Nature (the world’s #1 scientific publication) published an opinion piece called “Degrowth can work—here’s how science can help.” This piece argues:
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.
It additionally argues that degrowth can “create prosperity while using less materials and energy.”
The thing that is so funny about this argument at an extremely basic level is the authors are saying they do not want growth while describing exactly how growth works. Growth is, in fact, the process of creating stuff while using less materials, labor (which the authors omit), and energy. The authors do not seem to understand this.
The fact that you have 8 PhD’s, several with degrees in economics, arguing this makes it in fact funnier.
The stated goal of degrowth is environmental, with a side of paternalistic “it’s good for humans if you take into account what humans really need,”
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. This approach, which has gained traction in recent years, can enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown while improving social outcomes
And folks, we’re going to somehow stop producing a bunch of stuff while avoiding recession, ensuring full employment, improving public services, and reducing working hours. Really. If you don’t believe me, here’s the block quote:
Reduce less-necessary production. This means scaling down destructive sectors such as fossil fuels, mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars [emphasis mine] and aviation, including private jets. At the same time, there is a need to end the planned obsolescence of products, lengthen their lifespans and reduce the purchasing power of the rich.
Improve public services. It is necessary to ensure universal access to high-quality health care, education, housing, transportation, Internet, renewable energy and nutritious food. Universal public services can deliver strong social outcomes without high levels of resource use.
Introduce a green jobs guarantee. This would train and mobilize labour around urgent social and ecological objectives, such as installing renewables, insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems and improving social care. A programme of this type would end unemployment and ensure a just transition out of jobs for workers in declining industries or ‘sunset sectors’, such as those contingent on fossil fuels. It could be paired with a universal income policy.
Reduce working time. This could be achieved by lowering the retirement age, encouraging part-time working or adopting a four-day working week. These measures would lower carbon emissions and free people to engage in care and other welfare-improving activities. They would also stabilize employment as less-necessary production declines.
what if we took degrowth seriously
Let’s imagine a scenario where we do what the authors suggest, starting with production. We decide somehow that certain industries and types of production are going to be illegal. Not just banning fossil fuels (which is not a terrible idea!), but banning fast fashion, meat and dairy, advertising, cars, and planes.
OK, you’ve just created a recession. People cannot drive to work, they cannot buy eggs, legislators cannot fly to DC, everyone who works at H&M is out of a job, every advertising agency in NYC is shuttered. The authors state you can do this without a recession, but no you can’t. Whoopsie.
And we’re going to do this and also reduce working hours, and guarantee everyone a job, and increase funding for the public sector! Oh, don’t worry, we can do that because:
New forms of financing will be needed to fund public services without growth. Governments must stop subsidies for fossil-fuel extraction. They should tax ecologically damaging industries such as air travel and meat production. Wealth taxes can also be used to increase public resources and reduce inequality.
Every time you see a construction like something fundamentally “new” will solve a giant problem, you should be skeptical. There are myriad actually existing societies which attempt to solve hard problems in lots of different ways. And if none of them have managed to solve a problem in the way someone is suggesting, well, we should have some skepticism.
Ending entire industries and raising taxes also seem like a large political problems that a degrowther would need to address. But wait, the authors have suggestions.
Second, [degrowthers] should learn from sustainable ‘transition towns’, cooperatives, co-housing projects or other social formations that prioritize post-growth modes of living. The experiences of countries that have had to adapt to low-growth conditions — such as Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Japan — also hold lessons.
…
Fourth, a better grasp is needed of the political and economic interests that might oppose or support degrowth. For example, how do groups such as the think tanks, corporations, lobbyists and political parties that work to support elite interests organize, nationally and internationally, to scupper progressive economic and social policy? The role of the media in shaping pro-growth attitudes remains underexplored. Given the links between economic growth and geopolitical power, individual nations might be disinclined to act alone, for fear of facing competitive disadvantage, capital flight or international isolation. This ‘first mover’ problem raises the question of whether, and under what conditions, high-income countries might cooperate towards a degrowth transition.
OK, so we’re going to ban a bunch of industries, take “lessons” (which!?) from post-Soviet Cuba, and do some research about the role of the media in shaping pro-growth attitudes. We did it, we solved capitalism!
degrowth is not about the environment
And that’s the thing here, the argument in this degrowth article is not really about the environment. It’s about not liking the existing economic system. There are many, many good criticisms of actually existing capitalism. But “capitalism is bad at creating prosperity while using less materials and energy” is not one of them. Capitalism is fantastic at this. The prosperity is often unfairly distributed and doesn’t account for environmental externalities, for sure. Those things are bad and we should fix them. But that’s not what the degrowthers are arguing. They are arguing we need to blow the system up.
The dip into wanting to ban advertising is really the tell in this article. It’s not about sustainability or carbon emissions or wildlife and forests. It’s about disgust/anger at how people live and wanting to use a looming environmental catastrophe to generate the political will to punish people for their “bad behavior.” And the fact that they got this published at nature dot com is, well, pretty funny.
In my mind, degrowth has the flavor of pastoral environmentalism. The kind of environmentalism you see in The Population Bomb. Humans are a plague, the modern world is a plague, we must return to something that is “natural” or be punished for our sins. It’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God reformulated to be palatable to people with PhDs.
In my last post, I argued that internally consistent political philosophies that you can use to understand everything in the political world aren’t really great at guiding you to the truth or to good policy. I think degrowth is different from these internally consistent philosophies. Degrowth just sort of makes no sense on its face. And given the provenance of degrowth thought and the types of places where you see degrowth mentioned approvingly, this is pretty funny.
beyond criticism
I think there’s an entire line of sociological or STS research to do on how clear nonsense like this manages to survive in the academic world.
But I also think things like degrowth exist because climate catastrophe is a real possibility, preventing it seems hopeless, and there are not enough voices clearly proposing actual solutions. There a real climate fear that many people feel, including myself. We need to take this fear seriously and speak to it. But we need to speak to it by reminding people what are actually effective policies for averting catastrophe, and asking them to participate in political action to support these policies.
However, recommending policies like densification, electrification, and green energy abundance is very different from recommending the end of capitalism or the end of growth economies. In fact, if we succeed at producing a ton of carbon-free energy while electrifying transport and homes, living standards should go up a lot. It may make the contemporary economic system more secure rather than less. We will still live in a world of private property and markets. We will not end every problem: we will still have work to do in areas like gender and racial equality, labor rights, and inequality.
But if we are successful we can avert bad climate outcomes, and when talking about climate policy that’s what our goal should be.