Economic Sustainability

Economic sustainability means holding investment at rates sufficient to maintain stocks of capital. It also means that economic prosperity and development should be achieved without decreasing the prospects for posterity. Economic sustainability requires economic capital to be stable, to remain intact. The basic idea is to determine the maximum level of consumption by current generations such that capital (natural or man-made) accumulates to permit future generations to enjoy the same opportunities. Implied is the notion that some capital stock is maintained indefinitely in order to perpetuate future levels of consumption.

Sustainability refers to the long-term viability of a community, set of social institutions, or societal practice. The idea rose to prominence with the modern environmental movement, which rebuked the unsustainable character of contemporary societies where patterns of resource use, growth, and consumption threaten the integrity of ecosystems and the well-being of future generations. Sustainability is presented as an alternative to short-term, myopic, and wasteful behavior. It serves as a standard against which existing institutions are to be judged and as an objective toward which society should move. With respect to governance, it implies an interrogation of existing modes of social organization to determine the extent to which they encourage destructive practices as well as a conscious effort to transform the status quo to promote the development of more sustainable patterns of activity.

Sustainability resonates with cognate concepts such as sustainable yield, sustainable society, and sustainable development. Sustainable yield relates to the harvest of a specific (self-renewing) natural resource—say timber or fish. Such a yield is one that can in principle be maintained indefinitely because it can be supported by the regenerative capacities of the underlying natural system. A sustainable society is one that has learned to live within the boundaries established by ecological limits. It can be maintained as a collective and ...