Why the Infinite Growth Economy does not Support the Future of Work
We can ideate all we want about optimal hybrid working conditions, advantageous real estate plans, learning and development programs, total rewards, employee experience strategies, digital tools, and the list goes on and on. These are, however, merely a bandaid solution for a much larger problem staring us all in the face.
Ultimately, a new economic system is required to create a future of work that works.
Let me explain.
Our society currently operates on an economic model that demands infinite growth.
Under this model, priorities are set by the ruling upper class. When the economy keeps growing, their wealth and power grow along with it. Not only this, but if the economy keeps growing, hypothetically, there will be more money to go around for all of us.
However, there are two main problems that we are running up against with an infinite growth economic model:
- Wealth is not trickling down, it’s consolidating at the top. The rich are getting richer, the poor, poorer.
- Our planet cannot sustain economic growth, indefinitely. We’re running up against our resource limits and are now experiencing the biggest threat to humanity, a threat we created: Climate Change.
As Joel Kovel, American scholar and author, wrote:
Our society is an immense machine constructed to extract wealth from the earth through unlimited economic penetration. Its raw materials extend to nature (viewed as “resources”), other societies, culture, and critically, the selves of individual persons.
Our infinite economic growth model is not only violating nature, it is violating our own human-nature.
It is drawing life out of us. It doesn’t allow us to grow and flourish as nature intended for us. As psychologist, Carl Rogers, puts it:
Ours is a world in which living things die to make dead things grow.
Our experience of life and of work is informed first by our feelings. Audre Lorde, American writer and feminist, sums up our predicament perfectly when she said:
Within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.
We can therefore try as we may to create the most desirable working conditions in the most sought after environments and companies, but the feelings invoked by a repressive, nature-exploiting economy have taken their toll, both on the Earth and ourselves.
