You're right. The standard measure of "economic growth" is real gross domestic product. But if we use some measure of economic output such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, which counts leisure as a good and pollution as a cost, we get a different story.
It's also true that both increased leisure and increased pollution can have cumulative effects. On 11/3/06, Walt Byars <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
One of the common arguments I see against policies which allegedly reduce economic growth is to concede that such policies (redistribution, less work, environmental) have good immediate consequences but that, since economic growth is cumulative, the best long run outcome will come from not hampering growth. A typical example of this argument is here ( http://catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2006/10/30/reducing-growth-now-is-bad-juju/ ) Some on the left have even made this argument, In Recasting Egalitarianism, Bowles and Gintis use this to justify their rule that redistributions must be "efficiency enhancing." Now, while not necessarily right (I don't really think that there is good reason to believe that more common forms of redistribution than those B&G indicate reduce growth that much, and the positive impact of redistribution could outweigh this) at least the argument makes sense in the context of income distribution and redistribution. There are mathematical limits to how even or uneven the distribution of income could get that don't apply to growth. But what about the environment? Aren't there cumulative aspects to the health of ecosystems? And with working less, even if we ignore Sandwichman's arguments about less work improving productivity, there could still be a cumulative aspect to leisure. I mean, while certainly referring to more changes than a quantitative reduction in working time, Marx talked about socialism removing fetters to the development of human capacities and the relationships between humans. Couldn't the development of human capacities and the quality of interactions be cumulative? If people spend lots of time having fun, they will probably invent better ways to have fun as time goes by. And couldn't the development of the means to make the quality of work more enjoyable develop cumulatively? Then there is what Gerschenkeron and some institutionalists stress about economic growth not being *that* cumulative. There may be situations in which having lower growth may improve an economy's ability to have higher growth rates.
-- Jim Devine / "Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
