Growth: Quantitative versus Qualitative

For the purposes of this discussion, Quantitative growth in business or society could be said to be just doing more of the same thing with more people and machines or whatever. Qualitative growth is doing a given task more efficiently, or developing more valuable products and services from less valuable ones.

When economies are expanding, quantitative growth will usually yield impressive growth of sales, and profits. For society as a whole, there is increased economic activity, increased tax revenue for governments, and increased income for investors and workers.

Qualitative growth tends to happen more slowly. It comes about through innovations. Sometimes it happens as continuous incremental improvement, or sometimes as flashes of inspiration.

There has been a lot of quantitative growth in the world over the last several hundred years, and especially over the last fifty. We believe this trend is transient, and largely the consequence of the exploitation of fossil fuels and mineral resources. As society glides down the slope past peak just-about-everything, quantitative growth and the economic theories which justified it will become a thing of the past.

On the other hand, qualitative growth seems to spring from the human spirit and will probably rise to the occasion of being more needed than ever as the product of the bowels of the earth are exhausted. On this count we are very optimistic. From what we have seen of ingenuity in ourselves and others, this is an inexhaustible resource.

To allow qualitative growth to become humanity's primary economic driver, several changes will have to happen to the way people look at their lives: First, they will not measure themselves by how much they consume, but rather by how well they do things. Second, they will have to let go of always wanting more and different, and instead learn to be satisfied with making the best of what they have, with only a small allowance for novelty. Third, they will have to learn to practice restraint.

It seems to be human instinct to "be fruitful and multiply." Unfortunately, the human race seems to be multiplying itself into overshoot and collapse. People need to realise that humans can either shrink their numbers gracefully, or have the natural limits of the Earth do it for them painfully. In not many years time, much of what was once termed progress will be seen to have been a swindle - an orgy of consumption and resource extermination that benefited only a tiny minority of plutocrats and left the rest with broken illusions.