Speakers Discuss Population Growth

A Wellesley economics professor and a National Labor Caucus member debated the economics implications of zero population growth last night at MIT.

"Today, progress is the opiate of the people," Marshall Goldman, a professor of Economics at Wellesley College, said.

"The way things are going, we promise progress to everybody, but the planet just can't take it," he added.

No Solution

Goldman said that there is "no solution" to the current problems posed by the rapidly increasing world economic growth, a growth which counts "only what companies are producing, not what they're destroying."

In his rebuttal, Paul Gallagher, a member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, termed zero growth "a form of radical pessimism around which bourgeois thinkers are grouping."

"The widespread acceptance of zero growth springs from the widespread depression and demoralization of capitalist society," he added.