Unit Eight,The Costs of Economic Growth,Introduction,The economy has developed greatly in the past years, and peoples life has changed a lot with invention of telephones, automobiles, computers etc. However, the weather is becoming warmer and warmer; the air and water are polluted more and more seriously.,Text,Exercises,Related Technical Terms,Grammar,1 Citizens and scholars are today raising a fundamental question: Is economic growth desirable? Or to put it only slightly less grandly: when a society has reached a stage of wealth where all the necessities of life and a high (historical standards) degree of comfort have been assured to the overwhelming number of its citizens, does it thereby reach a stage when the costs of growth begin to exceed its benefits, when its energies should properly be turned in other directions？,Text,2 This is not an altogether new question. Even in the nineteenth century, the great philosopher economist John Stuart Mill yearned for the day when mankind would look for “better things” than a continuation of the constant “struggle for riches”. Mill wrote:,Text,3 I confess I am not charmed with an ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.,Text,4 Mill actually looked forward to the coming of a “stationary state,” providing, of course, that the population problem (which had worried his predecessors, Malthus and Ricardo) could be handled and a decent standard of life could be guaranteed to the working classes.,Text,5 In the United States in the eighth decade of the twentieth century, we have achieved a standard of life for the average man that far exceeds anything that Mill had hoped for. In consequence, there are those who argue that the time has now come to reconsider the pivotal role of economic growth in our social life. The argument has many variants, but it is built around two fundamental themes.,Text,6 The first theme stresses the declining benefits of modern growth in the affluent society. Why do we want more goods, the critics ask. Certainly not out of economic necessity. Not even for added material comfort; historically, men have been content with far less abundance than we now enjoy. Essentially, they answer, we want more goods because a growing society creates the very wants that it in turn supplies. These wants may be created by other consumers in the manner of “keeping up with the Joneses: My neighbor has a new and fancy automobile and thus I, too, must have a new and fancy automobile. Or they may be created by the,Text,industrial producers through advertising and other means of public persuasion-if you do not buy such-and-such a product, your personal and social life will be jeopardized if not ruined. In either case, a kind of self-canceling process of want creation and want-satisfaction is established. If I buy more because my neighbor buys more, and if he buys more because I buy more, then we can both keep on accumulating purchases indefinitely without either being any better off than if we had remained content with less in the beginning.,Text,Text,Similarly, in the case of producer-induced demand, business firms advertise to convince the consumers that they need the goods that they would not have missed had the advertising and the additional production never occurred.,7 Few critics would claim that these are the only motives that make consumers wish additional goods-one may want to buy more records or books, for example, simply because one likes to listen to music or to read-but such motives clearly do enter into many of our purchases and , to this degree, the benefits that accrue from still additional economic growth are far less than they appear in the statistics. As the society becomes ever more affluent, these benefits can be expected continually to decline.,Text,8 The second theme of this argument, and increasingly the more important theme, has to do with the costs of economic growth. Growth has always had associated costs. At the time of the English Industrial Revolution, there was the tremendous dislocation in the traditional pattern of life that the birth of the industrial system involved. Indeed, even the measurement of growth is made difficult by the fact that many of the products that we include in our GNP may actually be nothing but costs of an industrial-urban society. Suppose we lay tracks and,Text,set up a commuter train service from the suburbs to the city. Should we consider this act of production an addition to GNP, or should we argue that commuter services are simply a required cost of having an industrial-urban society and would have no value, were our society organized differently? Within the category of costs of growth, c