I was a bit all over the place last time, and the overall result was a mediocre post, at best.  So let's try to tighten this down a bit this time.  It is obvious that we are in thrall to the societal goal of economc growth.  Even the green-conscious folks among us are anxious to point out that environmentalism will provide many opportunities for growing the ecological economy, with wondrous new vistas of renewable energy jobs and smart, green products.  No matter how bad our current economic morass gets, growth is always seen as the way out.

As mentioned in earlier posts, we have had decades and decades of continuous economic growth.  And to what end?  In America, economic growth has brought us to the precipice of societal collapse.  We have crippling inequality, unprecedented household debt, surging levels of poverty, a health insurance crisis, and very high levels of unemployment (let's not forget that any real measure of unemployment must take into account the out-of-control prison population, prisons having far more to do with an economically-superfluous underclass than with any actual criminal behavior).  But despite this abject failure of economic growth to deliver a positive overall outcome for our society, we think that more growth is the answer.  To repeat the aphorism, insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome than what has happened in the past. 

Growth is not the way out.  We are blinded to the fultility of economic growth because we are trapped inside of it.  Since we have poured all of our human interactions and economic transactions into the open marketplace, there is no space from which to objectively assess the situation.  Everything we do and need now has a price, and the only way to keep things moving is to keep growing the totality of the economic pie.  And that is all that economic growth really is: creating more marketplace transactions, regardless of whether they are positive or negative.  But it goes without saying that more stuff and more economic activity by themselves are not necessarily good.  For example, building more prisons and filling them up with people is excellent for the economy.  It creates monetary transactions for building the prisons, staffing the prisons, paying lawyers to prosecute and defend the supposed criminals, paying judges to deliver prison sentences, and paying cops to round up the future residents.  These are all economic positives, adding to growth -- but it is obviously a societal disaster. 

What has happened is that our economic growth has been funnelled upwards, siphoned off by the extremely wealthy at the top.  We have taken every previously-uncommodified social function and interaction and pitched it into the gaping maw of the marketplace, hoping to get happiness, prosperity and leisure spit out the other end, like some great Dr. Seussian contraption.  But instead, all of that social value and social capital has become monetized and gobbled up by the captains of finance and industry, leaving regular families isolated, in debt, and absolutely powerless to change the overall contours of their lives.  Everyone is now trapped on this conveyor belt of total commodification of society, so we have to keep it moving.  We are terrified to think that the overall economy might contract, because if our actual paychecks shrink, it's game over.  There is no economic wiggle-room for regular folks to enact a different way of living.  We have to keep the money-train on track, because we have to continue buying food, paying our credit card bills and mortgages, and saving for college tuition and retirement.  The brutal fact that this entire house of cards is going down, what I have earlier called the collapse of the American Algorithm, is as far outside the frame of our reference as Superstring theory is to termites.

We are not going to grow our way out of the current economic situation.  This is not a cyclical recession that will eventually yield to happy, roaring days ahead.  We're looking at the absolute exhaustion of petro-based civilization and the consumption-centered version of capitalism that goes with it.  And as this system luches into the future as a crippled shadow of its former self, economic growth will prove impossible.  We will not be able to just keep shovelling more crap into the marketplace, hoping that we'll suddenly get things out of it that we have never gotten before, like dignified jobs, comfortable living for our seniors, or a sophisticated popular culture.  We will need to come up with different ways of running our society, ways that are not dependent on monetizing and commodifying everything under the sun.  We will need to carve out social and economic space for ourselves, so that every family is not on the razor's edge of disaster all the time.  We will have to find ways of recapturing activities and functions from the marketplace, returning them to local, non-monetized arenas.  And we will need to create new ways for people to earn a living and contribute to their communities without having to work in a traditional "job."

I think by now it should be obvious that I do not feel that the changes mentioned in the paragraph above can happen within the current one-person/one-job, one-family/one-dwelling complex.  The economic inefficiency of a system where every family has to purchase all of its own products and services on the open marketplace will finally become undeniable as we slide down the back slope of Peak Oil. Collective ways of living and working will prove our only way forward.  Economic growth will prove elusive if not impossible in the near future.  And unlike the current arrangement, in which economic stagnation is seen as the ultimate uber-tsunami of disaster, a society that has transitioned to collective social forms will allow regular folks to keep things in perspective.  People living in groups will have social and economic space, the wiggle-room necessary to weather the changing circumstances.  They will be able to harness the efficiency and power of scale, which comes with the combination of resources and efforts.   

In such a group-based setting, economic contraction can be seen for what it is: simply a reduction in the number of large-scale monetized transactions, and an unavoidable effect of petrocollapse.  As economies become more local, and more functions are pulled out of the marketplace and back into the informal sector, economic contraction can actually be seen as positive, as a sign that we are less dependent on centralized power.  And ecologically, an overall reduction of large-scale economic activity can actually prove to be healthy for our natural surroundings.  Economic growth may even be ultimately laughed at, as a ridiculous idol of an insane sociopolitical philosophy born in 18th-century Great Britain and finally killed on the great plains of Peak oil.