Policies for Ending Addiction to Growth and Achieving a Steady-State Economy

Let us look briefly at ten specific policy proposals for moving from

our unsustainable growth economy to a steady-state economy. A steady-

state economy develops qualitatively without growing quantitatively in

physical dimensions; it maintains constant the metabolic flow of resources

from depletion to pollution (the entropic throughput) at a level that is

within the assimilative and regenerative capacities of the ecosystem. The

policies recommended will seem a bit radical by present standards, but

are not as insanely unrealistic as the current policies of growth forever—

especially after growth has become uneconomic in the basic sense of

costing more than it is worth at the margin. Ten is an arbitrary number—

just a way to get specific. However, the whole package fits together—

some policies supplement and balance others—so the whole is important,

even though its division into ten parts, rather than eight or twelve, is

arbitrary.