The Steady State Economy Position

Don't say people aren't trying to come up with different ideas when it comes to economic philosophy. CASSE explores something called the Steady State Economy. Basically, it warns of the pitfalls of relying on "growth" as a means to a stronger economy.

Here's just an excerpt of its philosophy and a history lesson:

The evidence is all around us — the global human economy has grown too large. Continued economic growth (especially in high-consuming nations) is at best irresponsible, and at worst risks ecological collapse and resource deprivation for future generations. The logical way forward for nations of the world is to take a different path to achieve sustainable, healthy, and equitable lifestyles for citizens. The alternative to continued economic growth is a non-growing or steady state economy. Modern societies have not undertaken efforts to establish steady state economies – the goal has consistently been growth, especially since the dawn of the industrial revolution.


Fear and doubt often swirl around the concept of a steady state economy. Mere mention of an end to growth prompts anxious discussions about unemployment, stagnation, and lack of progress. These are not features of a functional and dynamic steady state economy, but most citizens do not have a sense of what life would be like in an intentionally non-growing economy. One way to envision this life more clearly is to examine various activities and institutions as they would exist in a steady state economy and compare them to how they exist in an economy that pursues continuous growth. Click on the following items to see how they behave in a steady state economy versus an economy aiming for evermore growth.

And...some myths and realities.

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This post was originally supposed to be about discussing Canada's poor record on climate change and the contradictory reality of being a semi-diversified, resource based economy. My research brought me to the CASSE site and this article in particular:

In the 21st century, Canadian economic growth has been rooted in real estate and oil production. Canada has a resource-based economy, even though almost three-quarters of Canadians have jobs in services like real estate, which have little or nothing to do with resources. In fact, only 5-6% of Canadians actually work in the primary sector, where resources are extracted. Yet the country has one of the highest ecological footprints on the planet, partly due to international demand for its oil and minerals.


Over time, the volume of materials that circulates through the Canadian economy hasn’t changed much despite improvements in intensity (material used per unit of income). As a result of this peculiar structure, Canadians have become a nation of extractor-investors, with the remainder of people working in a manufacturing sector centered around transportation equipment, which has been struggling to remain competitive for the last decade.

Services have become a top-heavy trophic layer in the economic structure, with material throughput remaining roughly the same over time despite modest and constant population growth. According to Brian Czech’s trophic theory, the tertiary sector sits atop the secondary sector, which sits atop the primary sector. The three sectors are mutually dependent, imitating the same trophic structure of an ecosystem. Resources flow from one sector to the other in an entropic thermodynamic process, which subjects them to the laws of irreversibility and path-dependence. In other words, material and immaterial economies can’t be considered separate from one another. It’s more like a top-heavy layered cake which, miraculously, doesn’t fall over.

Read more about SSE.