to see why anyone would be opposed to such gains.
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