collective of grandees known as the Club of Rome set out to establish the limits to economic growth. Worried about the state of the planet, they fed a computer all they knew about farming yields, natural resources, population trends and so on. The rudimentary machine crunched the data and spouted a grim answer: given ecological constraints, the highest standard of living possible was one stagnating at half the American level of the time.
One participant gushed at being there at the “Woodstock for system-changers”. That may be to overstate the impact that can be wrought by a cast of minor academics, trade unionists, green lobbyists and fellow-travellers on stage. Still, many a progressive idea has germinated in Europe, and Brussels is where some of them get turned into policy.
It turns out that the animus against economic growth comes in 50 shades of red. Some merely decry the use ofas the primary gauge of a society’s success, pointing to how it fails to measure ills ranging from environmental degradation to slumping mental health. Fair enough. A bit further from the mainstream are the “post-growth” advocates, who think people can be just as happy with economies going up or down.
Beyond the confines of the conference, Europe is grappling with near-intractable problems. How much can it spend to assist Ukraine as it fends off Russian aggression? How will Europe’s welfare state be financed as society ages? How can the best ideas to continue decarbonising the economy be turned into reality? Finding suitable solutions will require hard graft and much human ingenuity. That is the very stuff that economic growth is made of. The more of it, the better.