Economic Growth
Paper One treats economic growth ideology as one of three critical drivers of the behavioural crisis, acting primarily on the consumption lever.
Two definitions of "the economy"
Economists conventionally define the economy as the organised activities and behaviours associated with production, allocation, exchange and consumption of scarce goods and services. The paper argues this is a limited definition, and proposes an ecologist's alternative: the set of behaviours and activities by which humans interact with their biophysical environment (the ecosphere) to acquire material resources and dispose of resulting waste. On this view, economic accounts should record all energy and material throughput from the natural world through the human subsystem and back into nature — including goods that never enter formal markets.
How the growth belief took hold
Simplistic economic thinking conceives of humans as self-interested utility maximisers with unlimited material demands and no attachment to family or community, and treats scarcity as solvable by raising the input of other factors (capital, labour, knowledge) or by price-driven substitution. This made it easy for MTI society to accept the economy as untethered from nature and human ingenuity as unbounded — accepting, in turn, the notion of unlimited economic growth fostered by continuous technological progress.
The numbers
Real gross world product has grown 100-fold, and average per-capita income (consumption) has increased 14-fold (twice that in wealthy countries) since the early 1800s. This was made possible not primarily by improving population health but by fossil-fuel-powered technology: fossil energy is still 81% of primary energy (2022). Between 1800 and 2021, global fossil fuel use increased 1,402-fold. The average world citizen today uses 175 times as much fossil fuel as their 1800 counterpart, and humanity has burned half of all fossil fuels ever consumed in just the last 30 years.
See also
Levers of Overshoot · Exosomatic Energy · Maximum Power Principle