No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Now shall we talk about how much we pay, how we are bankrupting our future, to keep that circus going?

No. That’s not something we talk about. Not in Congress. Not in the White House. Not anywhere.

Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor

September 2011

Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich.

—Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,”

Al Jazeera, 22 February 2011

IT’S AS SILLY for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry-free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.

So: I want to ask how economists can continue to speak of growth as a positive economic goal.

I understand why we’re in a panic when our business or our whole economy goes into a decline or a recession: because the whole system is based on keeping up with/outgrowing the competition, and if we fail to do that, we face hard times, collapse, crash.

But why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?

Up to a point, growth is a plausible metaphor. Living things need to grow, first to their optimum size, and then to keep replacing what wears out, annually (as with many plants) or continually (as with mammalian skin). A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.

In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.

Maybe there are organisms that have no optimum size, like the enormous fungal network one hears about that underlies the whole Middle West, or is it just Wisconsin? But I wonder if a fungus wandering around thousands of square miles underground is the most promising model for a human economy.

Some economists prefer to use mechanical terms, but I believe machines have an optimum size much as living organisms do. A big machine can do more work than a small one, up to a point, beyond which things like weight and friction begin to ruin its efficiency. The metaphor comes up against the same limit.

Then there’s social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw, surviving fitly, while small vermin live on the blood that trickles down . . . This metaphor, based on a vast misunderstanding of evolutionary process, hits its limit almost at once. In predatory competition, bigness is useful, but there are endless ways to get your dinner besides being bigger than it is. You can be smaller but smarter, smaller but faster, tiny but poisonous, winged . . . you can live inside it while you eat it . . . As for getting a mate, if combat

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