“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell” – Edward Abbey

5/29/2020

Edward Abbey demonstrates powerful rhetorical skill in his above phrasing. Which I guess is expected given his profession as a writer and essayist. And due to the equivalence established between growth and cancer, the above quote is largely effective when used as a tool to condemn unchecked, modernist economic expansion. But the quote actually misses the mark.

In reality, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of all biological matter. Humans are driven to reproduce. It’s baked into our DNA. Charles Darwin. Etc. The reason why cancer is especially bad is not because it grows to grow but because when it grows it grows unchecked and destructively. It grows at an immense cost to the other biological matter around it. Cancerous growth is antithetical to the idea of symbiosis. A more apt description might be the following…

“Indiscriminate, unharmonious growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”

That’s what Edward Abbey was really railing against when he condemned growth for growth's sake – unchecked growth at a high cost to the organism. And he was right. The institutions that exist in the United States have increasingly allowed for the unchecked growth of cancerous companies, industries and ideologies. And the stay-at-home orders and subsequent slowdown in the economy has offered us an opportunity to take a breath and reflect.

Growth of the prescription pharmaceutical industry is cancerous. Growth of big oil. Growth of healthcare insurance and Medicare fraud. Growth of snack foods, fast foods, sugary beverages, credit cards and payday lending. Cancerous. Cancerous and incredibly hard, if not impossible, to stop once started. The growth has inertia. The growth has individuals behind it. Fighting for it. Rationalizing it. Stuck depending on the growth to maintain a certain position in society, care for loved ones or just take home a paycheck.

How do you stop cancer? You can attack it with chemical warfare. You can cut it out. You can starve it of the material and input that it needs to survive.

Harvard Health “estimates suggest that less than 30% of a person's lifetime risk of getting [and sustaining] cancer results from uncontrollable factors”, but that everyone has the power to control the other 70%. Antioxidants, low GIs foods and exercise are important for cancer prevention as they help to neutralize free radicals that damage cells. High GI foods, smoking and weight gain are associated with higher cancer risk.

The idea of letting numbers and figures and logic and profitability alone (i.e., financial statements) determine the winners and losers in a competitive economic game is seductive. Numbers are imbued with an inherent sense of fairness and are useful to organize and maintain power hierarchies. But basing the entire economic system off of numerical, quantifiable financial inputs and outputs is akin to eating a diet of pure sugar. Indulgent. Gratifying. Dopamine-stimulating. Addictive. Inflammatory. Sedating. Depression-inducing. Cancer-causing.

As a society we have reached a turning point. Due to the spread of technology and the ever-increasing democratization of information flow, network effects and social capital are slowly becoming a more important driver of behavior and attention than financial capital for the creative class and younger generations. The foundations which establish the optimal conditions for cancerous economic growth are beginning to decay. This is a good thing given how destructive it is to – economically speaking – subsist on a diet consisting only of financial returns and cash flows (i.e., pure sugar).

Returns to emotional well-being. Returns to environmental sustainability. Returns to community engagement. These are some of the key components of a healthy economic diet. These are the “vegetables” that the free market capitalists push to the corner of the plate.

U.S. consumer spending fell by a record 13.6% in April. Pundits are predicting a recovery (meaning a return to prior expenditure levels), but it’s important to consider what a true “recovery” from our previous sugar high actually looks like.

Consider for a moment that if production and consumption both drop together, we simply come to rest at a different equilibrium. We don’t need endlessly increasing production. Only the asset owners and the banks need that.