One economic fact is held to be self-evident: that the future well-being of the United States requires economic growth — preferably, as much of it as we can muster. Despite wildly divergent policy recommendations, this basic assumption is made clear and explicit by everyone from the fiscally conservative Club for Growth to the left-leaning Center for American Progress. In the boardroom of the Federal Reserve, at the negotiating table for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and on the shale fields of North Dakota, our national economic policy is built on the unshakable conviction that the only way to grow the middle class is to grow the economy — by any means necessary. Aside from the fact that the top 1 percent has taken most of the gains of growth, leaving the rest of society in virtual stalemate for three decades, there is a profound problem with this solution. Indeed, it’s time to face an ecological truth that makes the traditional assumption increasingly untenable, as unpopular and difficult as this conclusion might be: Growth isn’t always possible. Nor is it necessarily desirable.

Growth is good?

For the generation that came of age in the post-WWII period, the “growth is good” assumption made perfect sense. And why wouldn’t it? The period between 1946 and 1973 saw the emergence of an “American dream” that was characterized by a robust middle class and accompanied by an annual increase in real GDP that averaged close to 4 percent. But as growth began to slow in the 1970s, our national economic politics began to split in two, with the vestiges of the Keynesian liberal consensus, which favored government involvement in the economy, clashing more and more frequently with a nascent neoliberalism that supported free-market policies. The systemic problem posed by long-term stagnation has been masked by the spectacle of Washington politics, where everything seems to come down to conservatives animated by laissez-faire fantasies and the rearguard liberal defenders of a crumbling social safety net fighting each other to a perpetually dramatic stalemate. Even if this particular ideological logjam were to suddenly and unexpectedly clear, the case for unrestricted growth is not convincing for other reasons — in particular, environmental ones, as the new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear. The heat waves, droughts, floods and other harbingers of a changing climate catalogued in the report continue to multiply, and governments are now forced to get serious about adaptations to the world our carbon-fueled economy has produced. Yet so far a serious conversation about reducing emissions remains politically impossible. Despite the head-in-the-sand antics of “skeptics,” climate change is real, and economic growth, even at today’s historically depressed levels, is a major factor.

A rising tide used to lift all boats, but now it just drowns our cities.

Other studies suggest we are approaching real limits to the availability of numerous basic resources necessary to economic advancement. No technological quick fix is going to change the fact that our finite planet has definite limits. And the more we grow, the more we begin to trip over them, in an increasingly chaotic and interconnected fashion. The energy business and its deleterious impact on the environment are only the most obvious of many examples: The trajectory of the hydrocarbon industry toward costly and carbon-intensive tar-sand extraction and extreme deep-water drilling now makes “sense” from the perspective of a market that has exploited most easily available energy deposits and ignores the consequences of its actions with impunity. Meanwhile, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is pouring more carbon into the air while depleting dwindling aquifers and destroying the very rock formations that some had hoped might be available to sequester excess carbon. The planet cannot sustain this type of growth, but the economy, we are told, commands it. This is a problem. Our national political debate is so constrained that accelerated growth is presumed to be the necessary precondition for broad prosperity. We’re told the only way to help the 1 in 6 Americans living in poverty is to keep enlarging the pie until everyone has a big enough slice. But is this worth it if we lose Miami in the process? A rising tide used to lift all boats, but now it just drowns our cities. A genuine alternative instead of attempting to press beyond the limits we face would distribute the fruits of our technological and economic prowess away from those at the top and toward the vast majority.

Turbocharged