ABSTRACT
The hard wiring of the growth economy is revealed in the boosterist sentiments of political and corporate leaders, who evoke sustainability on the one hand and boundless economic growth on the other. The governing priority of the ‘conflicted state’ was starkly revealed in national responses to the global financial crisis from 2007. The business sector is not so conflicted, certainly not in its corporate mainstreams. Here there is less vexed understanding of the need to pursue the cause of growth, which starts and finishes at company balance sheet and share value. The ‘consumption carnival’ that departed in the global financial crisis was surely problematical for economic integrity and failed to meet many social needs. The crisis halted a long phase of neo-liberal growth leveraged through mounting private debt, and a progressive decoupling of the material and financial economies. The main problem was that the drive for efficiency improvement never seemed to dent the relentless growth in resource consumption.
