ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that ambiguity by considering the different futures which economic growth may create. It analyses capitalism’s most sustained and lasting legacy to human beings–an accelerated rate of economic growth–and the futures that it makes possible. A major objective of that governance structure is for all the planet’s human population and the planet itself to benefit from, rather than suffer from, economic growth. Economic growth has a very odd logical status in fact. Taking economic growth to be a measure of collective economic success, is to treat all economic actors as though they were workaholics. In the former individuals are often willing to sacrifice all other economic objectives simply in order to increase their money and real incomes. A society combining ever more time-consuming forms of economic growth with consistently low rates of such growth, must surely be regarded as being as even more collectively pathological than the workaholic is individually pathological.
