Economy

My friend was obviously in a good mood. While I was still pondering about his suggestion of monitoring treatment complications, he continued with his speech.

“We can consider the problem from a wider perspective. It is silly to monitor clinical activity and give money accordingly because medical professionals are good at generating useless activities. In fact, it is no wiser to monitor all forms of economic activity, and I consider it an obsessive disorder of the modern society to insist on a continual economic growth!”

“Why?” I seemed kept asking the same question that evening.

“Alas, because economic activities, whether being measured by GDP or whatever, reflects how much resource we exploit on this planet – or the amount of pollution we generate.”

“Not necessarily,” I retorted, “We have environment-friendly industries, and there are a whole lot of companies and people make their livings on recycling or other means to cut down pollution.”

“Alas, you think so?” L was laughing, “To me, environment-friendly industry is the modern version of the Holy Roman Empire – despite of its name, it was not holy, it had very little to do with Roman, and it was not an empire!”