What is growth? Something getting bigger. Something increasing in size. Some form of
improvement. Growth can be described using all of these phrases and many others. We hear growth used in an economic
context every day in business news. What was the growth rate of our Gross Domestic Product this quarter? What
was the growth rate for a company in revenue or earnings or cash flow or some other financial metric? What was the growth
rate in productivity? Wall Streeters in the investment community spend billions of dollars every year searching for
the next growth stock that will deliver massive investment profits because they want to grow their net worth or income faster
than the next guy or gal. The world's investment community searches for growth continuously and when they can't find
any source of growth they get all nervous and upset because for many of them their lifestyle is completely dependent on finding
and investing in growth in some manner.
But maybe we should think
about growth a little differently. The most basic driver of growth in the world economy is the increase in global population.
The simple fact that more people are born than die every year creates an ever increasing set of demands that need to
be provided for our global population to exist and keep growing. Collectively, we need more food, water, housing, energy,
services of all types and "stuff" that is manufactured as we grow our population. Our world has a finite amount
of resources to draw from and we continue to add more people that want to draw from those resources. Not every resource
located on our planet has been found at this point but after thousands of years of searching we have definitely found everything
that is easy to find. Also, we haven't found the most optimum way to use every resource we have yet but we made a lot
of progress in the past 200 years. However, every day the amount of total resources on our planet available per person
declines. Nobody is arriving from a nearby planet to replenish the non recoverable resources we consume each day. There
are fewer resources available for us, our children and future generations as we continuously grow our population. Since
much of the world seems to be doing ok what is the problem? But is much of the world doing ok? What does doing
ok mean to each of us that live on this planet? Since the world's resources are not divided up evenly we have to decide
how to allocate them as the world's population continues to grow. We also need to think about what happens when people
decide to emigrate from one part of the planet to another.
Over the
past few hundred years various experts have tried to define absolute limits on global population. What is the maximum
amount of food production we can produce to sustain what levels of population? How much clean water is available in
different areas to sustain life? Have we reached peak oil production which places limits on various forms of energy
consumption and impacts the manufacturing of "stuff"? So far all of the prognosticators have been wrong. Using
our collective ingenuity we have been able to keep our population growing by identifying a higher percentage of our total
resources for use and by changing the way we consume those resources to be more efficient. We have done a good enough
job managing our use of resources to sustain global population growth, albeit unevenly in different parts of the world. Also,
there is no doubt that some segments of the global population consume far more resources per capita than others.
How much growth remains available to us collectively? How many people can our planet support at what standard
of living? Throughout history population groups have warred over control of resources that they needed for growth. Throughout
history people have migrated from one area of the earth to another in their search for personal or family growth. Today
millions of people are attempting to migrate out of Africa, the Middle East, areas of Asia, and Central America to other areas
of our planet in an attempt to obtain a better life (a larger share of the total resource pie - growth). Should those
of us that have larger shares willingly give up part of our shares so that others can increase their shares? Should we give
up part of our growth so they can grow? If we give up part of our share of global growth what do we get in return?
I don't have answers to all the questions I have asked in this article. But almost everybody in this world
has been conditioned to focus on growth as a fundamental aspect of human life. It may be the immigrant that is trying
to provide a better opportunity in life for their children (giving them a better chance at growing their share of the resource
pie) or a business that is trying to develop new markets (giving the owners and employees a better chance at growing their
share of the resource pie) or a country desperately attempting to grow its real (after inflation) Gross Domestic Product so
that its citizens will be able to control a larger share of the global resource pie. As long as our global population
continues to grow on a finite planet the total amount of resources per person will continue to decline, making real growth
more and more difficult to achieve. It doesn't seem possible that we can avoid massive conflicts over resources in the
decades ahead as long the global population continues to grow. Governments and their peoples in nations around the world
need to rethink how they manage growth.
Copyright 2015 by TPM
