The Ambiguity of "Growth"

I'm reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing , and there's a lot to like about the book. But this paragraph, early on, jumped out at me as a version of an argument I see frequently, and has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, but I fear, when critically examined, has some troubling implications alongside some conceptual confusions.

[T]he practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

Much of this comes in an extended discussion of how development is changing the city of Oakland, where the author lives, and particularly how that development is encroaching on the remaining spots of nature.

In a book about paying attention to the world around us, and discovering a new appreciation for that world, a call to care about the natural parts of it fits. And appreciating nature is good. There's lots to love about it, and something unseemly about those people you occasionally encounter—they do exist—who adopt a performative "Hell yeah, let's pave over all of paradise, and how!" stance.

So, okay, sure. But there's more going on in this paragraph. First, there's a conceptual blurring around "growth." When she's talking about uncontrolled growth in the natural world as bad, parasitic and cancerous, this is growth as quantity. It means more and more, crowding and strangling. The tumor. The kudzu. It kills because eventually nothing else has space to live.

But there's another meaning of "growth." This meaning is "improvement" or "getting better." It's when you "grow" as a person, and it's also when we see productivity growth. In the latter, it doesn't necessarily mean just "more." It means "more with less." That's how wealth happens, too. We become wealthier when we can get more outputs from fewer inputs, whether those inputs are resources or time. Much of the novelty and productivity the passage laments too much focus on isn't really about the first kind of growth. It's not that I buy a new car or a new phone because I want another car or phone. It's that the available cars and phones have gotten better, and I'd like to swap my old something worse for a new something better. ("Novelty," if it means a superficial chasing of something we mistakenly believe to be better, instead of something actually better, doesn't really avoid this because it depends on making wholly objective what necessarily is at least partly subjective. Who are you to tell me what I want is frivolous and unnecessary, when you're convinced that what you want isn't? And what looks frivolous today can turn out to be necessary tomorrow. Or, if any instance of it doesn't, we need messy diversity to find out what, among that diversity, is.)

A shifted focus to maintenance and care can't address that need for what's better. No matter how much time I spend in the garage lovingly tending to a classic car, it's not going to get the gas millage or safety features of a current model hybrid. Yes, of course, we also buy junk. You're better off investing more in, and caring for, a great pair of boots or jeans than buying another piece of fast fashion that'll fall apart in a year or less. Probably. Maintenance is a good approach to some goods, but it fails as a systemic model for areas of rapid technological, environmental, or societal advancement.

But the point is that most of the products out there now are, in meaningful ways, better than what came before. That's growth, in the second sense, not an obsession with growth in the first.

But it is the case there are more cars in the world than there used to be, and more phones and jeans, too. And so when we do upgrade to something better, we're throwing away (probably) what came before. The quantity of stuff in the world goes up.

And just as our goods take up physical space, so do the people who buy them. So when it comes to housing, if you want to build a new house, and don't want to or can't build it in a spot where a house already was, then you need to build it in a spot a house already wasn't. Which means nature.

And maybe that's a problem. Nature is good. Having access to nature is good. Crowding out all of nature would, therefore, be bad. You can get away with more housing without less nature for a while by just ramping up density. But density takes space, too. If you want Oakland denser, you need to crowd out something, even if just views of the sky.

Now, if you don't want Oakland denser, or you don't want more houses built, well... This is where we get to the less savory undercurrent of these "growth (in the first sense) is bad and can't go on" narratives. Because "Can't go on" rarely means, "We'll slow it down 200 years from now." It means "We've had plenty of that, thank you, and it's time to stop it now." Or, at most, soon. But if you mean that, if you think we have enough phones in the world, or enough cars, or enough houses, then it means, to be blunt, you think we have enough people. That Oakland doesn't need more. That the world doesn't need more. Or, you think it's fine to have more people, but that those more people, or some significant portion of them, shouldn't get phones, or cars, or homes.

So opposing growth, in either sense, is saying, "The world, as it is right now, at this very moment, is good enough. The quality around us is good enough, and the quantity is, too." It's to privilege the present, or some imagined past, against the future. And not just "the future" in the sense of new technologies that necessarily will mean throwing away (or sometimes recycling) the old, but "the future" in terms of the people not around today but who will be around tomorrow.

This is, even if it's not recognized, a selfish view. And you can see that by just imagining the same argument made not today but five-hundred years ago. Or a thousand. None of us would want to live, not really, the way our ancestors did. We can imagine it with misleading nostalgia, or we can experience it, incompletely, by going camping or going hungry, but we don't actually want it as a permanent alternative to the quality of life the past five-hundred or a thousand years' of growth (in both senses) have given us. Or you can see it by thinking about the city you live in, and how someone the generation before you could've said, "That's enough of that," and stopped anyone new—including, someday, you—from living there, too.

Growth is good. In both senses. We could do with a lot more of it. In both senses.