Many years ago in 1976, I think, when I was an undergraduate student at Loyola College pursuing a B.Com. Degree, I remember I read a book called “Small is Beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher .
At that time when I was a callow student, I didn’t believe at all that Schumacher’s views on the models of global ecology and economy were practical, viable or even sensible … They seemed to me so Gandhian and so unlike Nehruvian ….
India back then was a poor country and desperately needed more than a rapid rate of GDP growth to lift its millions out of poverty and backwardness…. And that’s exactly what was being taught to me too in the graduate studies in Economic Planning and Development which I was pursuing,
Just under 60 years later, watching this morning on my IPhone this very short video-clip below, makes me feel the world has simply turned full circle … and, O God, how dramatically indeed!
Schumacher makes eminently more sense now to me in hindsight than it did back in 1976, and as this video explains, the world certainly seems to be hurtling towards an economic and ecological disaster while riding mounted on a tiger from which it finds it simply cannot dismount …. The world is chasing an unsustainable and utterly mad-consumerist dream called non-stop GDP growth !
And India under Modi too wants no less than 10% continuous GDP growth for the next two decades! That’s what he wants, what his BJP Party is planning for as its “sab ka saath, sab ka vikaas” grand agenda, what his Economic advisors and wise men too are pushing so hard for … and it is what his adversaries and detractors too are carpingly saying he will fail miserably to achieve in his bid to make India a $5 trillion economy by 2030!
The Western nations have today put all we countries like India in a real, civilisational bind indeed…
They enjoyed all the advantages of economic growth in the last 150 years since the Industrial and Consumerist Revolution; they enjoyed all the material goodies in life for decades on end … And now, when they see and realise the sheer folly of their shortsighted, ill-thought-out and profligate macroeconomic ways of living, thinking and self-indulgence , they have come to regret the misguided choices they made in life ..
The grand merry and wild party the Western nations started and threw in gay abandon and then kept pressing 3rd World countries to also join in for well over 50 + years since the steam locomotive engine and the internet was invented… that rave, irresponsible party, they realise now, simply cannot go on and on forever …
And now the same nations in 2021-22 reckon that unceasing GDP growth is nothing but a shadow the world can choose to chase but only at its own very grave, near-suicidal socio-ecological peril ….
So , what does the First World now preach to the Third (developing) world? What is the new song they sing now to lighten up and lift the sagging animal spirits of the party ?
The Western nations have begun to start talking of a “Revolution” to dismantle Capitalism as an unsustainable global economic model … ! Now, after a century and half in modern history, they seem to be hearkening back once again to the model which 60 years ago they only derided and rejected : the old Schumacher Model of “Small is Beautiful”!
Voila! What goes around does come around indeed! … Plus ca changer plus c’est la meme chose ….! The more things change the more they remain the same and only to return and haunt us … The party tune is changed!
So, now that all the rich , fat and obesity-afflicted nations of the West have already gorged down all the rich and fancy foods of the world they served themselves and feasted upon all these years … having drunk all night and danced and boogie-woogied, non-stop, and having enjoyed the merry wild party they threw for so long … now that the party is almost nearing its end …. what on earth are late-arrival guests to the party like India, China, South Africa or Brazil to do ?
The party is over …! Will India or Brazil have to therefore got to abandon the “goody goal of GDP growth” and simply go and join the other party the Western-nations of the world wish now to host and start all anew and fresh? —- viz. the “anti-capitalism revolution” that the glib-tongued panellist in the talk-show video is seen talking about?!
Not a chance, says Modi of India, to the western world ! A hundred years it has taken us as a country to reach the doorsteps of the global GDP party and now you expect us to be turned away as latecomers who missed the bus? No way !
We will dream, cries Modi voicing the aspirations of a billion Indians, we will work, embrace and rejoice in exactly those same ways of living that you did all these last 3 centuries since Adam Smith first defined economic growth as the pursuit of self-interest and individual happiness.
We will exploit and wring every ounce of benefit there is to be extracted from every natural, human and non-human resource available to us at our disposal within our land and in the world at large.
We are a people who have woken up at last to the fact that to be fulfilled human beings we must first have to be fully satiated Consumers.
To the Western nations, therefore, leaders like Modi, Xi Jin Ping and Bolsaro are daring to say right in their faces —- “the wild partying for you may be getting over … but to us it’s only beginning to start!” There’s a long, long night’s carousel left still for the world to party in in the decades ahead before it begins to see the first shining rays light of an awakening dawn ….
What a pity really that Narendra Modi was not at the helm in India during my undergraduate years in recent history… He might well have taken the people of India along with him to party all night long then with Western Capitalists to savour all the delights they did, and in so full a measure!
Sudarshan Madabushi
Dear Sudarshan,
A viewpoint offered by natural sciences would be beneficial in the case of the GDP growth.
Wealth is a static value and when we want to measure its change over a given period of time we ordinarily use GDP, for example, an annual GDP to reflect an annual increase of a country’s wealth.
This way, GDP is related to wealth as speed to distance.
GDP growth, by the same analogy, is an acceleration of wealth.
The laws of nature do allow to accelerate continuously but only until certain boundary conditions are reached that preclude further acceleration.
(As every motorist knows very well!)
Therefore, a zero growth GDP still ramps up the wealth. Even a negative growth GDP does!
The other important factor to consider here would be the wealth per capita. When population numbers are stagnating (Europe and Japan), wealth can stop growing at all.
Otherwise, the GDP could track the population growth to keep everyone content.
P. S.: For brevity, I leave out waste and asset depreciation. These are the forces against which GDP is pushing as well.
Excellent thought , Igor ! We get carried away by GDP as a measure of growth . It often misses out measuring a lot of other parameters .