Economy, Growth and Jobs

What is economic growth? It depends on many factors such as an expanding population that needs more goods and services eg. houses, agricultural goods (crops and meat), machinery, resources(metal ores, coal, minerals); the banking system that charges fees for lending money that it does not fully hold in deposits; corporations that reward their shareholders with dividends and higher share prices; and entrepeneurs who sell their intellectual capital at whatever price they can get. The goal is to have high exports, increasing the country's earnings, thereby boosting its economic growth and wealth.

How much money do we really need? It may be preferable to have just enough to support our family, and have more community and leisure time and create a better environment for ourselves. We may wish to get off the treadmill of 60 hour weeks, working for organisations with a shareholder profit focus at the expense of employees, the community and the environment.

By creating extra "wealth" or money, this increases economic growth, generating inflation and putting pressure on individuals to seek higher income. Also, countries need to find more jobs for expanding populations, and following conventional economics, try to stimulate economic growth.

Groups or individuals may wish to add a comment (Just register first) about how we can manage our economy and jobs better, with alternatives such as:

1. Promoting a  Zero Population Growth (ZPG) ie. no more than 2 children per family, or optimum population, to combat the looming resource shortage, including Peak Oil.

2. Moving to a Steady State Economy (H. Daly, or Ted Trainer's - The Simpler Way) where there is zero economic growth, since resources are finite. As Ted Trainer mentions, we should combine Men's Sheds with Community food gardens. This would allow the retired men to help build the garden structures, and repair broken appliances and goods from waste pickups (eg. Hunter Resource Recovery, or Life Cycle Hunter), and sell these to second hand stores to gain income.

3.  Replacing "invented" money as the unit of currency (it used to be based on gold, until governments gave bankers the power to create "money" as debt, and let the bankers direct this to any purpose they deemed worthwhile) with something that has real value eg. Energy - Joules (see David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without Hot Air). This would mean that waste and goods thrown out by our consumerist society would become highly valued, especially if they were made of materials with high embodied energy (Aluminium, steel, concrete/cement), took a lot of energy to extract eg. difficult or extensive mining activities (gold, copper, zinc) or with large transport energy (goods from overseas), or needed much energy to process (chemicals, medicines). It would also reduce the consumption of high-energy valuable resources that are rapidly used eg. fossil fuels (oil, coal, which would assist with lowering greenhouse gas pollution.

4. Having more cooperative (employee shareholders), triple-bottom-line (economic, ecological and social) and not-for-profit organisations, leading to more organisations with high corporate social responsibillity (CSR). For a good community examples, see Ted Trainer's Save Our Town with Community Development Cooperatives, using LETS bartering schemes.

5. Finding fair employment for all/most, by sharing more part-time jobs (currently about 1/3 of all jobs in Australia - ABS - jobs) providing enough wealth with more leisure time, and more time to build community and internal resources eg. better houses, food gardens, water security. This could be the case easily for the 1/3 of Australians who have paid off their mortgage (ABS - mortage), and we can afford to reduce our very high Human Development Index of 4th in the world (a measure of health, wealth and education - Wiki - HDI, 2008), and so reduce our resource consumption.

6. In times of downturns, we could build our own internal infrastructure (personally, community, state and federally). This would increase our own resilience, rather than give handouts that eventually end up with shareholders of corporations, which often includes managers who are paid hundreds of times the average employee's wage and may receive shares as well.

7. Use a local currency, such as the "Molly" from LETS (see Hunter LETS), which encourages the labour and energy expended in a region to remain within the region. This means that profits are not exported outside the local area to where the prices of labour, materials or energy have been distorted by practices that may be unfair, have a poor regulatory basis, that waste resources or take advantage of society or the environment.

Please supply some details of what you would like to see and how it would work.