The Runaway Economy: the Rhetoric is Growth, the Issue is Freedom

After centuries of accelerating growth, the economy continues to be promoted for endless growth when the effects increasingly become economically counterproductive, ecologically devastating, and socially generated crises. Yet society, Kenneth Schneider demonstrates poignantly, continues to seek blind, endless, and reckless growth-leaving in waste vast human possibilities not attainable through personal expenditures. Once the standard of living reaches affluence, continued growth becomes increasingly destructive and economically suicidal, confining the human career to productions and wastefully generated consumption. As it expands, the economy increases its control over society, dominating urban form, education, the media, and social imagination. Rather than freeing people, the increased economic wealth offers vast promotional for business to control human behavior-note that advertising multiplied forty-fold from 1950 to 2000. Schneider stresses how society must fundamentally redirect human thought and economic power to fulfill specific social purposes that constitutes human progress.