The economy has gotten bigger, the ecosystem has not. How big has the economy become relative to the ecosystem?

Growth chestnuts have to be placed on the unyielding anvil of biophysical realities and then crushed with the hammer of moral argument.

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year’s model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people’s wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.

But the macro-economy is not the Whole. It too is a Part, a part of the larger natural economy, the ecosphere, and its growth does inflict opportunity costs on the finite Whole that must be counted.

The problem with the World Bank has to do with development – the spreading of Western over-consumption worldwide.

We need an economics fit for purpose in a finite and entropic world.

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behaviour it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.

Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.

Growth is widely thought to be the panacea for all the major economic ills of the modern world.