What we need to reduce is the ‘throughput’ of the residual industrial economy
‘If “growth” is meaningless, so is “degrowth”. There’s no technological or ecological reason why we can’t have more and more services.’‘If “growth” is meaningless, so is “degrowth”. There’s no technological or ecological reason why we can’t have more and more services.’henever I mention concepts such as gross domestic product , there’s a high probability that arguments about the merits of “growth” and “degrowth” will erupt.
The industrial economy could be conceptually understood in terms of three sectors. Primary industries, such as agriculture and mining, produced raw materials. Secondary industry turned raw materials into useful products. Tertiary industry took the products from the factory to the consumer. Other services, such as accounting, finance and law, greased the wheels of the entire process.
In the industrial economy, growth involved an increasing number of workers, each of whom produced more of everything: more primary products, turned into more manufactured goods, sold in bigger and better shops, generating more and more waste. Growth was achieved primarily by equipping workers with more capital, owned by employers . More sophisticated analyses took account of technological progress and of “human capital”, that is, the skills acquired by workers through education and training.
As it turned out, however, the mid-20th century marked the beginning of the end of the industrial economy. The services or “tertiary” sector accounted for half of US employment by 1950 and that share has increased steadily to about 80% today. Within the service sector, ever fewer workers are engaged in the “tertiary” activities of distributing the output of farms and factories, through retail, wholesale and transport.
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