Not even a person of average intellect ~ far removed from the rarefied world of economists ~ will find it hard to understand why the Nobel committee chose Paul Romer and William Nordhaus for the Prize in economics. No human escapes the effects of nature ravaged, as the inexorable pursuit of growth, sometimes even pleasures of life, devastate everything natural and pristine; to wit, eco-tourists trashing the regions that they visit in their keenness to be one with nature. Corporate greed and subterfuge around planned environmental depredations continue to shock one’s sensibilities and the Nobel laureates, very simply put, seek to incorporate sustainability, climate change concerns and technological innovations into the tools for analyzing economic growth.
The contrarity of seeking infinite growth with finite resources without technological intervention is obvious even to the unschooled and, by both nature and nurture, mankind wants a healthy environment. This makes it hard to fathom why research is not propelled by an urge to solve this primary concern, even though its abandonment is sending the world headlong towards doom. Arguably, economists cannot address the rapacious mindset that embraces bottom-line concerns as it strategises to enrich balance sheets. But surely research creating countervailing processes to extract “genuine” business value ~ that embraces mankind ~ from the humungous, globally-interconnected, production machinery, should be factored in for reckoning growth.
Yet the apparent irrelevance of this criteria must have seemed threatening even in the 1960s, prompting former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to caution those in the “councils of government” in his 1961 farewell address against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex”. His grim prognostication that the potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power “will persist” came alive in the biotech company Aventis’ sale of the genetically-modified Starlink corn (approved as animal feed only) to its unsuspecting consumers or the callous Union Carbide’s notorious 1984 Bhopal gas leak (the worst-ever chemical accident) or the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spills, to name a few. Elsewhere, it is evident in the refusal to put technology to desired use.
Surely, if the world’s largest ‘Ocean Cleanup’ is eliminating 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, India can show more substantive results with its Clean Ganga mission. Why corporate action propelling unsustainable lifestyle changes, courtesy chemical agro-inputs, processed food, exposure to radioactivity and innumerable others, using innovation to enslave humankind and destroy the earth should not be integral to assessments of economic cost while estimating growth is the abiding mystery of the 20th and 21st centuries.