Growth Fetish (2003), by Clive Hamilton

For the past thirty years (and particularly during the last ten), we've heard a lot about Growth. The related projects of population increase, boosting exports, expanding share portfolios, and the big one, Economic Growth, have assumed central importance in the expectations modern Australians have of their governments.

"Growth" is consistently presented as a self-evident good, to the point that arguments in its favour are now little more than empty statements of pro-Growth rhetoric. There simply MUST be constant and steady Growth in our Gross Domestic Product (within the parameters set by consequential inflation and interest rates), our leaders urge, or else.

The rhetoric is applied in increasingly bizarre circumstances. Queensland's ostensibly Labor Premier Peter Beattie uses the phrase "nation-building" - code for Growth - to justify policy positions that are actually right-wing.[1] The right factions at national Young Liberal conferences declare that the ABC's youth radio station, Triple J, must Grow or suffer the consequences of "stagnation".

Growth...but for what purpose? Just why does our Economy (never our "society") need to Grow faster, stronger, better?

In his role as Executive Director of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton takes this question as his starting point in his 2003 book Growth Fetish (ISBN 1741140781). That question arises from a political-philosophical belief that the widespread, uncritical acceptance of an idea often hides the existence of a relatively small class of benefactors who usurp political power by setting the paradigms within which the majority operates, speaks and thinks. The Australia Institute is often described as a "left-wing" think tank, but while Hamilton's critical approach has its origins in Marxist thought, he is no Marxist: he believes in "false consciousness" and the existence of social classes, though he doesn't believe class any longer substantively informs our identities.

In asking the whys and hows of Economic Growth - in requiring its adherents to provide sound rationale for their pro-Growth rhetoric - Hamilton engages in a deeply subversive exercise. He wants progressive thought to engage itself with the situation at-hand: as he sees it, the thirty-year campaign of the pro-market, anti-regulation ideologues has succeeded in winning the battle for our minds, but its corrosive and deeply disturbing social impacts means that it will never win our hearts.

It's a simple question, "why Growth?". Why, indeed, when the major justification for our mass-fetish - a marked increase, across the board, in material wealth - has not made us any happier? Hamilton points to evidence that suggests that the extreme emphasis placed on productivity, flexibility, efficiency and so-called "choice", at the apparent expense of quality relaxation time, relationships, stability and mental, physical, social and spiritual well-being, is actually causing great harm.

We all know the survey results. Financially rich people do not report that they are significantly happier (or even more financially comfortable) than financially poor people. In his Quarterly Essay (ISBN 1863951822) published earlier this year, Hamilton adds more startling statistics: only 5 per cent of those living in households with incomes above $100 000 describe themselves as ‘prosperous’; an identical percentage (9%) of those in the lowest and highest income groups say they are ‘totally satisfied’ about their financial situations; almost half of the richest 20 per cent of Australian households say they can’t afford to buy everything they really needed, despite the financial wealth of Australians having increased threefold since the 1950s.[2]

Hamilton is not anti-growth, or even anti-market. He recognises that growth is necessary to pull people, societies and nations out of situations of material depravation. But he does argue that, once material depravation is no longer an issue for the vast majority of the population, the use of Growth to make already comfortable individuals wealthier - a use that promotes widespread acts of overconsumption - raises ethical and health-related concerns. The globalisation of information flows has made it possible for ‘us’, in the ‘West’, to see (if we want to) that our lifestyles, characterised by material über-wealth, comes at major material, social and health costs to others – in the Africa of human guinea pigs for commercial pharmaceutical companies, in the Asia of sweatshop labour, in the Middle East of international, antidemocratic intervention, and in the South America of public good commodification by corporate multinationals. Of course, we don’t want to see these things, and, guided by ratings, corporate media respects our need for ignorance.

The ethical problems of overconsumption are more fully explored in Richard Wilkinson’s The Impact of Inequality (2004, ISBN 1565849256), but they derive from an inherent characteristic of capitalistic societies: that ‘winning’ comes at the cost of another’s ‘loss’.[3] Purely within Australia, those ‘losers’, in material (and often wider wellbeing) terms include those living outside cities, members of minority groups (including, significantly, Indigenous Australians, whose life expectancy is now 20 years lower than other Australians), people on low incomes, unemployed people, non-citizens and refugees, unskilled people and those with low levels of education, outer-suburban dwellers, and those living in hazardous environments. That we now ascribe a negative moral value to each of these categories in an attempt to justify our lavish overconsumption is itself indicative of massive (and unjust) inequality.

Hamilton goes one step further, and argues that such overconsumption is actually detrimental even to the wellbeing of those who ostensibly benefit in material terms. The phenomena of lack of social engagement, the devaluing of civic institutions, overwork, stress, depressive illness and suicide are on the rise in, peculiarly, the societies of material abundance. His project is to open our eyes to the current state of affairs by lifting the veil of spin, and then to persuade us to change it.

Hamilton’s work provides a starting point for a new progressive politics. It is not, however, a blueprint: Growth Fetish suffers from unnecessary polemicism, and in its failure to provide evidence for a number of correlations and conclusions. This is unfortunate, because in not being properly armed, his argument is wide open to misappropriation and even dismissal by those with high stakes in the current regime. Rather, Growth Fetish is aimed at progressives searching for a politics beyond that of the traditional Left, which has become merely an alternate expression of the importance of material wealth. [Russell]

[1] Beattie, interviewed by Maxine McKew, ABC TV's Lateline, 14 July 2006.
[2] Hamilton, ‘What’s Left? The death of social democracy’ (2006), 21 Quarterly Essay 1 at 22-23.
[3] See Bob Blain, as interviewed by Phillip Adams, Late Night Live, ABC Radio National, 18 July 2006.