Peter Victor. Photo by Molly Crealock.

Could you live on $14,000 a year? Could everyone in Canada? And could we live on $14,000 a year for the rest of history?

That’s the sort of uncomfortable, prickly question Peter Victor likes to ask. And the way you answer might say a lot about the future of the planet.

That’s because Victor is an economist at York University who is a leading pioneer in “no-growth” economics, a field that tries to figure out whether it’s possible to create an economy that stops growing—yet doesn’t collapse.

Environmentalists, of course, have long warned that humanity is chewing through the world’s natural resources— land, trees, minerals—at an unsustainable locust’s pace. But every country’s prosperity currently depends on constant growth: more people, more consumption, more stuff.

A few years ago, Victor wondered: Could an economy stop growing but still remain prosperous?

To find out, he began working on a computer model that replicated the Canadian economy. Once he’d built a model approximating reality, he began tweaking some of the major variables to cut growth: He lowered consumption, tweaked productivity, and halted the increase of population. He imposed a slew of government policies aimed at increasing taxes for the wealthy and reducing the use of fossil fuels. Then he extrapolated forward to see what would happen.

The upshot? Victor’s virtual Canada slowly stopped growing after 2010, and after a few turbulent decades, unemployment dwindled to just four percent. Greenhouse gases went down to Kyoto levels. And then…things just stayed the same. Ecological catastrophe was averted. In 2008, he published Managing Without Growth, and became the first economist to prove—virtually, anyway—that a steady-state economy is possible.

“I’m trying to the plant the seeds of this idea,” he tells me. “The climate is changing things rapidly, and people think, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ They need ideas.” In the wake of his book, Victor has become something of a rock star amongst environmental economists, travelling the world to explain his ideas at conferences, and even meeting with the curious finance minister of Finland. People, he tells me, are fascinated by the details: What would it be like to live in a non-growing world? Could we handle it?

Could you? Well, there’d be one big upside: We would all work less—a lot less. That’s because technology naturally reduces workforces: say it takes 100 people to make one airplane this year. Next year, technological improvements will mean it only takes 90. Soon after, just 80; in a decade, perhaps as few as 50.

Currently, such rising productivity—the amount of work one person can do—creates unemployment, so governments push policies that grow the economy and create jobs for those 50 people who are no longer building airplanes.

Victor’s plan works differently. Instead of firing workers as we become more productive, we just share an ever-decreasing pile of work. Keep employed, but work fewer hours. In Victor’s computer model, Canadians gradually work their way down to a four-day workweek, perhaps even less. (“When I mention this to people,” Victor says, “you can hear their sigh of relief.”)

Working less would transform society in many ways: Imagine the spectacular upsides for health care and education if Canadians had more time to spend caring for themselves and teaching their children.

Sounds great—but it wouldn’t be easy. To achieve zero growth, Canadians would need to seriously curtail their consumption. In a recent paper, Victor plotted out a global nongrowing economy—the whole planet this time—then ran the numbers and found Canadians would need to decrease their average income to around $14,000—roughly our prosperity from the ’70s. Granted, the rest the world would see its income rise dramatically from hundreds of dollars to thousands: We go down, but Bangladesh shoots up. (Victor’s no-growth vision is decidedly in favor of more economic equality.) And since technology increases productivity, that $14,000 buys a lot more quality of life than it did in the ’70s. But it would still be a hard sell on most Canadians.

Even bleaker, though, is the challenge of stabilizing population. Victor’s model requires a flat population curve, and it’s hard to figure out how to achieve that without some pretty authoritarian family-planning policies (à la China’s one-child rule). Victor is well aware of how crazily difficult it would be to craft a no-growth world. For a guy with some of the most radical ideas around, he’s an unassuming, avuncular sort — more tweedy professor than ideological bomb-thrower.

“I know that these ideas are almost impossible for politicians to embrace now,” he says matter-of-factly. But as resources dwindle, Victor is starting a difficult and crucial conversation—one that we may soon have no choice but to join.

There’s nothing like an all-purpose label to bring comfort and order to an otherwise overwhelming world. But what’s comforting to one person can be downright offensive to another. When it comes to the language used to label the “non-Western” world, quotation marks just won’t cut it anymore. What’s really behind the terms we use and which ones should we be avoiding?

Third World

ORIGINS: Attributed to French economist Alfred Sauvy in the 1950s, it originally referred to countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that were not aligned with either the capitalist (First World) or Communist (Second World) blocs.
STATUS: It’s dated—avoid using it. According to Shahidul Alam (see below), who coined the term “Majority World,” when used by the so-called West this phrase is hierarchical and reinforces “the stereotypes about poor communities and represents them as icons of poverty. It hides their histories of oppression and continued exploitation.”

Developing World

ORIGINS: The notion of “areas needing development” was introduced by U.S. President Harry Truman in his 1949 inaugural address. Originally a measure of income and wealth, the World Bank now defines developing in terms of quality of life, which includes economic growth and basic social services.
STATUS: Use with caution—the term has built-in problems. “Developing opens up a huge can of worms,” points out New Internationalist co-editor Dinyar Godrej. “Are we talking purely economic development or cultural development, and if the latter, isn’t such terminology blatantly prejudicial?”

Global South

ORIGINS: Credited to West German chancellor Willy Brandt, whose 1980 report, North-South: A Programme for Survival, divided the world into economic hemispheres: North and South, with exceptions like Australia and New Zealand. The term was taken up in academia in the 90s.
STATUS: The UN and other NGOs love this term and so can you. It “refers to those poorer nations that are not left out of development, but whose labor and lives pay for the affluence of the North,” writes Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. However, use it carefully. Matthew J.O. Scott, former head of World Vision International’s UN Office in New York, prefers it, but cautions, “It doesn’t describe the global poor who technically live north of the equator.” And, points out Sumita Dixit, a senior advisor with Canada’s department of foreign affairs, “While Global South has some resonance, this term ignores the incredible diversity among countries.”

Majority World

ORIGINS: Coined by writer and photographer Shahidul Alam in the early ’90s.
STATUS: While it’s a lesser-known phrase, feel free to get ahead of the trend and use it, because, says Alam, the term “highlights the fact that we are indeed the majority of humankind. It also brings to sharp attention the anomaly that the G8 countries—whose decisions affect the majority of the world’s peoples—represent a tiny fraction of humankind.”