{"id":20021,"date":"2016-04-18T20:27:32","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T01:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20021"},"modified":"2016-04-18T20:27:32","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T01:27:32","slug":"what-is-it-like-to-live-in-a-steady-state-economy-miss-hokusai-in-edo-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20021","title":{"rendered":"What is it like to live in a steady state economy? Miss Hokusai in Edo Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is it like to live in a steady state economy? Miss Hokusai in Edo Japan<\/a><\/h3>\n
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“Miss Hokusai<\/a>” is a delicate and beautiful movie set during the late Edo period in Japan. It may give us a feeling of what it is like to live in a steady-state economy. In the picture from the movie, you can see O-Ei (Miss Hokusai) together with her father, the painter Tetsuzo, better known by his pen name of Hokusai.<\/i><\/div>\n

We owe to Kennet Boulding the concept that \u201cAnyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.\u201d And we call the end of this impossible growth a condition of “no growth”, “zero growth” or “stable state.” Many people argue that such a condition is not only necessary because of physical reasons, but it is also a good condition to be in.<\/p>\n

In practice, we don’t know what a true “zero-growth” society could be, simply because it has never existed in the modern Western World. The only hint we can find on how such a society could be is from history. Probably the best example of such a society, close in time and very well known, is Japan during the Edo Period, that historians place between 1603 and 1868.<\/p>\n

We have no data about Edo Japan that we could compare to our modern concept of “Gross Domestic Product,” which is at the basis of our idea of “economic growth”. However, we have good data about the\u00a0population<\/a>\u00a0of that time and there is no doubt that it remained nearly stable during the whole period. We also know that the extent of cultivated land in Japan didn’t vary over almost one century and a half, from 1720 to 1874 (source<\/a>).
\n…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is it like to live in a steady state economy? Miss Hokusai in Edo Japan “Miss Hokusai” is a delicate and beautiful movie set during the late Edo period in Japan. It may give us a feeling of what it is like to live in a steady-state economy. In the picture from the movie, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13527,286,7985,353,452,13525,13526,7928],"class_list":["post-20021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-edo-japan","tag-exponential-growth","tag-finite-world","tag-gdp","tag-japan","tag-kennet-boulding","tag-stable-state","tag-steady-state-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20021"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20022,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20021\/revisions\/20022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}