Cognitive fluency is an unconscious bias whereby things that are harder to understand are less believable. For most of us, we’ve been told so often that economic growth is a good thing that we can’t see past it. The idea of NOT wanting economic growth is unthinkable, even blasphemous to growth worshipers.

I found this phrase in the promo material for a masters course in transport economics this morning – “You’ll develop a range of economic skills to help promote economic growth”. To be fair, the sentence didn’t end there but used further words to indicate ‘sustainable economic growth’. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Whenever I read ‘sustainable economic growth’ what my brain tells me is ‘economic growth achieved while making an effort to minimise environmental harm’. In other words, economic growth – yes, environmental harm – maybe/probably.

I was prompted (h/t Craig Parker) to post here by the article I read this morning over breakfast called “We Asked for Science. We Got Sustain-a-Babble“. It’s a well-written rebuttal of the Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change’s response to a petition “to acknowledge the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, and to apply the principles of steady-state economics in the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change”.

The rebuttal includes the following explainer in brief: “

⚫ Economic growth is an exponential function

⚫ A 3% growth rate, the target rate of most governments, doubles the size of the economy, and thus resource and energy use, roughly every 23.5 years

⚫ Physical and biological laws dictate that economic growth can only occur by liquidating the natural world on which we depend; absolute decoupling of resource use from GDP is a fantasy

⚫ Scientific data show that exponential GDP growth is occurring lockstep with exponential resource use and climate and biodiversity breakdown. In fact, GDP is actually a measure of environmental impact—our collective ecological footprint—and not a measure of our well-being.”

Don’t hold your breath at the General Election for the main parties offering up a manifesto pledge that squares up to this conundrum.

Perhaps we need a new breed of economists who are able to grab our cognitive dissonance by the scruff of the neck and enlighten us? A ray of hope in this regard is Flourish Economics. Go to its website and soak up its inspiring words:

“If you think it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, we should talk.”

“Collectively we need to unlearn what we’ve been told about people, economics and our communities.”

“We can join the dots together to understand how capitalism, patriarchy, racism, imperialism and colonialism have collided to create the polycrises we face today.”

Cover your ears growth worshipers!

Emma Woods

#economicgrowth