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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1103 life, which would make the need to act, create and care for others irremovable from us." The development of civilisations, aside from brief transitional periods (by which I am referring primarily to the periods of restoration following wars), does not involve the significant increase of the mass of goods per capita. Even so, population growth and the exhaustion of natural resources has still led more than once to collapse, desperate wars for dwindling resources or mass emigration.” A global civilisation and the inhabitants of an overpopulated planet must today also face the uncomfortable fact that they have nowhere to run from the consequences of the destruction they have wrought. ‘There are quite simply no rational arguments for maintaining the pursuit of growth. Man is not satisfied by the increase in size or quantity of the things he likes; rather, it arouses confusion or disgust. Nor is he made happy by acquiring them too easily. What he holds good is if the measure of the given thing fits its nature, be it the sweetness of a cake, the size of a city or the number of people in a group. If there is such a measure, then the good steward or the clever businessman has to know not how to increase what they have but how much and how big is just enough. This is how it was while economic performance was measured by material indicators. The pursuit of growth began when the value of economic performance began to be measured and compared with formal, abstract and unified index numbers. Economic globalisation has brought with it a fatal turn of events in this process: the initiative slipped from the hands of the participants of the real economy into the hands of the creditors and financial investors. Their decisions and theirs alone are driven by a single motive: whether their investments will yield a return, without regard to anything else. ‘There is no room here for personal considerations anyway, since the banks and portfolio investors are managing the money of people who perceive nothing out of the whole process apart from the rate of their shares. The decisions of the management therefore have to be made primarily with them in mind. And it is in fact difficult to increase the profit realised in the process of reproduction without an increase in the volume of production. ** Thomas Princen: Treading Softly: Paths to an Ecological Order. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2010. Carl N. McDaniel — John Gowdy: Paradise for Sale. A Parable of Nature. The University of California Press, 2000.
