RECENTLY Shanghai's environmental watchdog ordered 14 of the 17 lead-acid battery plants in the city to stop production pending investigation of toxic discharges.

The move has been taken after some children living in Kangqiao area were found to have excessive levels of lead in their blood in early September.

This is just one case suggesting how an industrial source of pride (as a contributor to local GDP) becomes a curse when some of its environmental costs are considered.

In other words, local officials can continue to talk gleefully of growth as long as they can pretend not to see its ecological and health consequences.

And the costs are high. About 34 percent of children in China have blood-lead levels that exceed the WHO limit, mainly attributed to exhausts from cars, according to researchers at the Beijing University Health Science Center, after reviewing 10 years of data.

In the United States, where economic growth is almost flat, less than 1 percent of children have blood-lead levels above the WHO limit.

While growth is relative, ephemeral and hard to maintain year after year, the effects of lead exposure in children appear to be long-lasting and irreversible.

Tim Jackson's "Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet" gives an unusually candid analysis of what GDP purports to measure, and what it fails to take in.

The book explains that gross domestic product (GDP) is a common measure of economic growth, but it fails to consider the ecological damage caused by that growth.

By prioritizing growth, capitalism has raised productivity to a level that can only be sustained by excessive consumption.

In order to perpetuate this production-consumption cycle, capitalism has developed a huge advertising sector specialized in celebrating consumption power as a source of pride, pleasure, or evidence of elegance and success.

Unconditional glorification of consumption deliberately ignores such inconvenient truths as the depletion of vital resources, pollution of the air and water, and changing climate.

Age of irresponsibility

As the production capacity of capitalism is too much for its own consumption, it needs to convert more people into consumers of its products.

Thus the gospel of prosperity (read: consumption) is diligently preached to all homo sapiens.

Jackson calls for a redefinition of prosperity with an emphasis on the sense of security that allows people to live happier, more meaningful lives. The benefits of prosperity should be societal, not individual.

Ironically, prosperity is trumpeted most in an era of relentless and brutal onslaught on nature, as evinced by shrinking rainforest, melting icecaps, and a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction capable of blowing up the earth many times.

Human history demonstrates that the planet is big enough to meet everyone's needs, but not everyone's greed.

A recognition of the limits of the planet necessarily entails the debunking of the cult of GDP, which is difficult.

"The idea of a nongrowing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist," Jackson observes.

Today politicians and economists are more comfortable with sustainable growth, or an ever-lasting, continually expanding economic paradise, rather than no-growth or negative growth.

Jackson believes the financial panic of 2008 had its root in a myopic commitment to growth. Subsequent regulatory intervention to stimulate growth helped bail out Wall Street, which dictates American policy.

In China, where the crisis was largely conjectural while clamor for bailouts was loud, the government pumped a multi-trillion-yuan stimulus into the economy, quickly declared victory in defusing the crisis, and set the stage for runaway inflation that is still robbing us every day.

The crisis management rationale does shed light on the fact that many politicians are driven to sustain growth at the expense of the well-being of citizens.

Growth has become an purpose in its own right, decontextualized, mystified, enshrined.

In the waves of forced demolitions that no longer make news in China, growth is more and more extracted from blood.

The approbation of growth centers on the glorification of consumption (read: prosperity).

"The age of irresponsibility demonstrates a long-term blindness to the limitations of the material world," Jackson comments.

Hidden costs

There is also a blindness to the limitations of consumption itself.

As the book mentions, the law of "diminishing marginal utility" means that each additional unit of a particular product or service gives the owner less satisfaction than the previous unit did.

Which explains why people in Denmark, Ireland and Sweden are found to be more satisfied with their life than Americans, although they earn less on average than residents of the US.

As practical use and rational function can no longer justify significant additional consumption, there arises the need to cultivate in human beings a fascination with novelty, and sensitivity to new brands.

Thus owning or aspiring to own such e-gadgets as iPads or iPhones has acquired near religious connotations.

In accordance with the ideals of capitalists, aspects of human existence formerly known as cultural or spiritual have been successfully reduced to a brand and a price tag.

"Material goods provide a vital language through which we communicate with each other about the things that really matter: family, identity, friendship, community, purpose in life," Jackson writes.

This life of mindless material accumulation has been hailed as liberating, inspiring and more worthy than any other alternatives.

One needn't be clairvoyant to realize that this freedom amounts to no more than the freedom to consume, or a license to trash the environment as much as one can.

The author goes on to debunk the macro economists who are obsessed with countable units of material goods, but who fail to pay sufficient attention to the planet and its population. In other words, they measure progress in total disregard of the ecological and social costs of growth.

"The new macroeconomics will need to be ecologically and socially literate, ending the folly of separating the economy from society and the environment," Jackson points out.

Only when we are no longer bound to a narrow economic concept can we hope to be sensible of intrinsic human values, and the hidden costs of growth. Like the afore-mentioned battery plants.

One of the chief drivers for the growth miracle in China is the huge migration of former peasants flocking into cities as cheap labor.

The labor fueled decades of growth, but only recently our attention has turned to the non-economic factors of the migration that is acknowledged to be the most spectacular on the planet.

This includes the welfare of the children and parents of the migrants, or the migrants themselves.

As the author states, "The cultural drift that reinforces individualism at the expense of society, and supports innovation at the expense of tradition, is a distortion of what it means to be human."