As a follow up, can I ask the question as to whether we really need growth?…at some point even baby elephants stop growing. Though I have heard it suggested that our money system does require growth, since most money is created as debt/credit, and you need growth to pay the consequent interest. Is this correct or one of those half-truths from the mad money videos on youtube?

Assuming that it is correct, then does the answer to your question lie in the money system? though I should think that the question of the dynamics of any change here would be quite interesting (could one country fundamentally change how its money worked whilst the rest continued as previously?).

Peter.

Thanks for the comment. Yes, this is a very short blog and I am missing out a whole lot of the detail. By ‘deeply-rooted cultural factors’ I’m referring to a broad research strand that includes the economist William J. Baumol’s (1990) article, Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive. The basic idea being that entrepreneurial activity can take on economically, socially and environmentally destructive forms under certain historical conditions, but that these are often deeply-entrenched in our culture, insitutions and legal systems. The global banking and financial crisis of this century would be a case in point, as would our collective failure to address the growth in global carbon emissions. My point about Schumacher (but not just about his study) is that people often make propositions about a better way of organising things (e.g. by privatising state institutions or by creating new social enterprises to deliver local services), but they can have a very short-term perspective. In doing so, they can fail to take into account the new patterns of interaction (e.g. competition and collaboration between different organisational actors) that are being unleashed and the kind of growth that is going to arise as a consequence. In other words, by not thinking about these longer-term ‘dynamics’ (i.e. interactive changes) we may end up in a very different place to that originally envisaged. I hope that helps.

Richard

Could you explain “deeply-rooted cultural factors”? and what do you mean by “how you deal with the dynamics?”?

Peter.

But seriously, I’ll enjoy reading about enterprise, innovation and your current projects, so be with us soon.