This commentary is by Art Woolf of Westford. He is an economist who taught at UVM for 39 years.To slightly change a famous question from one of the presidential debates of 1980, “Are you better off today than you were 40 years ago?According to Justin Dempsey’s recent opinion piece, the answer is : “Since the 1980s, increasing GDP has not increased quality of life, but instead increased economic inequality and ecological devastation.”So clearly, according to Mr. Dempsey, we are worse off. The rich are richer, the poor are poorer, the planet’s environment is being destroyed, and, most important, our quality of life has not improved.READ MORE Let’s look at those issues worldwide, in the U.S. and Vermont.According to the EPA, just about every major source of air pollution has declined since 1990. If one part of the quality of your life is the air you breathe, you are better off today.Greenhouse gas emissions globally have gone up since the 1980s, but that’s almost entirely due to rising emissions from the developing world, primarily India and China. In Europe, emissions have fallen by more than one-third since 1990. In the U.S., they are lower than they were in 1990 and 16% below their 2005 peak.Increasing greenhouse gases from India and China are due to their rapid economic growth over the past 40 years, which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. That growth means that there are many more rich and middle-class people worldwide than there used to be. But far fewer poor people. In 1990, 40% of the world’s population lived on less than the equivalent of 800 U.S. dollars per year. Today that share is less than 10%. What about the U.S.? The official poverty rate is lower today than it was in 1980 and median income is higher. Is inequality higher?If you benefit by having Amazon at your fingertips, by using an iPhone, by connecting with friends on social media, by having a personal computer with easy-to-use software, by being able to Google the web, by driving an electric car or shopping at Walmart, then the much-maligned billionaires have created something very useful for all of us.  They earned their wealth honestly, and their success was not at other people’s cost. We have all benefited, and continue to benefit, from their success. Mr. Dempsey also argues that Vermont “must develop more housing to relieve the cost-of-living crisis many Vermonters are facing.”But building a house uses a tremendous amount of resources, and creating lumber, pipes, wires, sheetrock, insulation, glass, paint, and all the other inputs that go into a new house means using a lot of natural resources and energy. That is, building more houses means GDP will increase. How can you have a degrowthed economy that also builds more houses?But growth — a rising GDP — does not just mean more houses and more stuff. It’s the creation of goods and services. And we consume more and more services as the economy grows and we get wealthier.Producing services does not use many natural resources. It takes less less and less energy to create one dollar of GDP than it used to. That means using fewer natural resources and generating fewer carbon emissions per dollar of GDP. That’s not just true for currently wealthy economies like the U.S. It will happen worldwide as nations grow and people get wealthier.One of the most basic indicators of the quality of life is being alive. With the rapid economic growth the world has experienced, life expectancy worldwide has grown by 13 years and in the U.S. by four years since 1980.  Much of that increase in life expectancy is due to reductions in child mortality. In 1990, more than one in ten babies born in the world did not live to be 15. (Going further back in history before modern economic growth, half of all babies did not make it to 15).In Vermont, better health care and medical technology — both of which go along with our economic growth — have contributed to a reduction in infant mortality. In 1980, 85 Vermont babies died before they celebrated their first birthday — 10.9 deaths out of every 1,000 births. Today, 25 infants die, 4.7 out of every 1,000 births. It is still a tragedy for those families, but fewer families experience that loss today than in the recent past.If living longer and having fewer babies die is not a key indicator of an improving quality of life, I don’t know what is.People who argue for “degrowth” need to address why these benefits of economic growth would happen without a growing economy, and more importantly, they need to be able to explain to the billions of people far less wealthy than we in the West are, how they can escape from poverty in a degrowthed world.Finally, the proponents of degrowth need to explain to average Americans, and average Vermonters, why they should be content with a material standard of living for their children and their grandchildren that is no different than theirs is today. That experiment has been run before in human history. We call it The Dark Ages.Read the story on VTDigger here: Art Woolf: The benefits of growth. ...read more read less