The first thing to understand is that economic activity is just activity, and that just looking busy, doing more stuff, isn’t a useful goal in and of itself.
More people doing more stuff, moving things around, moving money around, stressing out, sending emails back and forth, hurrying from one place to another, having meetings, … Well yes, ok, it’s economic growth, sure. But… Is it achieving anything useful?
Sometimes.
But often, a lot of that energy is wasted.
Imagine some people who don’t smoke.
And they want to grow their economy. So they start working more, to plant tobacco, and to harvest and process it, and to transport it, and to advertise it, and to sell it.
They end up with a growing consumption, growing sales, jobs, etc.
Then they hire propaganda specialists and think tanks to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer, and they hire more advertisers to push it even more aggressively, promoting smoking as something healthy.
And they also have to hire more doctors and nurses and build more hospitals to treat all the sick people dying of cancer.
And they can have some random grifter writing ineffective self help books on how to stop smoking.
And pharmacies selling nicotine patches.
Now it’s very obvious that the tobacco industry grows the overall economy.
People end up working more, more taxes are paid, more profits are made, more people are sick, more nicotine patches are sold, etc.
There is a lot of economic activity going on, people are doing stuff, money is changing hands, surgeons get paid to help lung cancer victims.
But… it’s not actually improving society.
Some economic activity is useful.
For example, if you want a house, the house needs to be built, so what the workers are doing is useful.
If you want to eat food, farmers need to grow food.
So you can’t really have no economic activity at all.
But at some point, you hit diminishing returns.
Working one job, so that you can afford to put food on the table, sure, that makes sense.
But if you already have a second job, so that you can fund some kind of sugar/soda/junk food addiction, where the farmers grow extra corn syrup, more than needed, and there are teams of people working to advertise the junk food to you as dishonestly as possible, and you consume more than needed, and your waist size keeps growing along with your weight and your consumption, and you are struggling to afford the healthcare and the insulin costs linked to your sugar addiction, and people are employed to push misinformation blaming fat for obesity, and coca cola funds misinformation saying it’s actually just about exercise and sugar isn’t to blame, and there are a zillion people selling ineffective diets and so on…
Well, all of that extra economic activity is “doing stuff”, money is changing hands, stuff is happening.
But again: Is it really improving society, is it improving your life?
You could get a third job and try to struggle to afford some gambling addiction or something like that, so that more stuff is done, and more money is changing hands.
But again, is that really all that helpful?
Personally, I find that if I consume a moderate amount of food, I’m actually happier than when I’m consuming more and more, and growing more and more obese.
I’ve never hit the point where the growing consumption of food and growing weight caused me to need growing amounts of healthcare services to deal with a growing number of chronic health issues.
But honestly, I’m really not interested at all in that kind of growth just for the sake of growing.
Growing pollution, growing global temperatures, growing CO2 levels…
It’s going to lead to more economic activity.
As more natural disasters happen, people will have to rebuild more, people will have to leave there homes behind, other people will be building fences and concentration camps, there will be growing wars, just more and more panic and frenzy and stuff that is done.
But again: Are we really that desperate for something to do, that we want to create that much more work for ourselves?
What if we had a growing amount of free time instead of growing obesity? Would that really be so bad?
Someone who is just spending time with friends or family is not increasing the GDP or growing the economy.
Someone who stops smoking, stops drinking, stops gambling, stops compulsively stress eating, and stops having so many chronic health issues, and instead meditates, and does bodyweight exercises at home, and has human relations, is shrinking the economy, hurting the addiction industry.
Is that really so bad?
Do we really need to ramp up the production of bombs and stuff like that, to produce ever more wars?
I’m not saying we need 0 production of anything, but this whole cult of production and consumption for the sake of doing stuff and being active all the time, seems rather toxic.
Instead of just trying to look busy doing something, we should think about what the actual goal is, no?
