The growth economy is really a war economy.
This is what I recently learnt when reading Rutger Bregman‘s piece (NL) on de Correspondent “Leugens, grove leugens en het bbp“. Bregman writes that: “According to some historians the invention of the GDP has been more important than the invention of the atom bomb. The GDP turned out to be an amazing measure of the strength of a war economy” Bregman goes on to explain that during WWII it was of strategic importance to the war effort to have good statistics about how productive the economy was, since the country which could send more tanks, planes and bombs into battle would win the war. Also when the future of a nation and millions of lives are at stake one needs to do everything one possibly can to win. It is fine to borrow from the future, to plunge into debt, to pollute, to sacrifice family life, and postpone everything else that makes life worthwhile. The war has to be won! It is really all about brute force, and the GDP, developed for the American war effort during the war by Simon Kutznets, did a really good job at measuring it. And since we won the war with it why not stick with it. So we did.
Intuitively this idea that we live in a war economy during peace-time feels perhaps strange. We’ll have to look with different eyes at reality in order to see how this “war” is woven into the banality of our everyday lives.
Just think for a moment about the abundance of the supermarket. A place packed with food from exotic and far-away places. It is restocked multiple times per day so the image of abundance never allowed to fade away. This is our “normal”. But isn’t the supermarket in fact the trophy room of our war economy? A perpetual vanitas, displaying the loot of the perpetual colonization operation that is conducted on the world’s resources. But also a still life without the cues that remind us that things will decay and rot, that they will end and that we will all eventually die.
We’ll never have to smell or taste anything outside this cornucopia, as long as we don’t forget to throw things out when they’ve passed their “best before” dates.