[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A Catechism of Growth Fallacies

[Bill Totten]

Chapter 5 of Steady-State Economics (1977, 1991)

by Herman Daly


The part played by orthodox economists, whose common sense has been
insufficient to check their faulty logic, has been disastrous to the
latest act.
- J M Keynes (1936)

The first question asked of any critic of the status quo is: What would
you put in place? In place of the growth economy we would put a
steady-state economy. But such a theoretical alternative is not of great
interest unless there is dissatisfaction with the business-as-usual growth
economy. If you have eaten poison, it is not enough to simply resume
eating healthful foods. You must get rid of the specific substances that
are making you ill. Let us, then, apply the stomach pump to the doctrines
of economic growth that we have been force-fed for the past four decades.
Perhaps the best way to do that is to jump right into the growth debate
and consider critically some fifteen to twenty general pro growth
arguments that recur in various guises and either expose their errors or
accommodate their valid criticisms.

First a preliminary point. The verb "to grow" has become so overladen with
positive value connotations that we have forgotten its first literal
dictionary denotation, namely, "to spring up and develop to maturity".
Thus the very notion of growth includes some concept of maturity or
sufficiency, beyond which point physical accumulation gives way to
physical maintenance; that is, growth gives way to a steady state. It is
important to remember that "growth" is not synonymous with "betterment".


Can't Get Enough of That Wonderful Stuff

The American people have been told by no less an authority than the
President's Council of Economic Advisors that, "If it is agreed that
economic output is a good thing it follows by definition that there is not
enough of it" (Economic Report of the President, 1971, page 92). It is
evidently impossible to have too much of a good thing. If rain is a good
thing, a torrential downpour is, by definition, better! Has the learned
council forgotten about diminishing marginal benefit and increasing
marginal costs? A charitable interpretation would be that "economic"
output means output for which marginal benefit is greater than marginal
cost. But it is clear from the context that what is meant is simply real
GNP. Perhaps this amazing non sequitur was just a slip of the pen. At
another point in the same document the council admits that "growth of GNP
has its costs, and beyond some point they are not worth paying" (page 88).
However, instead of raising the obvious question - What determines the
optimal point and how do we know when we have reached it? - the council
relapses into non sequitur and quickly closes this dangerous line of
thinking with the following pontification: "The existing propensities of
the population and policies of the government constitute claims upon GNP
itself that can only be satisfied by rapid economic growth" (page 88).
Apparently, these "existing propensities and policies" are beyond
discussion. This is growth mania.

The theoretical answer to the avoided question is clear to any economist.
Growth in GNP should cease when decreasing marginal benefits become equal
to increasing marginal costs. But there is no statistical series that
attempts to measure the cost of GNP. This is growth mania, literally not
counting the costs of growth. But the situation is even worse. We take the
real costs of increasing GNP as measured by the defensive expenditures
incurred to protect ourselves from the unwanted side effects of production
and add these expenditures to GNP rather than subtract them. We count real
costs as benefits. This is hypergrowthmania. Obviously, we should keep
separate accounts of costs and benefits. But to do this would make it
clear that beyond some point zero growth would be optimal, at least in the
short run. Such an admission is inconvenient to the ideology of growth,
which quite transcends the ordinary logic of elementary economics. More
precisely, it is good growthmanship strategy to admit the theoretical
existence of such a point way out in the future, but somehow it must
always be thought of as far away. The ideological reasons for this are
clear and have to do with the problem of distribution of output in an
economy in which ownership of land and capital is highly concentrated and
embodies laborsaving technology. Full employment at a living wage requires
high aggregate demand, which requires high net investment to offset the
large savings made possible by concentrated income. High net investment
signifies rapid growth.


The Hair of the Dog that Bit You

One of the most popular arguments against limiting growth is that we need
more growth in order to be rich enough to afford the costs of cleaning up
pollution and discovering new resources. Economist Neil Jacoby says, "A
rising GNP will enable the nation more easily to bear the costs of
eliminating pollution" (1970, page 42). Yale economist Henry Wallich makes
a similar point:

The environment will also be better taken care of if the economy grows.
Nothing could cut more dangerously into the resources that must be devoted
to the Great Cleanup than an attempt to limit resources available for
consumption. By ignoring the prohibitionist impulse and allowing everybody
to have more, we shall also have more resources to do the environmental
Job [Wallich, 1972 page 62].

No one can deny that if we had more resources and were truly richer, all
our economic problems would be more easily solved. The question is whether
further growth in GNP will in fact make us richer. It may well make us
poorer. How do we know that it will not, since we do not bother to measure
the costs and even count many real costs as benefits? These critics simply
assume that a rising per-capita GNP is making us better off, when that is
the very question at issue!

If marginal benefits of physical growth decline while marginal costs rise
(as elementary economic theory would indicate), there will be an
intersection beyond which further growth is uneconomic. The richer the
society (the more it has grown in the past), the more likely it is that
marginal benefits are below marginal costs and that further growth is
uneconomic. That marginal benefits fall follows from the simple fact that
sensible people satisfy their most pressing wants first, whether in
alternative uses of a single commodity or in alternative uses of income.
That marginal costs rise follows from the fact that sensible people first
exploit the most accessible land and minerals known to them, and that when
sacrifices are imposed by the increase of any one activity, sensible
people will sacrifice the least important alternative activities first.
Thus marginal benefits of economic activity fall while marginal costs
rise. Were this not the case, our previous "economic activity" would not
have been economic - less pressing wants would have to have taken priority
over more pressing wants, and the level of welfare could have been
increased by reallocation with no increase in resources used.

... Once we have gone beyond the optimum, and marginal costs exceed
marginal benefits, growth will make us worse off. Will we then cease
growing? On the contrary, our experience of diminished well-being will be
blamed on the traditional heavy hand of product scarcity, and the only way
the orthodox paradigm knows to deal with increased scarcity is to advocate
increased growth - this will make us even less well off and will lead to
the advocacy of still more growth! Sometimes I suspect that we are already
on this "other side of the looking glass", where images are inverted and
the faster we run the "behinder" we get.

Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by the economic
physicians who attempt to treat the basic sickness of unlimited wants by
prescribing unlimited production. We do not cure a treatment-induced
disease by increasing the treatment dosage! Yet members of the
hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you school, who reason that it is impossible to
have too much of a good thing, can hardly cope with such subtleties. If an
overdose of medicine is making us sick, we need an emetic, not more of the
medicine. Physician, heal thyself


Consistent Inconsistencies and Avoiding the Main Issues 

Growthmen are forever claiming that neither they nor any other economist
worth his salt has ever confused GNP with welfare. Consider, however, the
following four statements from the same article (Nordhaus and Tobin, 1970):

(1) Gross National Product is not a measure of economic welfare ...
maximization of GNP is not a proper objective of economic policy ...
Economists all know that ... [page 6].

(2) Although GNP and other national Income aggregates are imperfect
measures of welfare, the broad picture of secular progress which they
convey remains after correction of their most obvious deficiencies [page
25].

(3) But for all its shortcomings, national output is about the only
broadly based index of economic welfare that has been constructed [page 1,
Appendix A].

(4) There is no evidence to support the claim that welfare had grown less
rapidly than NNP. Rather NNP seems to underestimate the gain in welfare,
chiefly because of the omission of leisure from consumption. Subject to
the limitations of the estimates we conclude that the economic welfare of
the average American has been growing at a rate which doubles every thirty
years [page 12].

It is asking too much of context and intervening qualification to
reconcile statement 1 with statements 2, 3, and 4. Either GNP (or NNP) is
an index of welfare, or it is not. The authors clearly believe that it is
(in spite of the first statement). They offer many sensible adjustments to
make GNP a better measure of welfare on the assumption that, although
imperfect, it is nevertheless a measure of welfare. But all of this avoids
the fundamental objection that GNP-flow is largely a cost. Wants are
satisfied by the services of the stock of wealth. The annual production
flow is the cost of maintaining the stock, and though necessary, should be
minimized for any given stock level. If we want the stock to grow, we must
pay the added cost of a greater production flow (more depletion, more
labor, and ultimately more pollution). Depletion, labor, and pollution are
real costs that vary directly with the GNP-throughput. If we must have
some indices of welfare, why not take total stock per capita and the ratio
of total stock to throughput flow? Welfare varies directly with the stock,
inversely with the flow. Beyond some point, the benefits of additions to
the stock will not be worth the costs in terms of additional maintenance
throughput.

Kenneth Boulding has for many years been making the point that Gross
National Product is largely Gross National Cost and has never been taken
seriously. If this way of looking at things is wrong, why does not some
economist deal it a decisive refutation instead of avoiding it? Certainly
it is not a minor issue.

The source of this flow fetishism of orthodox economics is twofold. First,
it is a natural concomitant of early stages of ecological succession
(Odum, 1969). Young ecosystems (and cowboy economies) tend to maximize
production efficiency, that is, the ratio of annual flow of biomass
produced to the preexisting biomass stock that produced it. Mature
ecosystems (and spaceman economies) tend to maximize the inverse ratio of
existing biomass stock to annual biomass flow that maintains it. The
latter ratio increases as maintenance efficiency increases. Economic
theory is lagging behind ecological succession. The other reason for flow
fetishism is ideological. Concentrating on flows takes attention away from
the very unequally distributed stock of wealth that is the real source of
economic power. The income flow is unequally distributed also, but at
least everyone gets some part of it, and marginal productivity theory
makes it appear rather fair. Redistribution of income is liberal.
Redistribution of wealth is radical. Politically, it is safer to keep
income at the center of analysis, because not everyone owns a piece of the
productive stock, and there is no theory explaining wealth distribution.
Putting stocks at the center of analysis might raise impolite questions.


Crocodile Tears from Latter-Day Marie Antoinettes

Economists and businessmen with no previous record of concern for the poor
have now begun to attack steady-state advocates as upper-class social
climbers, who, having gotten theirs, now want to kick the ladder down
behind them and leave the poor forever on the ground floor. There may be
such people, and certainly they should be condemned. But most advocates of
the steady state accept and proclaim the absolute necessity of limits to
inequality in the distribution of both wealth and income. Indeed, many
people who have long favored less inequality in the distribution of wealth
on ethical and political grounds have reached the same conclusion on
ecological grounds. It is the orthodox growthmen who want to avoid the
distribution issue. As Wallich so bluntly put it in defending growth,
"Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth
there is hope, and that makes large income differentials
tolerable" (1972). We are addicted to growth because we are addicted to
large inequalities in income and wealth. What about the poor? Let them eat
growth! Better yet, let them feed on the hope of eating growth in the
future!

We have been growing for some time, and we still have poverty. It should
be obvious that what grows is the reinvested surplus, and the benefits of
growth go to the owners of surplus, who are not poor. Some of the growth
dividends trickle down, but not many. The poor are given the sop of full
employment - they are allowed to share fully in the economy's basic toil
but not in its surplus - and unless we have enough growth to satisfy the
dividend recipients, even the booby prize of full employment is taken away.

On the issue of growth and poverty, Joan Robinson noted:

Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute
poverty is increased by it. Growth requires technical progress and
technical progress alters the composition of the labor force, making more
places for educated workers and fewer for uneducated, but opportunities to
acquire qualifications are kept (with a few exceptions for exceptional
talents) for those families who have them already [Robinson, 1972, page 7].


Admitting the Thin Edge of a Big Wedge

"We know that population growth cannot continue forever" (Nordhaus and
Tobin, 1970, page 20). This is certainly a true statement. It is also the
thin edge of a wedge whose thick end is capable of cracking the growth
orthodoxy in half. This results from the fact that, in addition to the
population of human bodies (endosomatic capital), we must also consider
the population of extensions of the human body (exosomatic capital). Cars
and bicycles extend man's legs, buildings and clothes extend his skin,
telephones extend his ears and voice, libraries and computers extend his
brain, and so on. Both endosomatic and exosomatic capital are necessary
for the maintenance and enjoyment of life. Both are physical open systems
that maintain themselves in a kind of steady state by continually
importing low-entropy matter-energy from the environment and exporting
high-entropy matter­energy back to the environment. In other words, both
populations require a physical throughput for short-run maintenance and
long-run replacements of deaths by births. The two populations depend upon
the environment in essentially the same way. The same biophysical
constraints that limit the population of organisms apply with equal force
to the population of extensions of organisms. If the first limitation is
admitted, how can the second be denied?

This simple logic has recently imposed itself on the population of books
in college libraries (Gore, 1974). Academic library collections have for
several decades been growing at a rate that doubles holdings every fifteen
years. Microfilm technology has not substituted for bulkier acquisitions
but has led to extra acquisitions. If we admit that every college cannot
afford a Library of Congress, and that even that library cannot grow
forever, we must accept some kind of a steady-state library. That is, some
sufficient number of holdings must be maintained constant, and whenever a
new book is added an old one must be discarded. Up to this point there is
no escape from the simple logic of the problem.

Difficulties arise in setting the aggregate "birth" and "death" rates and
especially in deciding which books are to be acquired and which are to be
sacrificed. If to add a new book we must throw away an old one, then the
new one must be judged better than the old one. This is surely a healthy
discipline and will result in an improvement of quality of the total stock
of books. But the problem, as ever, is how to judge quality. A legitimate
difference of opinion arises between the consumer sovereignty school (get
rid of those books that are checked out least often) and the library
responsibility school (rely on the judgment of librarians and scholars).
This is a difficult issue and probably requires compromise. But what is
certain is that the issue must be faced. No library can continue to buy
books indefinitely and never discard any. What is true for books is true
for cars, buildings, bicycles, and, of course, for human bodies. At some
point, more births must be balanced by more deaths.


Misplaced Concreteness and Technological Salvation

Technology is the rock upon which the growthmen built their church. Since
rocks and foundations are concrete entities, it is natural that growthmen
should begin to endow technology with a certain metaphorical concreteness,
speaking of it as a thing that grows in quantity. From there, it is but a
short step to ask whether this thing has grown exponentially, like many
other things, and to consult the black art of econometrics and discover
that indeed it has! Next, we can conceive of technology as a sort of
antibody to the pollution and depletion germs. Ultimately, we conclude
that depleting and polluting activities (production and consumption) can
continue to grow exponentially, because we have a problem-solving
antiparticle, technology which can also grow exponentially!

Is this progression an unfair caricature? Consider the following statement
from a review of Limits to Growth (Meadows et al, 1972) by two economists
and a lawyer:

While the team's world model hypothesizes exponential growth for
industrial and agricultural needs, it places arbitrary, nonexponetial,
limits on the technical progress that might accommodate these needs.

... lt is true that exponential growth cannot go on forever if technology
does not keep up - and if that is the case we might save ourselves much
misery by stopping before we reach the limits. But there is no particular
criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation. Malthus was
wrong; food capacity has kept up with population. While no one knows for
certain, technical progress shows no signs of slowing down. The best
econometric estimates suggest that it is indeed growing exponentially
[Passell et al, 1972, page 12].


These few sentences are very valuable in that they unite in one short
space so many of the misconceptions of orthodox growthmen. Note that
technology has become an exponentially growing quantity of some thing that
solves problems but does not create any. Note the clear implication that
exponential growth could go on forever if technology (that problem-solving
antiparticle) can keep up. Can it in fact keep up? Consult the entrails of
a nameless econometrician and, behold! It has in the past, so it probably
will in the future. Most econometricians are more cautious in view of the
fact that technological change cannot be directly measured but is merely
the unexplained residual in their regressions after they have included as
many measurable factors and dummy variables as they can think of.
Sometimes the residual technology component even includes the effect of
increased raw material inputs! Note also the blind assertion that Malthus
was wrong, when in fact his predictions have been painfully verified by
the majority of mankind. But then majorities have never counted. Only the
articulate, technically competent minority counts. But even for them
Malthus was not really wrong, since this minority has heeded his advice
and limited its reproduction.

The idea that technology accounts for half or more of the observed
increase in output in recent times is a finding about which
econometricians themselves disagree. For example, D W Jorgenson and Z
Grilliches found that "if real product and real factor input are
accurately accounted for, the observed growth in total factor productivity
is negligible" (1967). In other words, the increment in real output from
1945 to 1965 is almost totally explained (96.7 percent) by increments in
real inputs, with very little residual (3.3 percent) left to impute to
technical change. After taking account of critical reviews of their study,
Jorgenson and Grilliches admitted the likelihood that a greater role was
played by technological change but reaffirmed their basic conclusion "that
total factor input, not productivity change, predominates in the
explanation of the growth of output" (Jorgenson and Grilliches, 1972, page
111). G S Maddala found that for the bituminous coal industry "growth in
labor productivity can be explained almost totally by a rise in the
horsepower per worker. Thus what formerly was considered as technical
change now appears as a process of factor substitution" (1965, page 352).
Such findings cast doubt on the notion that technology, unaided by
increased resource flows, can give us enormous increases in output. In
fact, the law of conservation of matter and energy by itself should make
us skeptical of the claim that real output can increase continuously with
no increase in real inputs.

Norman Royall, a far more perceptive reviewer of The Limits to Growth, has
noted a similar confusion and lucidly comments on it:

Some critics of "Limits" berate the authors for not including
exponentially growing technical knowledge as a sixth constituent of the
World Model. Such criticism elaborately misses the point. The other
constituents have real, physical referents that can be quantified:
population can be counted, barrels of petroleum consumed can be enumerated
and part per million of abrasive chemicals in the smog of Los Angeles can
be measured.

Sheer "knowledge" means nothing for the world system until it enters one
of the other five constituents, and the tacit assumption that all
technical knowledge necessarily enters as a good is unwarranted. Is the
technical knowledge that performance of gasoline engines can be improved
by adding tetraethyl lead to their fuel a "good"? [Royall, 1972, page 421.]

In other words, the projections of physical growth trends already include
the effects of past technical "progress" as these effects were registered
in the five physical referents of the model. The tacit assumption is that
the influence of technology on the physical world will, in the future,
change in ways similar to the way it has changed in the past.

We need not accept The Limits to Growth in its entirety; it is clear,
however, that whether or not technology has grown exponentially is largely
irrelevant. The assumption of some critics that technological change is
exclusively a part of the solution and no part of the problem is
ridiculous on the face of it and totally demolished by the work of Barry
Commoner (1971). We need not accept Commoner's extreme emphasis on the
importance of the problem-causing nature of post-World War Two technology
(with the consequent downplaying of the roles of population and affluence)
in order to recognize that recent technological change has been more a
part of the problem than of the solution. The key questions are: What kind
of technology is part of the solution? What type of institutional sieve
will let pass the good kind of technology while blocking the bad kind?
This issue was dealt with in the discussion in Chapter 3 of the depletion
quota auction, which provides such a sieve in the form of higher resource
prices.


But Resources Are Such a Small Percentage of GNP

Perhaps another "justification" for ignoring resources is the small value
component of GNP they represent. In 1968 minerals production represented
1.7 percent of GNP and total fossil fuels, 2.0 percent (Goeller, 1972,
page 15).* Why is it that our price system imputes such a small share of
total value produced to resources and such a large share (the remainder)
to labor and capital? Does this vindicate the assumption that resources
are ultimately not scarce? Or does it simply mean that they are
underpriced? I believe the latter is the case** and that this underpricing
results from the relative power of social classes that conditions the
functioning of the market. Specifically, labor and capital are two
powerful social classes, while resource owners, for good reasons, are not.
Let us see how this rigs the market in favor of low resource prices.

*The optimistic" conclusion of Goeller's paper is that "assuming
reasonable management the resource base of the earth is sufficient to
maintain the present state of material affluence of the United States, and
to share it to some meaningful degree with the rest of the world, for at
least the next hundred years" (page 1). In other words, If we move rapidly
and efficiently to a steady state at present levels, and draw on all the
world's resources, and limit our sharing with the rest of the world to
some "meaningful degree", our system could continue for the next hundred
years. Such optimism makes pessimism redundant.

**It would be interesting, following Ise's suggestion noted in Chapter 3,
to calculate the value of nonrenewable resources priced at the price of
their nearest renewable substitute - for example, petroleum priced at the
Btu equivalent of, say, wood alcohol. No doubt the picture would be very
different.


In the short run, we have a given technology and given amounts of the fund
factors, labor and capital. It takes time to change the capital stock and
to change the size of the working-age population. Suppose we desire to
increase the incomes of both capital and labor in the short run. Since the
incomes of capital and labor are tied to their respective productivities,
it becomes necessary to increase these productivities. Under short-run
assumptions, the only way to increase the productivities of both fund
factors is to increase the flow factors of raw materials and power. As the
flow of resource throughput is increased with a given fund of labor and
capital, the productivity of the resource flow must, by the law of
diminishing returns, decrease. All three productivities cannot increase in
the short run. It is clear that the flow factor's productivity is the one
that is going to be sacrificed, since in the short run it is the only one
whose quantity can be increased. Furthermore, even in the longer run, with
all factors variable but no technological change, it is clear that
resource productivity will also lose out. The tie between labor
productivity and labor income, plus the monopoly power of labor unions,
will keep labor productivity from being sacrificed. The tie between
capital productivity and profit, along with the monopoly power of large
corporations, will keep capital productivity from being sacrificed.

Capital and labor are the two social classes that produce and divide up
the firm's product. They are in basic conflict but must live together.
They minimize conflict by growth and by throwing the growth-induced burden
of diminishing returns onto resource productivity. How do they get away
with it? In earlier times it might not have worked; a strong landlord
class would have had an interest in keeping resource prices from falling
too low. But today we have no such class to exert countervailing upward
pressure on resource prices. Although resource owners do exist and they do
prefer higher to lower prices, other things being equal, it remains true
that no social class is as effective in promoting resource productivity as
the capitalists and laborers are in promoting the productivities of their
respective factors.

Suppose we allow for technological change in the long run. Now it is
possible for all three productivities to increase. But how likely is it?
Given the desire to increase incomes of labor and capital, innovations
that increase these two productivities will have first priority, while
those that increase mainly resource productivity will not be stimulated.
Given low prices for resources, it will not matter much to entrepreneurs
what happens to resource productivity. And surely it is easier to invent a
new technology that increases the productivity of two factors than to
invent one that increases all three productivities.

Should we, by a kind of reverse land reform, reinstate a landlord class?
Landlord rent is unearned income, and we find income based on ownership of
that which no one produced to be ethically distasteful. No one loves a
landlord. Adam Smith tells us that landlords love to reap where they have
never sown, and not many lament the historical demise of the landowning
aristocracy. But not all the long-run consequences of this demise are
favorable. Rent may be an illegitimate source of income, but it is a
totally legitimate and necessary price, without which efficient allocation
of scarce resources would be impossible. Henry George said let rent be
charged but then tax it away. Socialists, after trying to get along
without rent, now say charge some rent but pay it to the government, who
is now the landlord. In the United States neither of these things has
happened. The largest resource owner, the government, has followed a
give-away and low price policy, both on resources it owns and on those,
such as natural gas, whose price it regulates (Energy Policy Project,
1974, Chapter 11). It has done this to favor certain capitalists, to
promote growth, and to ease the labor-capital conflict and win votes in
both camps.

Moreover, imports of resources from underdeveloped countries, which have
not yet learned how to use them, have naturally been cheap because of the
low short-run opportunity cost to the exporting country. This pattern is
now changing, but in the past it has been a factor in keeping resource
prices low. Some resources are owned by capitalists, who are likely to be
much more interested in maximizing growth and minimizing conflict through
low resources prices than in making profits on sales of resources. In
fact, the capitalist's ownership of resources will generally be for the
purpose of lowering the cost price of those resources to himself as
capitalist, by means of vertical integration, in order to increase the
returns to capital. Capital is the dynamic, controlling factor. It is not
for nothing that our economic system is called "capitalism" rather than
"resourceism".


Present Value and Positive Feedback

It is sometimes argued that the market automatically provides for
conservation by offering high profits to farsighted speculators who buy up
materials and resell them later at a higher price. There are at least two
things wrong with this argument.

First, exponentially growing extraction leads to "unexpectedly" sudden
exhaustion. Suppose the doubling time of the cumulative total amount
extracted is on the order of thirty years, as it apparently is for many
resources, and that there is enough of the resource to last for 300 years
at present growth rates. At the end of 270 years the resource would only
be half depleted. Yet in the final thirty years it would go from half to
total depletion. Most resource owners probably find that surprising. For
linear trends, the past is a good guide to the future. For exponential
growth, the past is a deceptive guide to the future.

The second problem is that the future profit must be discounted to its
present value. The investor has the alternative in an expanding economy of
depleting now and investing the short-term profits in another line that
will earn the expected going rate, which will be close to the growth rate
of the economy. The discount rate he applies to future profit is the same
as the rate at which he would expect his reinvested short-term profits to
grow. This expected rate is determined largely by the current rate and by
recent changes in the current rate. The result is that high and increasing
current growth rates, based on high and increasing current depletion
rates, lead to high and increasing discount rates applied to future
values. The last condition in turn leads to a low incentive to conserve,
which feeds back to high current depletion and growth rates, high discount
rates, and so forth. Present value calculations thus have an element of
positive feedback that is destabilizing from the point of view of
conservation. Financial prudence usually advises depleting now and
investing short-term earnings in depleting some other resource. The
presumption again is infinite resources. There will always be more
material and energy resources available to feed the march of compound
interest, with its consequent discounting of future values and
disincentive to conservation. This tacit assumption sometimes becomes
explicit, as in the following statement from the president of a great oil
company:

The fact seems to be that the first [resource] storehouse in which man
found himself was only one of a series. As he used up what was piled in
that first room, he found he could fashion a key to open a door into a
much larger room. And as he used up the contents of this larger room, he
discovered there was another room beyond, larger still. The room in which
we stand at the middle of the twentieth century is so vast that its walls
are beyond sight. Yet it is probably still quite near the beginning of the
whole series of storehouses. It is not inconceivable that the entire globe
- earth, ocean and air - represents raw material for mankind to utilize
with more and more ingenuity and skill [quoted in Ordway, 1953, page 281].

Such is the assumption of orthodox growth economics. Even if this vision
were correct, we should add that eventually we must live in the same rooms
we work in. Living in intimate contact with garbage and noxious wastes is
a by-product of growth. But optimists will argue that there is another
infinite series of ever larger garbage dumps! The whole conceptual basis
of the growth faith is equivalent to a generalization of the chain-letter
swindle. There will always be five new resources for every depleted
resource. The current beneficiaries of the swindle, those at the beginning
of the chain, try hard to keep up the illusion among those doubters at the
end who are beginning to wonder if there are really sufficient resources
in the world for the game to continue very much longer.


Youth Culture and Frustrated Pyramid Climbers

A stationary population is a part of a steady-state economy. Assuming
present mortality rates, the attainment of a stationary population would
imply an increase in the average age of the population from the current
twenty-seven to about thirty-seven years. This raises fears of social
senility, excessive conservatism, loss of adaptability and dynamism, and
so forth. This hardly seems a reasonable fear, even for devotees of the
"Pepsi generation". We need only compare Sweden, with one of the oldest
age structures, to Brazil, with one of the youngest. It would certainly be
stretching things a bit to say that old Sweden is a reactionary, non
innovative gerontocracy, while young Brazil is a progressive, innovative
country run by young people. We might just as well argue that Brazil
values youth less than Sweden because its infant mortality rates are
higher, and therefore Sweden is more youth-oriented than Brazil. Such
arguments are simplistic at best.

The stationary population "pyramid" would be shaped more like a house
(rectangular up to about age fifty, where the roof begins and rapidly
tapers to a peak). But the structure of authority in hierarchical
organizations remains a pyramid. Thus there would, in the future, be less
of a congruence between advancing age and advancing position. More people
would grow older at lower levels of authority, and many ambitions would be
frustrated. The observation is a highly interesting one and no doubt has
important sociological implications. But they are not all negative by any
means. More individuals will learn to seek personal fulfillment outside
hierarchical organizations. Within such organizations, fewer people will
be automatically promoted to their level of incompetence, thus thwarting
the so-far relentless working of the "Peter Principle". Perhaps giant
bureaucracies will even begin to dissolve and life will reorganize on a
more human scale.


Pascal's Wager Revisited

The growthmania position rests on the hypothesis that technological change
can become entirely problem solving and not at all problem creating and
can continually perform successively more impressive encores as resources
are depleted. There is sufficient evidence to make reasonable people quite
doubtful about this hypothesis. Yet it cannot be definitely disproved.
There is a certain amount of faith involved, and faith is risky. Let us
then take a completely agnostic position and apply the logic of Pascal's
wager and statistical decision theory. We can err in two ways: we can
accept the omnipotent technology hypothesis and then discover that it is
false, or we can reject it and later discover that it is true. Which error
do we most wish to avoid? If we accept the false hypothesis, the result
will be catastrophic. If we reject the true hypothesis, we will forgo
marginal satisfactions and will have to learn to share, which, though
difficult, might well be good for us. If we later discover that the
hypothesis is true we could always resume growth. Thus even in the
agnostic case, it would seem prudent to reject the omnipotent technology
hypothesis, along with its corollary that reproducible capital is a
near-perfect substitute for resources.


The Fallacy of Exponentially Increasing Natural Resource Productivity

In a previous section we considered the orthodox position that the
productivity of reproducible capital increases exponentially, thanks to
exponential technological progress. The problem noted was that exponential
technological progress, as measured in two-factor production functions is
usually accompanied by exponential increases in resource throughput
(depletion and pollution), which remain outside the analysis. It is of
little comfort to contemplate increasing productivity of labor and capital
if it is at the continuing expense of resource productivity and if
resources are the ultimately scarce factor. Robert Solow has defended
growth by directly appealing to increasing resource productivity. Solow
concludes that "there is really no reason why we should not think of the
productivity of natural resources as increasing more or less exponentially
over time" (1973, page 51). This remarkable conclusion, if true, would be
a boon to those who advocate limiting the throughput of resources, because
it would mean that such a limit is totally consistent with continued
exponential growth in GNP and is therefore not such a radical proposal.
The resource flow could be stabilized and GNP could continue to grow
exponentially as a resource productivity (that is, GNP/resource flow)
increased exponentially. Why, then, does limiting the resource flow
provoke such strong opposition from growth economists?

The arguments Solow presents to support his conclusion are highly
interesting. If the productivity of labor is measured by GNP/labor, he
reasons, the productivity of iron is measured by GNP/iron output, that of
aluminum by GNP/aluminum output, and so on. He calculates what has
happened to the productivities of a number of particular resources between
1950 and 1970 and finds that some (iron, manganese, copper, lead, zinc,
bituminous coal) have increased, while the productivities of others
(nickel, petroleum) have remained the same and those of still others
(aluminum, natural gas, electric power, columbium) have fallen. On the
face of it, the evidence supports no generalization about resource
productivity at all, even accepting Solow's definitions. But even more
damaging is a hard look at the facile analogy between labor productivity
and coal productivity, columbium productivity, and so forth, insofar as
particular resource productivities are supposed to add up to, or convey
some notion of, aggregate resource productivity, which is what Solow's
conclusion clearly required that it should do.

First of all, if the amount of labor used goes up, ceteris paribus, the
productivity of labor goes down. If the quantity of all resources used
goes up, then ceteris paribus, the productivity of aggregate resources
likewise goes down. But the productivity of a good many particular
resources will still increase if the GNP happened to increase faster than
the quantity of that resource used. Furthermore, the increase in GNP is in
part made possible by the more rapid increase in quantity used of those
particular resources whose productivities consequently fell over the given
period. Solow recognizes this effect: "One of the reasons the productivity
of copper rises is because that of aluminum falls, as aluminum replaces
copper in many uses" (page 51). This observation by itself could have
restrained Solow from drawing his conclusion.

The meaning of these "resource productivities" is further obscured:
"Sooner or later, the productivity of oil will rise out of sight, because
the production and consumption of oil will eventually dwindle toward zero,
but real GNP will not" (page 51). Presumably, when production and
consumption of oil approach zero, oil productivity will become infinite!
The conclusion to be drawn is certainly not that increasing productivity
compensates for diminishing supply of resources - otherwise we would be
better off with nearly zero output of petroleum, which is absurd. Rather,
the warranted conclusion is that Solow is playing around with meaningless
numbers that support no conclusions at all.

In his Richard T Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association, Solow
went as far as to proclaim not only the conditional possibility, but the
empirical likelihood that "the world can, in effect, get along without
natural resources" (1974, page 11). Solow elaborates that this is so if we
have a "backstop technology", such as breeder reactors, which will mean
that "at some finite cost, production can be freed of dependence on
exhaustible resources altogether" (1974, page 11). Apparently, the world
cannot get along without all natural resources as he first suggested, but
only without exhaustible ones. Just how to build and maintain a backstop
technology of breeder reactors (the only example offered) without
exhaustible resources such as copper, zirconium, tungsten, and iron, not
to mention initial stocks of enriched uranium or permanent depositories
for radioactive wastes, is not explained by Solow. No doubt it is true
that at "some finite cost" we could live on renewable resources, as
mankind essentially did before the industrial revolution. But the finite
cost is going to include a reduction in population and in per-capita
consumption levels or, at the very least, a cessation of further growth.
This is accepted by the steady state view but not by Solow and other
victims of the infinite substitutability fallacy, who are forced to lower
the deus ex machina of backstop technologies onto the stage in order to
save the awkward plot of growthmania. Even a perfect backstop technology,
one that would deliver energy "too cheap to bear the cost of metering", to
recall the early promises of fission advocates, cannot save the ever
growing economy. In fact, "free energy" would simply enable the
growth-maniacs to destroy the biosphere more quickly. Within the context
of a SSE [Steady State Economy], free energy would be a blessing, but in
the present growth context it would be a curse.

The explicit belief in the unlimited productivity of natural resources and
the unlimited substitutability of other factors for natural resources has
led economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen to the following verdict on Solow
and the many other economists for whom he is the distinguished spokesman:

One must have a very erroneous view of the economic process as a whole not
to see that there are no material factors other than natural resources. To
maintain further that "the world can, in effect, get along without natural
resources" is to ignore the difference between the actual world and the
Garden of Eden [Georgescu-Roegen, 1975, page 361].


The Ever Expanding Service Sector and "Angelized GNP"

Advocates of growth frequently appeal to the increasing importance of
services, which, it is assumed, can continue to grow indefinitely, since
such activities are presumable nonpolluting and nondepleting. Thus while
agriculture and industry will be limited by their necessary pollution and
depletion flows, services are allegedly not so limited and will continue
to grow. Therefore, an ever larger fraction of total GNP will originate in
the service sector, and consequently the pollution and depletion flows per
average dollar of GNP will fall continuously. Presumably, we will approach
a nonphysical "angelized GNP".

There are two fatal flaws in this picture. While it is true that some
activities are more throughput-intensive than others, it is not clear that
these activities are always services, nor is it clear that the differences
are very great once indirect effects are incorporated. Eric Hirst found
that "services associated with food used almost as much energy as did
farming and processing" (1974, page 135). It is likely that when we add
all the indirect as well as the direct aspects of service activities
(inputs to service sector, inputs to inputs of service sector, et cetera),
we will find that services do not pollute or deplete significantly less
than many industrial activities. That most services require a substantial
physical base is evident from casual observation of a university, a
hospital, an insurance company, a barber shop, or even a symphony
orchestra. Certainly the incomes earned by people in service sector will
not all be spent on services but will in fact be spent on the average
consumer basket of both goods and services.

The second flaw in this view is that there are limits to how high the
proportion of services to goods can rise in the product mix without
provoking a shift in the terms of trade in favor of goods and against
services to such an extent that goods production would again expand and
service production contract. Historically, employment in the service
sector has grown relative to total employment, because productivity and
total output of industry and agriculture have increased vastly. Once total
output of physical goods is restricted, service sector growth will be
increasingly restrained by a progressive deterioration in its terms of
trade vis-a-vis physical goods.

It is true that "In 1969 a dollar's worth of GNP was produced with
one-half the materials used to produce a dollar's worth of 1900 GNP, in
constant dollars" (National Commission on Materials Policy, 1973, page
3-3). Nevertheless, over the same period total materials consumption
increased by 400 percent. We must resist being carried away by the halving
of the material content of a GNP dollar. Remember the man who bought a new
stove that cut his fuel bill in half and then reasoned that he could cut
his fuel bill to zero by buying another such stove! More significant than
the halving of the materials per dollar of GNP is the quintupling of the
absolute material throughput and the similar increase in energy throughput
over the same time period.

The idea of economic growth overcoming physical limits by angelizing GNP
is equivalent to overcoming physical limits to population growth by
reducing the throughput intensity or metabolism of human beings. First
pygmies, then Tom Thumbs, then big molecules, then pure spirits. Indeed,
it would be necessary for us to become angels in order to subsist on
angelized GNP.


Misleading Views on Misallocation and Growth

Many growth economists (Beckerman, 1974, page 20) have argued that in
order to prove that the growth rate is excessive it is necessary to show
that the resource misallocation at any point of time takes the form of
excessive investment. This reflects a commonly held position among
economists that the market will automatically limit growth at some optimal
rate. But we must first ask just what "misallocation", or more
specifically "excess investment", means in the context of the statement.
It means that more is being invested and less consumed out of current
production than would be the case under freely competitive markets and
consumer sovereignty. Misallocation is defined with respect to the
competitive market equilibrium of the plans of savers with the plans of
investors, not with respect to physical relations of the economy with the
ecosystem. Excessive "disinvestment" of geological capital (depletion),
excessive pollution and destruction of ecosystems, and excessively onerous
technologies are all consistent with the condition that savers in the
aggregate are planning to save just what investors in the aggregate are
planning to invest. The market seeks its behavioral equilibrium without
regard for any ecological limits that are necessary to preserve
biophysical equilibrium. There is no reason to expect that a short-run
behavioral equilibrium will coincide with a long-run (or even a short-run)
biophysical equilibrium. In fact, it is clear that under present
institutions the two will not coincide. The behavioral equilibrium between
planned saving and planned investment nearly always occurs at positive
levels of net saving and investment. Positive net investment means growth,
which means an increasing throughput and increasing biophysical
disequilibrium.

Orthodox growth economists are likely to reply that if only we could
internalize all true ecological costs into money prices, then market
equilibrium would coincide with ecological equilibrium. This is a bit like
Archimedes saying that if only he had a fulcrum and a long enough lever he
could move the world. Even granting the impossible task of
internalization, all that means is that ala relative scarcities are
properly evaluated. Growth could continue and absolute scarcity could
become ever greater, even though relative prices were at all times perfect
measures of relative scarcity. Correct relative prices can help us bear
the burden of absolute scarcity in the least uncomfortable way but cannot
stop the weight of the burden itself from increasing.

Excessive growth is sometimes thought of by economists as a misallocation
over time - the present is sacrificing too much current consumption to
capital accumulation for the future. Conservationists looking at the same
rapid growth attribute it to too little concern for the future, evidenced
by rapid depletion of resources. Who is right? It depends on which is the
limitative factor, capital stocks or resource flows. If resources are
superabundant and capital scarce, the economist is right. As we have
repeatedly seen, many economists effectively assume infinite resources. If
resources are scarce, then the conservationist is right. The future
inherits not only a positive bequest of more capital but also a negative
bequest of depleted mines and polluted sinks. And refineries and super
tankers are not very productive capital if there is not much petroleum
left.

The intergenerational costs of growth are not at all clear, but as time
goes on it would seem that the negative bequest of accelerated entropy
increase would weigh increasingly heavily since low entropy is the
ultimate means upon which all technologies depend. The market is not able
to allocate goods temporally over more than one generation. Indeed, when
different generations (different people) are involved, the issue is one of
distribution not allocation. Future people cannot bid in present markets.
Current markets cannot reflect the needs of future people, except as they
are represented by concerned people in the present, whose concern rarely
exceeds one or two generations. As Georgescu-Roegen (1975) points out,
markets are temporally parochial, and consequently market prices cannot
reflect the long-run value of resources any more than the market prices at
an art auction held in Wink, Texas would determine the true value of the
Mona Lisa. If prices are to measure values, all interested parties must be
allowed to bid. For the future this is impossible. There is no objective
market criterion for determining proper intergenerational allocation nor,
consequently, for speaking of misallocation. In any case the proper word
is "misdistribution".

Moreover, even within the present many natural values cannot be priced in
markets at all. Consider the instructive case in which a juke box in a
student cafeteria disturbed some students who preferred silence. They
petitioned for the removal of the offending machine. The music lovers
replied that the juke box was a democratic machine, like a free market,
and if the disgruntled did not like what they heard they could vote with
their money to hear something else. The objection, of course, was that the
silence-lovers' money could not buy silence. The clever solution was to
include a three-minute silent disc among the choices. This solution is
notable for its uniqueness; in most cases, silence, clean air and water,
and so forth cannot be purchased in discrete units by individuals, and
their values cannot be defended against their opposites in competitive
markets. They must be protected by physical boundaries that restrict the
domain of the market without crippling the functioning of the market
within its limited domain. This is the mode of operation of the three
institutions proposed in Chapter 3.

The direct reply to the initial assertion then is: No, it is not necessary
to show that excessive investment exists in order argue that the growth
rate is excessive. There are other criteria more basic than those of a
competitive behavioral equilibrium for defining excessive growth. These
are biophysical criteria that cannot be internalized in market prices.
Market equilibrium under present institutions usually implies biophysical
disequilibrium. Nor can the market handle intergenerational distribution.
All interdependencies over time and space cannot be fit to the procrustean
bed of an unrestricted price system.


What Second Law?

It was argued in Chapter 2 that growth economists were confused about
ultimate means, or low-entropy matter-energy. It might be useful here to
document a few examples of economists' disregard for the second law of
thermodynamics.

In an article defending growth, Harvard economist Richard Zeckhauser tells
us that "Recycling is not the solution for oil, because the alternate
technology of nuclear power generation is cheaper" (1973, page 117, note
11). The clear meaning of the sentence is that recycling oil as an energy
source is possible but just happens to be uneconomical, because nuclear
energy is cheaper. The real reason that energy from oil, or any other
source, is not recycled is of course the entropy law, not the relative
price of nuclear power. This nonsensical statement is not just a minor
slip-up that we can correct and forget; it indicates a fundamental lack of
appreciation of the physical facts of life. No wonder Zeckhauser is
unconvinced by limits to growth arguments; if he is unaware of the entropy
law he could not possibly feel the weight of the arguments against which
he is reacting in his article.

An article entitled "The Environment in Economics: A Survey" Begins with
the words: "Man has probably always worried about his environment because
he was once totally dependent on it" (Fisher and Peterson, 1976, page 1).
The implication is that man is no longer totally dependent on his
environment, or at least that he has become less dependent. Presumably,
technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But,
in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for
renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence. How
could man possibly become more independent of his environment without
shutting off exchanges with the environment or reducing depletion and
pollution, rather than increasing them? For man to exist as a closed
system, engaging in no exchanges with the environment, would require
suspension of the second law. Man is an open system. What was man three
months ago is now environment; what was environment yesterday is man
today. Man and environment are so totally interdependent it is hard to say
where one begins and the other ends. This total interdependence has not
diminished and will not in the future, regardless of technology.

The statement, already cited, by Barnett and Morse that "Nature imposes
particular scarcities, not an inescapable general scarcity", is about as
clear a denial of the second law as could be imagined. To drive the point
home they add:

Science by making the resource base more homogeneous, erases the
restrictions once thought to reside in the lack of homogeneity. In a
neo-Ricardian world, it seems, the particular resources with which one
starts increasingly become a matter of indifference ... Advances in
fundamental science have made it possible to take advantage of the
uniformity of energy/matter - a uniformity that makes it feasible without
preassignable limit to escape the quantitative constraints imposed by the
character of the earth's crust [Barrett and Morse, 1973, page 11].

It is, however, not the uniformity of matter-energy that makes for
usefulness, but precisely the opposite. It is nonuniformity, differences
in concentration and temperature, that makes for usefulness. If all
materials and energy were uniformly distributed in thermodynamic
equilibrium, the resulting "homogeneous resource base" would be no
resource at all. There would be a complete absence of potential for any
process, including life! The economist's notion of infinite
substitutability bears some resemblance to the old alchemists' dream of
converting base metals into precious metals. All you have to do is
rearrange atoms! But the potential for rearranging atoms is itself scarce,
so the mere fact that everything is made up of the same homogeneous
building blocks does not abolish scarcity. Only Maxwell's Sorting Demon
could turn a pile of atoms into a resource, and the entropy law tells us
that Maxwell's Demon does not exist.


Zero Growth and the Great Depression

One of the more disingenuous arguments against the SSE [Steady State
Economy] was put forward by the editors of Fortune, who stated that "the
country has just gone through a real life tryout of zero growth" (1976,
page 116). This was the period 1973 to 1975, a period remembered "not as
an episode of zero growth but as the worst recession since the 1930s".

Fortune identifies a SSE with a failed growth economy. A condition of
nongrowth can come about in two ways: as the failure of a growth economy,
or as the success of a steady-state economy. The two cases are as
different as night and day. No one denies that the failure of a growth
economy to grow brings unemployment and suffering. It is precisely to
avoid the suffering of a failed growth economy (we know growth cannot
continue) that we advocate a SSE. The fact that an airplane falls to the
ground if it tries to remain stationary in the air simply reflects the
fact that airplanes are designed for forward motion. It certainly does not
imply that a helicopter cannot remain stationary. A growth economy and a
SSE are as different as an airplane and a helicopter. Growthmania reigns
supreme when even the failures of a growth economy become arguments in its
defense!


Conclusions from the Growth Debate

To a large degree, the growth debate involves a paradigm shift of a
gestalt switch - a change in the preanalytic vision we bring to the
problem. Conversion cannot be logically forced by airtight analytical
demonstrations by either side, although dialectical arguments can sharpen
the basic issues. But as the growing weight of anomaly complicates
thinking within the growth paradigm to an intolerable degree, the steady
state view will become more and more appealing in its basic simplicity. In
any case, orthodox economics will not easily recover from the weaknesses
that some of its leading practitioners have revealed in their efforts at
self-defense. It is, to say the least, doubtful that "the world can, in
effect get along without natural resources". But it is certain that the
world could do very well indeed without "the orthodox economists whose
common sense has been insufficient to check their faulty logic".

References:

Barnett, Harold, and Chandler Morse. Scarcity and Growth Resources for the
Future. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963.

Beckerman, Wilfred. In Defense of Economic Growth. London: Jonathan Cape,
1974.

Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle. New York: Knopf, 1971a.

Commoner, Barry. "Power Consumption and Human Welfare". Paper presented to
the AAAS Convention, Philadelphia, December 1971b.

Commoner, Barry. The Poverty of Power. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Economic Report of the President, 1971. Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1971.

Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, 1974. A Time to Choose,
Cambridge Masschusetts: Ballinger, 1974.

Fisher, Anthony C, and Frederick M Peterson. "The Environment in
Economics: A Survey", Journal of Economic Literature, March 1976, 1-33.

Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. "Energy and Economic Myths", Southern Economic
Journal, January 1975, 347-381.

Goeller, Harold E. "An Optimistic Outlook for Mineral Resources". Paper
presented at Scarcity and Growth Conference, National Commission on
Materials Policy, University of Minnesota, June 1972, mimeographed.

Gore, Daniel. "Zero Growth for the College Library", College Management,
August/September 1974, 1214.

Hirst, Eric. "Food-Related Energy Requirements", Science, April 12 1974,
134-138.

Jacoby, Neil. "The Environmental Crisis", Center Magazine,
November/December 1970.

Jorgenson, D W, and Z Grilliches. "The Explanation of Productivity
Change", Review of Economic Studies, July 1967, 249-283.

Jorgenson, D W, and Z Grilliches. "Exchange with Edward Dennison", in
Survey of Current Business, Part 11. Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, May 1972.

Kelso, Louis O, and Patricia Hetter. Two Factor Theory: How to Turn Eighty
Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money. New York: Random
House, 1967.

Keynes, J M. General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936.

Maddala, G S. "Productivity and Technical Change in the Bituminous Coal
Industry", Journal of Political Economy, August 1965, 352-265.

Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967;
originally published in 1867.

Meadows, D H, et al. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972.

National Commission on Materials Policy, 1973. Material Needs and the
Environment Today and Tomorrow. Washington, DC: US Government Printing
Office, 1973.

Nordhaus, William, and James Tobin. "Is Growth Obsolete?" National Bureau
of Economic Research, December 1970, mimeographed. Published with minor
changes in 1972 under the same title, in Economic Growth, fiftieth
Anniversary Colloquium V, National Bureau of Economic Research. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1972.

Odum, Eugene P. "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development", Science, April
1969, 262-270.

Okun, Arthur M. Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution, 1975.

Ordway, Samuel H. Resources and the American Dream. New York: Ronald
Press, 1953.

Passell, Peter, Marc Roberts, and Leonard Ross. Review of Limits to
Growth, New York Times Book Review, April 02 1972.

Robinson, Joan. "The Second Crisis of Economic Theory", American Economic
Review, May 1972, 1-10.

Royall, Norman N Junior. Review of Limits to Growth, Kansas City Times,
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Solow, Robert. "Is the End of the World at Hand?" in Andrew Weintraub et
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Wallich, Henry C. "Zero Growth", Newsweek, January 24 1972, page 62.

"Well, How Do You Like Zero Growth?" Fortune, November 1976, 116.

Zeckhauser, Richard. "The Risks of Growth", Daedalus, Fall 1973, 103-118.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

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