degrowth 1: putting the growth in degrowth
what degrowthers get right; fundamental errors
This is the first post in the doomed ideologies series. Please subscribe to good and bad ideas to follow along.
what is degrowth
Degrowth is a contemporary ideology that proceeds from the premise that if we continue to have economic growth, we will run out of resources and cook the planet due to climate change. It’s impossible to have infinite growth in a finite world, the phrase goes. And we need to address climate change quickly to avert catastrophe. As a summary article puts it,
Researchers in ecological economics call for a different approach — degrowth. Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.
Degrowth isn’t just about addressing climate change, but also envisions other sustainability goals (think fish, wildlife, habitats). It additionally imagines a transformation of everyday life in somewhat paradoxical ways: guaranteeing everyone a job, reducing working hours, producing less, decentering work as part of life. The vision is to reduce “social metabolism”, a term which basically means the entire resource throughput of a society, down to sustainable levels, while also securing the good life for everyone on the planet.
Crucially, degrowth views overuse of resources, deprivation, inequality, and indeed even the breakdown of community you see documented in books like Bowling Alone as inextricably produced by the capitalist system. The common call from degrowthers is to end capitalism. If you think I am mischaracterizing, here is a recent tweet from the world’s most prominent degrowther.
Degrowth is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. As Ezra Klein remarked on his podcast, “it’s tricky to talk about [degrowth]… because its advocates will continue to say you’re defining it wrong.” This has been my experience as well, but we will try anyway.
I’m working from three main sources:
“Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help”, which is a quick overview of degrowth I would encourage you to read
“Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World” by Jason Hickel
“The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism” by Schmelzer, Vansintjan, and Vetter (SVV)
I’ll refer to Hickel and Schmelzer et al (SVV) separately, as I believe their descriptions of degrowth are different in important ways.
If you want to criticize me by saying I haven’t read enough degrowth, please stop. Two books is more than enough to communicate the fundamentals of an idea. I’ll refer you to Noam Chomsky’s essay on postmodernism: please just explain what I am getting wrong in plain, succinct language and I will be happy to have a conversation with you. I am open to changing my mind, including revising my conclusion that degrowth is a doomed ideology.
let’s criticize GDP
The degrowthers’ complaints about GDP are, in part, reasonable. GDP is a measure of the dollar value of economic activity, not of human well-being. Anybody familiar with the US healthcare system’s sky-high prices and poor outcomes will tell you that just because something costs more does not make it better. This is a well-worn and correct critique of national accounting statistics. You can read Marilyn Waring’s Counting for Nothing from 1988 to see a similar critique from a feminist perspective.
So, Hickel’s perfectly correct that healthcare and education are crucial public functions that the mega-rich US does poorly while less-rich-but-still-rich countries do much better.
Take life expectancy, for example. The United States has a GDP per capita of $59,500, making it one of the world’s richest countries. People in the US can expect to live 78.7 years, nudging them just into the top 20%. But dozens of countries beat the US on this crucial indicator with only a fraction of the income. Japan has 35% less income than the US, but a life expectancy of 84 years – the highest in the world. South Korea has 50% less income and a life expectancy of 82 years.
Hickel, Jason. Less is More (p. 174). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Finland is widely known as having one of the best education systems in the world, despite having a GDP per capita that’s 25% less than the United States. Estonia is right towards the top of world education rankings too, but with 66% less income than the US.12 Poland outperforms the US with 77% less.
Hickel, Jason. Less is More (p. 175). Random House. Kindle Edition.
It is a consistent frustration for those on the American left that we clearly have the resources to provide the world’s best healthcare and education but cannot due to a combination of privatization and government dysfunction.
It’s also trivial to come up with examples of gaming GDP statistics to make the GDP number go up: destroying and rebuilding a bridge is one classic example, along with privatizing formerly public services. These activities are actually bad but make GDP go up, and that is bad.
So yeah, GDP is not a perfect measure, mindlessly maximizing it is not good. This is perfectly true and not a critique novel to degrowth. But what degrowthers want to do about the issues with GDP and growth is where things break down.
steelmanning degrowth
Degrowth’s headline goals of using fewer resources, fighting climate change, and securing the good life for everyone on earth are genuinely good ones.
The biggest issue with degrowth is that it is really likely you’ll need economic growth to achieve this. Degrowthers explicitly disavow “green growth” as a workable solution to our problems. You can see this both in Hickel and SVV. First Hickel,
All this brings us into new political terrain. A new consensus has emerged. While for decades we have been relying on market mechanisms to somehow magically fix the climate crisis, it’s now clear this approach isn’t going to do. The only way to make it work is with co-ordinated government action on a massive scale.
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The claim is that transitioning to clean energy will liberate capitalism from any concerns about ecology. It will pave the way to ‘green growth’, they say, and we can keep expanding the economy for ever.
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But this narrative suffers from a number of serious flaws. In fact, scientists go so far as to reject green growth hopes as empirically baseless.
The key point to grasp is that while it’s possible to transition to 100% renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.Hickel, Jason. Less is More (p. 137). Random House. Kindle Edition.
SVV strikes a similar note, calling green growth “naive” and saying,
Neither green growth nor left productivism are desirable options: growth cannot solve the problems it creates, and, to face the impending crises, we need an economy that values rather than exploits, disposes of, and invisibilizes, women and people of the global majority.
Schmelzer, Matthias; Vetter, Andrea; Vansintjan, Aaron. The Future is Degrowth (p. 35). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
Let’s also back up and define growth a bit, which isn’t done super clearly in the degrowth literature. Growth is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, we talk about growth as the overall GDP number going up. That’s one definition, but that’s a sort of static definition that hides the mechanics of growth. It doesn’t tell you why growth happens.
Growth is also the micro-level processes where people figure out how to produce more things while using the same amount (or reduced) resources. In economic terms, growth over the long term is really about productivity. From the St Louis Fed,
It has been shown, both theoretically and empirically, that technological progress is the main driver of long-run growth. The explanation is actually quite straightforward. Holding other input factors constant, the additional output obtained when adding one extra unit input of capital or labor will eventually decline, according to the law of diminishing returns. As a result, a country cannot maintain its long-run growth by simply accumulating more capital or labor. Therefore, the driver of long-run growth has to be technological progress.
To drive long-run growth, we have to learn to do more with a given value of capital and hours of labor. This is called a productivity increase (or technological progress, if you like, although I prefer productivity because it centers workers). If you have taken an undergraduate macro class, you learned the Solow model which illustrates exactly this.
In this sense, at the very least productivity growth seems like a very good thing, and in fact necessary for the degrowth project. If you want to be charitable to the degrowthers, I think you would argue the following:
That is, degrowthers think we need to radically reduce our capital usage, perhaps reduce labor or keep it the same while ensuring everyone is employed, and radically increase productivity. You might end up coming out behind on overall production (meaning GDP goes down, you have some quarters of negative growth). But the fundamental reason this would work is identical to the reason why capitalism has been successful over the long run: productivity growth largely enabled by technological progress. But as we have already seen, degrowthers explicitly reject green growth as a solution.
I was challenged on this argument by a friend who said: “George, your degrowth steelman is exactly correct. Degrowthers are huge productivity fans but hate capitalism.” So I dug into it. Here is what I could find on degrowthers and productivity.
SVV have some comments where they foundationally misunderstand what productivity is, arguing that increased productivity in advanced economies is due to cheap labor in other countries,
The debate is complex and involves both theoretical and empirical arguments. To begin with, the widely held idea that productivity improvements due to technological innovations lead to savings in resources and energy is historically misleading and factually wrong. Productivity increases were, in effect, largely caused by the use and appropriation of cheap labour and nature, by the increasing use of fossil fuels, and by ecological plundering and the shifting of costs to the future and to the countries of the Global South.
Schmelzer, Matthias; Vetter, Andrea; Vansintjan, Aaron. The Future is Degrowth (p. 87). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
and elsewhere they devote a section to critiquing industrialism altogether where they state,
With the critique of progress in productivity – the ability to produce more and more goods in ever shorter time – this critique questions the central factor by which both capitalist and socialist societies measure or have measured their success.
Schmelzer, Matthias; Vetter, Andrea; Vansintjan, Aaron. The Future is Degrowth (p. 143). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
These do not seem like productivity fans to me. Since SVV is the more extreme degrowth argument, I also looked in Hickel, who has this to say,
As labour productivity improves, firms need fewer workers. People get laid off and unemployment rises; poverty and homelessness go up. Governments have to respond by scrambling to generate more growth just to create new jobs. But the crisis never goes away; it just keeps recurring, year after year. This is known as the ‘productivity trap’. We are in the absurd position of needing perpetual growth just in order to avoid societal collapse.
Hickel, Jason. Less is More (p. 97). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Again, not a fan of productivity.
But perhaps there is something in the published literature where they say, “actually, yeah productivity increases are good.” Well, I found this article by Sekulova et al with 300 citations:
The policy option of a Job Guarantee scheme is examined as a tool to decouple jobs from economic growth and fiscal policy by bringing them to the realm of political rights. This is complemented by a discussion of the social benefits of an “amateur economy” through work-sharing and a socially beneficial reduction in labour productivity.
This article also discusses how this managed reduction in labor productivity would be used to guarantee everyone a job. We are doing less per hour so everyone needs to work, get it? Welp.
Degrowthers, in fact, want productivity to decline. They see productivity as necessitated by capitalism, which is bad in their view. This is a truly radical and deeply undesirable thing. It’s not mentioned prominently probably because it would be incredibly hard to defend. Think about it, in addition to using less capital (degrowthers have proposed a fixed cap on resource usage), they also want us to do less with each unit of capital and hour of work we have.
To me, this can be basically summarized as wanting to impoverish people. If you are proposing this, it is intellectually dishonest not to level with people about it. Sure, you want to reorganize the public sector to do better healthcare, amazing, we all agree on that. But you also want to have a socially managed decline in labor productivity because you think it will save the planet.
Let me make one Soviet Union comparison, OK? Can you imagine what these jobs would be like under a regime of socially managed productivity declines? It sounds like the People’s Degrowth Council would come in and be like: no you can’t use Excel anymore, that’s a bourgeois instrument of productivity growth.
OK, ok, I’m done.
degrowthers need growth
We got pretty down in the weeds there. Let’s go all the way back to the top of the argument stack. Degrowthers want to save planet Earth and prevent the worst of climate change. If you take those goals seriously and ignore the rest of their argument, it’s obvious that you need technological advancement and productivity increases. (You will also need government policy, and behavioral changes, for sure.)
One example of technological progress: solar panels getting more efficient and driving down the cost has made them economically preferable to other sources of electricity, which is a huge win for the planet.
Even in the hypercapitalist US, we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions while growing or potentially because we are growing.
To ignore this seems like a huge error, and to deny that productivity growth can be aligned with fighting climate change seems silly. Degrowthers will argue this isn’t fast enough, which might be true. But a socially managed decline in productivity is not going to fix it!
If you want to argue that productivity growth does not necessarily fight climate change and we need to do government policy to direct market forces, sure! That’s a great idea.
But that is foundationally not what degrowthers are arguing, as we have seen.
keep your eye on the ball
Degrowth is a difficult ideology to assess because it is really difficult to pin down what they want to do. This is undesirable for an ideology that claims it is the only way to save the planet, but I get it. Basic parts of the agenda, such as reducing output per hour worked, are really hard to defend and degrowthers likely know this. This is where the ideology really comes in, in the same way that the Republicans are ideologically committed to tax cuts for the rich.
In the case of degrowth, the proposal is actually about as radical as you can get: it would in many ways unwind the modern world. Again, there is nothing wrong with proposing this but you really need to level with people about it. You can’t promise abundance for all—people are going to get poorer. You just can’t argue
And the good news is that we can do this without any negative impact on human welfare. In fact, we can do it while improving people’s lives.
Hickel, Jason. Less is More (p. 206). Random House. Kindle Edition.
As I said in a previous blog post, my conclusion is that degrowth is not about the environment. It’s about not liking capitalism. If you were trying to fight climate change as quickly as possible, you wouldn’t propose ending capitalism first. If you genuinely believe that the only way to fight climate change is to end capitalism, well, I would encourage you to rethink that. We have seen that even the United States is making real progress fighting climate change, and we can increase the speed of that progress by all pitching in.
To support this end-capitalism-at-all-costs point, I want to finish with a quotation from SVV about implementing a universal basic income (UBI).
For example, if a basic income were to be implemented without further policy changes, it is likely that this would further entrench class and labour divisions between citizens of a country and migrants, who cannot access such policies. It could, furthermore, actually increase unsustainable consumption – and would not solve the alienation of labour in itself. Finally, a basic income, within patriarchy, could further push women out of the sphere of wage labour, as they may spend much of their time focusing on care work and housework instead of pursuing a profession.
Schmelzer, Matthias; Vetter, Andrea; Vansintjan, Aaron. The Future is Degrowth (pp. 214-215). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
That’s right, we can’t end poverty by implementing a UBI until we end capitalism and the patriarchy. Oof.
next time on doomed ideologies
Next time, we’ll look at the politics of degrowth! Please like, subscribe, and share!
Also, from this post but also our own conversations, I think a basic argument you’re making is:
“Degrowth” is a fundamentally unstable coalition between two ideological currents.
Team anti-GDP wants abundance, less work. They’ve confused the metric (GDP) for the thing it is meant to measure. Many of their critics of the GDP metric are fine, but fundamentally they’re putting radical chic on boring old productivity faith, redistribution, and better technocratic accounting of what “true” growth is. They want growth, just not the kind we have now.
The other faction, the true anti growthers, want to make things worse for humanity. Get rid of things that make people happy. Malthusianism. Less resources, overall less wellbeing. we’ll try to militate a bit maybe with better practices, but fundamentally humans flourishing now is unconscionable theft from the future.
The same person might flit from arguments of faction A and B. They aren’t necessarily factions as in organized groups as much as two very different arguments. They use similar terms but are arguing for contradictory things.
Just as water is pure and earth is fecund, so too could we have two relatively clear (if with varying feasibility) arguments existing. We don’t live in that world. We live in the mud of those two things entwined. Impossible to separate in practice and therefore in the process making us all dirtier.
The sludge of bad, contradictory, impossible arguments make this group of people so infuriating to engage.
That UBI quote is killer.
In your next post, will you talk about the factions in degrowthers? Feels like there’s a bait and switch there that could be explained by different groups under the same banner