Here’s a challenge. Isn’t “sustainable growth”, one of those ideas that gets bandied about by economic specialists as well as by mission statement writers, an oxymoron? In a finite world where ever-increasing growth consumes ever-decreasing non-renewable resources how can growth be a sustainable concept? It makes no sense on a global scale, and little sense (other than in the very short and greedy term) at the level of the firm. And yet the government would have Higher Education adopt this sort of thinking in its own thinking.
I do wonder what definition of sustainable, for example, the UK government has in mind when it comes out with policies that are meant to influence what goes on in Higher Education. One example comes via the Dept for Business and Innovation & Skills (see, here for an example connected with Higher Education, but there are others). I’m guessing that they mean sustainable simply as a qualifier for “growth”. This must seem logical to the legislators, but it also means that their policy is – logically – doomed. Or am I missing something?
Perhaps the problem lies with our way of thinking.
When people are figuring things out in a learning space, it has become generally accepted over the last 100 years that there are three methods that may be used, whether the learners know it or not, to reach explanation. The three methods are induction, deduction and abduction (retroduction).
Learning without knowledge of the form of inference that is being presupposed (and one must assume that this may be very commonly the case, even among humans) is probably only possible with either induction and abduction. But even if the learners are made aware of the logic of their thinking mechanisms, is there any guarantee that it would change the outcome?
It’s an interesting side question as to whether we can learn something without being aware that we are learning it but without much doubt I’d say that when we are aware that we are learning, it is in the deductive form of thinking where we spend most of our time. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Deductive thinking has been at the heart of the scientific method for two hundred years, and has served as a useful short-cut in the natural sciences to a system of the ‘eternal verities’ or laws of physics, mathematics etc. and it is therefore deduction that we now consider to be the higher form of sense-making. A deduction is a logical prediction or inference, based on the necessary truth of a general covering rule, about a specific case in point. It relies, usually, for its utility on there being enough general agreement about the covering rule for us to take its premises for granted (otherwise it would be a rather tedious process of inductive trial and error every time to establish each time the general rule – which, in any case, we could never do since induction proves nothing about future cases).
Deduction rules the roost, and has been adopted just as rigorously (unless you subscribe to an extreme form of inductive method, such as Grounded Theory) in Social Science. But…. deduction begins to come apart as a useful way of explaining things if either the grounds for the covering rule or the case in question have not been established in accordance with reality. The logic of deduction will operate and compute in either case – we’re just no better off than we were before. In fact, we may be much worse off since it may hurt…
The other day I was in a medium-size Tesco, located near a ring-road of a medium-size English city. I know that the company has invested a lot in its image as an environmentally concerned business, eager to cut its impact in terms of how it carries out its ever-increasing) business activities. Their web site has several clearly worded statements about this sort of thing and I must leave aside for a moment whether the drive for perpetual growth is must eventually end up destroy the environment since, for all I know, they may well be genuine in this desire to be able to compete in the “green business” space. That green space has a whole set of rules of its own, and none of the players in that space are either completely independent or completely aware of what those rules are.
However, what struck me walking around the store, was the emphasis Tesco had placed in just about all their choices on offers for consumer products that either encouraged waste (i.e. buying more than you would need because, well, you’d be stupid not to at those prices) or targeted foodstuffs that represented comparatively poor nutrition choices, the effects of which our health service will eventually end up paying for years down the line. It seems to me that the logic of “All tactics that encourage profit-making and growth are positive and ethical”, followed by “All other things being equal, consumers will tend to buy more foodstuffs that are convenient to consume, high in sugar, or high in salt.
Well, I’m not sure how I got from one topic to another in this posting, but sometimes it’s healthy to rant. Somewhere in here is a suspicion of whatever logic it is we are using to justify the unquestioning approach to size in business. If you can find it.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
I agree that sustainable growth is not possible within the existing paradigm.
However, it is possible, if we take a different approach, and arrange our businesses and economies like this:
http://www.finnjackson.com/2012/10/25/this-is-what-sustainability-looks-like/
One of the tenets of permaculture, for example, is that the possible yield [aka ‘profit’] is theoretically infinite.
“Perhaps the problem lies with our way of thinking.” — definitely.
Forgive me for keeping it simple and eschewing terms like “operational profit”, but…………………
A bottling company in the near future might make a bottle for 90p and sell it for 100p.
10p growth.
Then recycle it for 50p and sell it again for 100p.
Another 50p growth.
And so on and on.
What’s the problem?
And making more profit means more jobs (or it means more capital investment and growth elsewhere) and more taxes.
Hi Warren,
thanks for reading, and for the comment. I don’t disagree with the nice idea of operational profit or margin, but that seems to me to be (in the cliched expression) about “doing things right”. I think I was trying to get at the logic behind whether organisations and societies are “doing the right things”.
Maintaining greater levels of economic activity simply to maintain even greater levels of economy seems like a circular argument. It must surely matter also what kinds of activity are engaged in, and to what extent they end up doing more harm than good. Hence the example of supermarkets driving profits by selling people more than they need.
But I admit I am an armchair critic in economics, and not an armchair expert. And, what’s more, I am much more interested in the rules for how all of this stuff works than I am in the examples themselves.
Chris
Hi Chris,
It’s those greater levels of economic activity that drag people out of real poverty though – if Tesco can convince you to spend a few quid on something you don’t “need”, their corporate taxes (regardless which EU country they pay them in) can fund International Aid programmes in the developing world (for example)?
And the VAT and business rates and employer national insurance pay for vital services in this country, including the extra jobs created because you overspent on “stuff you don’t need”?
Of course, if we had limited our purchases to what we “needed”, you and I wouldn’t even have the equipment necessary to have this conversation, right?
Churchill had a good rule that defined how some of this stuff works – he said that capitalism was the unequal sharing of blessing, and socialism the equal sharing of misery.
While acknowledging that you are making a general, not a specific, point, I think it’s a lot more complex than whether or not a single consumer purchase (even a dumb one) drags anybody out of poverty.
I agree that if you look at how people around the world are lifted (better than dragged) out of poverty (always a relative state), you cannot escape the role of economic activity, but it would be foolish to think – and counter to the evidence (see, for example, this documentary “Stealing Africa“, which is on BBC i-player for a while longer) – to believe that the system we have allowed to dominate our lives is intrinsically interested in fair profit or sustainable development. Sometimes it is, of course, and I think we need to understand how this can be done, and support those – individuals or organisations – that actually do this, but they are not the majority. It’s not that the majority is deliberately ethically opposed to the idea of sustainability, but the internal logic of “grow forever” produces a toxic, short-term thinking.
When lives do improve in poor parts of the world, it is as a result of things such as improvements in health (particularly reduction in child mortality, which Hans Rosling demonstrates powerfully in his TED talks) and education (particularly for women). These achievements are not imposed on populations by wiser western governments or businesses, they should be as the result of a fairness in trade and commerce and just ways of distributing wealth and development.
In my very humble opinion, even the unintended consequences of globalised free market capitalism are usually more benign than the primary actions of almost every large-scale poverty alleviation programme ever devised by man.
Paul Krugman says it quite well:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html
Salving our consciences by ineffectually pawing at these problems with our soft pale well-meaning hands is no substitute for brutally solving these problems with methods that genuinely alleviate poverty but benefit us too.
If guilt is the price we must pay, let’s pay it.