Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

it systematically destroys the basis for long-term well-being. In a nutshell, it is investing in
the wrong things.’ 13
What can be done? The Archbishop cites a report of the UK’s Sustainable Development
Commission, Prosperity without growth? 14 , which speaks of a new ‘ecology of investment’,
in which the criterion of short-term returns is not the sole deciding factor, and we learn
how to invest in infrastructure and public goods and new low-carbon technologies. Can
we ‘revisit the concepts of profitability and productivity and put them to better service in
pursuit of long-term social goals’?
Certain kinds of growth will be acceptable, other kinds rejected. Is it possible to outline
certain criteria for ‘good growth’? I believe it is. I wish to argue the fundamental value
which judges economic expansion is that of fully human life and development: the deeper
human good.
This formulation about ‘the deeper human good’ is too vague to indicate what weight
any given society ought to attach to economic criteria in general and economic expansion
in particular. But it already indicates that as an instrumental good (or evil) expansion
cannot be an absolute criterion of anything! That sounds bland: but it implies that where
the goal of economic development becomes in, practice absolute, or where business ideology
becomes socially and politically dominant (‘What’s good for General Motors is good for
America’) the human good is endangered.
If economic expansion is always one social goal among others, there are four reasonable
implications:
– Much depends on which other goals are associated with it. The package ‘economic
expansion directed towards social justice’ is different from the package ‘economic
expansion plus untrammelled individual liberty’. If a society seeks expansion in order
to fund social protection systems better, policymakers will be alert to improve such
systems as resources allow. Growth has a good chance of being inclusive. If the goal is
expansion plus a minimal welfare apparatus (as under neo-liberalism), expansion will
exacerbate poverty – for example as investment in technology displaces workers.
– Economic expansion will always produce a mixed crop of good and evil together –
some people’s good and others’ evil. Selling arms to a dictatorship encourages violent
oppression overseas even as it ‘saves jobs’ (and boosts executive salaries) at home. It is
not a pure good.
13 Williams (2009).
14 Jackson (2009); Ed.: see also p. 257).
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