Growth and Wealth
What is the nature of growth? Is moral growth separate from physical wealth? What is meant by the “limits to growth”? What is true wealth?
Growth and the Limits to Growth
“In the long run, apologetics and linear extrapolations will not be enough, especially if we are to outgrow our obsessive concern with the limits of growth and also consider the limits of waste and the limits of wants….Limits themselves are not limitations but indicate the need for wise choices…Before determining whether and how far growth must be stopped, we must define the concept precisely. There are evident in nature two types of growth: one is the indiscriminate growth, through which cells reproduce by splitting in two, then into four, in a geometric progression, the multiples being essentially replicas of the original—a pure quantitative and accretive process that is rare in living organisms; the other is differential or organic growth, a process where the cells of an organism are specialized according to principles of harmonious development….” Professor Raghavan Iyer pages 242, 244-245 Parapolitics, Concord Grove Press.
In the Greek tradition, balanced development of the mind and body, the head and the heart, was the ideal of health. Thus harmonious development was viewed as possessing just proportions and continual growth. Thus growth has a scientific basis in natural and physical law. Harmony is a fact in nature, not only an ideal. However, life is interdependent; thus one must contribute to each other’s development by deliberating public policy together on true ideas (moral and mental planes), pointing organizations to the common good (social plane), and contributing to the subsistence of each and all (physical planes).
True, Balanced Growth
Thus there is the assumption and fact of dynamic unity behind formulating global, foundational public goods to meet the needs of the Human Family. This calls forth a generosity of spirit and a universal vision of humanity as a whole to direct careful fact-finding and mutual understanding in many different contexts of the globe. This search can begin by the provisioning of human subsistence for each and all: determining a merit public good which enhances societal and ecological balance.
One example is a global minimal income. The economist John McArthur writes in The Good Guide to Money p. 16 that the amount of money required to close the extreme poverty income gap for the entire world is around $70 billion per year. “At first this might sound like a lot, but it only works out to about 0.15 percent of high-income countries’ total annual income. The cost should to fall..to around $30 billion by 2030, or roughly 0.05 percent of advanced economies’ income. The year 2030 is pivotal.”
A second example might be the establishment of an Agricultural Export Pricing Policy of non-GMO crops in relation to the per capita incomes of consumer nations, coordinated with a proposal that a parallel oil pricing policy be adopted by OPEC and other oil producers, while encouraging communities to be more self-reliant in growing their own local food products that are not for export employing ecological technologies.
A third merit public good would be uplifting global information sharing. The United Nations should form a global television station which broadcasts achievements, useful local innovations, and humanitarian programs—its own and others—from around the world. It can also develop a global service corps, besides a security force, to provide joint fact-finding and encourage cross-cultural learning in the humane application of science and technology for the least and lowest, yet always being prepared in attitude and resource availability for unanticipated consequences!
What Is True Wealth?
Corresponding to a more generous yet fact-based public policy, we, as individuals, need to serve others more and appropriate and demand less in our daily lives. Our greatest wealth consist of what finer thoughts and compassionate actions we evoke whatever the external circumstances; thus through lifelong service we can extend our circumference of thought to identify with those who have less and our dispossessed.
Through service we can rebalance our ourselves while integrating more into the community in a healthy manner. So might public policy with disincentives for excess organized, extractive economic interests and more incentives for sustainable living.
See the idea of Gandhian Trusteeship.
