St. George for Growth

Is growth dead? The debate over whether economic expansion ought to be laid to rest as a social goal has been perking along briskly since the early 1970s and the publication of The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome's fervent (and flawed) argument that as population increases, resources will soon run out if industrial development rushes on unchecked. One of the few academics who have rallied to the pro-growth side of the debate so far has been Britain's Wilfred Beckerman, a witty, long-haired Oxford economist who has emerged as a kind of St. George against those he calls "the eco-doomsters."

Forceful Rebuttal. Beckerman's 1975 book, Two Cheers for the Affluent Society, has become one of the most forceful rebuttals of the doomsday forecasts. He argues that the doomsayers have not taken account of how the market system can motivate public and private enterprise to develop successful alternatives. As for population, says he, birth rates will fall dramatically as living standards rise, especially in Third World countries. Food shortages will fade as production techniques improve. Pollution can be controlled when it is recognized that the problem is not growth but a misallocation of resources. Says he: "Because we do not consider that people 'own' clean air, clean water, 'quiet' and so on, we cannot easily extract payment from people who use them by polluting them. Hence, the costs of pollution are not usually borne by those that are responsible for the pollution, but instead by the victims." First step toward a solution: more work on a definition of "property rights" in the environment.

In Leisure, Equality and Welfare, an essay soon to be published by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Beckerman challenges another notion dear to many Club of Rome theorists -- that G.N.P. is inadequate as a broad measure of how well a country's citizens are faring.

Comparing the growth of 13 major industrialized countries over 20 years, Beckerman factored in changes in leisure time and income distribution -- two variables not included in the calculation of G.N.P.-- and found they made no difference in the countries' relative growth rates. Beckerman's overall conclusion: the standard G.N.P. measure is still "a jolly good indication of changes in economic welfare."

Beckerman, 52, a tailor's son who managed to get to Cambridge after the war on an ex-serviceman's scholarship, enjoys the jousting with the doomsayers. The most ardent conservationists, he scoffs, are elitists with a "trendy" argument that rarely gets more sophisticated than "stopping the earth at once before it's too late." This aristocratic posture, he says, allows the well-heeled to display "exquisite sensibilities, moral virtue and subtle perceptions." What upper-class conservationists are really concerned about, he insists, is saving their "salmon streams and grouse moors." Little fuss is ever made, he notes, about the more immediate environmental concerns of factory workers and slumdwellers: "Poverty is degradation, misery and starvation, not the level of carbon monoxide in the air." Growth, he repeats, is the best solution to poverty. Beckerman jokes that he would like to retire from the growth debate, but cannot just now because "the zero-growth merchants have been creeping back." He believes that their case is still pure rubbish. "What is so sacred about zero?" writes Beckerman in the British weekly New Statesman, attacking his liberal critics. "Why not some negative growth rate like minus the square root of seven?"

As a father of three, Beckerman is indulgent toward youthful ecofreaks. "Poor old radical youth; it's hard not to sympathize with them," he sighs. But "pollution hysteria" generated by such studies as The Limits to Growth, he adds sternly, is another example of the odd doom consciousness that has persisted in industrial countries since Thomas Malthus, an early 19th century English clergyman who warned that population would soon outstrip available food supplies. Beckerman does admit to a certain pessimism about the next ten years. He fears unnecessarily slow growth, and blames politicians who deal with inflation by strangling economic expansion. The solution is not to stop growth, he says, but to use and direct it better.

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