Book Review: Beyond Growth

Over the past two years, I’ve read lots of books on the general topics of sustainability and energy.  I thought it might be fun to talk about them in my blog, and invite discussion with others who have read these or similar books.

I’ll start with a book I recently picked up in our library, published in 1996 and written by Herman Daly.  The book is called Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development.  As the title suggests, he tackles the great paradox of the modern environmental movement.  On one hand, economic growth is  considered not only good, but essential for modern life.  Just look at The Great Recession which is characterized by a period of time during which the economy (as measured by the Gross Domestic Product) was shrinking.  In other words, if the economy is not growing, then we’re in a recession.  On the other hand, the very term “sustainability” implies limit to growth, if for no other reason than the earth itself is finite.  I recently wrote a column in the local newspaper about this very issue, pointing out that, given our history of extraction and expansion, sustainability is a radical concept.  I don’t think many folks have gotten their head around it yet.

In this book, Daly proves that he has, indeed, gotten his head around this dichotomoy and does an excellent job of describing the kind of blindness exhibited by modern economists.  It turns out that modern economic theory is based on the assumption that the economy works in a vacuum of sorts. Raw materials and energy go into it, waste leaves it, but there is no effort to include the effect of teh scale of the ecnomy relative to the environment.  To be sure, government regulations and the like provide mechanisms to”internalize”  the economic impacts of pollution, but Daly sees those as proof of the inadequacy of the underlying model.

Every chapter provides food for thought.  For example, in Part VI of the book, he talks about the danger of confusing wealth (which has real physical dimension and subject to the laws of physics) and debt (which is a mathematical abstraction).   This discussion provides a fascinating and illuminating lens through which we can view the meltdown of the financial markets of the past few years.

Written for the educated layman, this book discusses economic theory, but provides enough background so that a humble engineer such as myself can follow along. In fact, an engineering background comes in handy as the concept of entropy is used heavily to help explain the intrinsic difficulties that come with sustainability.

A provocative and informative read.

BSGG