by From Clive L. Spash and Clíodhna Ryan and RWER issue 106 The aim of an economy should not be to grow so that a welfare State can be funded to ameliorate the social, health and ecological impacts of growth, but rather to engage directly in social provisioning that avoids exploitation and deliberate harm. Long ago, Kapp (1970) emphasised the social ecological imperative for reorienting economics towards policies addressing needs, the requirements of human life and social minima. This remains largely off economists’ agenda, along with the topic of transforming economies away from divisive, destructive, exploitative, unjust and unethical provisioning systems. A more foundational economic analysis is required that links to the physical basis of the system. Thus, the concept of social
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from Clive L. Spash and Clíodhna Ryan and RWER issue 106
The aim of an economy should not be to grow so that a welfare State can be funded to ameliorate the social, health and ecological impacts of growth, but rather to engage directly in social provisioning that avoids exploitation and deliberate harm. Long ago, Kapp (1970) emphasised the social ecological imperative for reorienting economics towards policies addressing needs, the requirements of human life and social minima. This remains largely off economists’ agenda, along with the topic of transforming economies away from divisive, destructive, exploitative, unjust and unethical provisioning systems.
A more foundational economic analysis is required that links to the physical basis of the system. Thus, the concept of social metabolism has been developed as an analogy with biological metabolism, which emphasises the material and energy inputs (resource extraction) and outputs (waste sinks) of any society (Krausmann 2017). Societies structured to reproduce on the basis of growth and accumulation continually seek to increase the use of material, energy and labour and so inevitably violate limits (Spash 2017: 12). The basic laws of physics (conservation of mass and energy) mean the exponential growth in extraction of primary resource stocks, and filling of primary sinks in the biosphere, are fundamentally unsustainable. Increased scale of production means the size and pace of the economy continually challenges ecosystems’ structure and functioning. It also means innovative new materials are continually introduced that have qualitative impacts and replace naturally sustained functions with artificial processes that require ongoing human management and intervention and so more material and energy inputs (Giampietro 2019).