Growth questionned

Gee, this might do in Jason's head.   A guy who techno-optimist Bill Gates apparently likes says economists just have to give up on the idea that economic growth has to keep happening.

An extract:

You debunk overly rosy projections by techno-optimists, who say we can solve all our problems with smarter computers, and economists, who promise endless capitalist growth. In many countries, the downside of material growth now seems greater than the upside, which leads to what you call “anthropogenic insults to ecosystems”. Is that a fair summary?
Yes, I think so. Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone. The best hope is that you find some way to manage it. We are in a better position to do that now than we were 50 or 100 years ago, because our knowledge is much vaster. If we sit down, we can come up with something. It won’t be painless, but we can come up with ways to minimise that pain.

So we need to change our expectations of GDP growth?
Yes, the simple fact is that however you define happiness, we know – and we have known this for ages – that the amount of GDP is not going to improve your satisfaction with life, equanimity and sense of wellbeing. Look at Japan. They are pretty rich but they are among the unhappiest people on the planet. Then who is always in the top 10 of the happiest people? It is the Philippines, which is much poorer and smitten by typhoons, yet many times more happy than their neighbours in Japan. Once you reach a certain point, the benefits of GDP growth start to level off in terms of mortality, nutrition and education.

Is that point the golden mean? Is that what we should be aiming for rather than pushing until growth becomes malign, cancerous, obese and environmentally destructive?
Exactly. That would be nice. We could halve our energy and material consumption and this would put us back around the level of the 1960s. We could cut down without losing anything important. Life wasn’t horrible in 1960s or 70s Europe. People from Copenhagen would no longer be able to fly to Singapore for a three-day visit, but so what? Not much is going to happen to their lives. People don’t realise how much slack in the system we have.

 I'm not sure about this, but I do wonder about it at times.

PS:   What bothers me about techno-optimists who go on about nuclear is that they are too pessimistic about different ways of utilising increasing amounts of renewables wisely.  Too pessimistic about large and small scale storage; too insistent that unless you keep the ability to use energy in exactly the way we do now, it'll be some sort of crisis.   I mean, unexpected brown outs are inconvenient, but the way they carry on if even a single brown out happens in summer now due to generation issues is over the top.    This guy makes a lot of sense - we can probably readily adjust to energy conservation if we accept it as necessary; and not all countries need to use energy in exactly the same way we do.

Seeing a future whereby clean energy allows a similar, even if somewhat more modest, lifestyle to what we enjoy now is a form of techno-optimism;  decrying renewables as never being able to supply enough power for a modern industrial nation is a form of techno-pessimism, really.