Questioning the Assumptions, Sustainability and Ethics of Endless Economic Growth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article questions the assumptions, sustainability and ethics of endless economic growth on the basis of environmental science, ecological economics and ecological ethics. It considers the impossibility and unsustainability of endless physical growth on a finite planet. It considers the indicators of environmental degradation (all increasing) and argues that society’s addiction to endless growth is irresponsible. It discusses the key problem of denial, and how this blocks us from finding workable solutions. It discusses how in theory GDP could continue to grow modestly in the future if we adopted a steady-state economy where growth was not caused by an expanding population or resource use. However, this model is currently unpopular, with many advocating the green and circular economies that are partial solutions, and which justify ongoing growth through a fantasy of absolute decoupling. I discuss the need for society to change its anthropocentric worldview to one of ecocentrism. I then question whether the UN Sustainable Development Goals are actually ecologically sustainable. I discuss how, when we ignore the problems of an endlessly growing economy, we create significant risk to society. Rather than a focus only on ‘sustainable economic growth’, I suggest it is time to focus centrally on an ecologically sustainable economy and future.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".