The results are in. Degrowth is a terrible environmental strategy.
The covid shutdowns hurt the world's poorest and most vulnerable worst.
Welcome to EarthWatch, the independent environmental news and opinion newsletter for people who think you should never turn your back on Mother Earth—written by me, Jerry Bowles, an ancient scribbler who has been around the Sun a few times and doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
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Who can forget the moment a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg first burst on to TV news, angrily lecturing world leaders at the United Nations in 2019:
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
I must confess that her words were so startling and rendered with such passion that my immediate concern was not their profound implications but the poor child’s mental state. That was a condescension I sincerely regret. We have grown so accustomed to political bullshit that we no longer recognize misguided sincerity when we hear it.
What I didn’t realize right away was that Thunberg was brilliantly mainstreaming an incredibly dangerous anti-growth movement of economists, environmentalists, prominent citizens, and the Pope who sincerely believe the only way to create a just society and avoid environmental extinction is to stabilize or even shrink the global economy.
“Degrowth,” which makes at least as much sense grammatically as deplane, has been percolating in plain sight for the past several decades inspired, as usual, by a gang of 1970s French intellectuals who called it “décroissance.“ In the introduction to a recent book, Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, the editors describe the movement succinctly:
‘The foundational theses of degrowth are that growth is uneconomic and unjust, that it is ecologically unsustainable and that it will never be enough.’
Another prominent degrowther, Phineas Harper, director of Open City describes it this way.
Degrowth is a designed reduction of total energy and material use to realign society with planetary limits, while improving people's lives and distributing resources fairly. It is an economic model that recognises that the route to greater welfare for all is not one of more extraction and expansion, but of more sharing and co-operation.
Like most new ideas, degrowth is not really a new idea. Back in 1848, the great moral philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote The Principles of Economy, building on Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus’ concepts of lassez-faire capitalism. He postulated that such a system would eventually lead to a “stationary state economy,” a condition of economic stagnation whereby a society, having reached the physical limits of economic growth, would simply reproduce wealth by replacing worn-out goods, maintaining capital stocks, and carefully husbanding nonrenewable resources.
Surely, no sane society would continue to create new goods and services that people didn’t want or really need once they had achieved a sustainable comfort level. The poor dear silly man honestly believed that once we had all we needed we would spend our time in pursuit of enlightenment and happiness, not just accumulating more stuff.
Let’s stipulate that many of the critiques of unbridled economic growth are true. It creates winners and losers depending often on a nation’s supply of natural resources. It produces serious environmental damage, along with increases in the supply of goods and services that we consume. Much of that consumption is wasteful especially in high-income countries.
GDP, the standard economic measure of a country’s fiscal health, may account for goods and services but it does not account for the environmental bads that are part of their production. GDP per capita is worthless in terms of general well-being because it reveals nothing about the distribution of income or wealth.
And, yet, for all its faults, economic growth and the jobs it creates has lifted more of the world’s population out of poverty in the last 100 years than any other approach. Over the past decade, the 18 indicators included in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have improved year-to-year on every single measure.
Until 2020. The vast majority of goals declined last year.
The global pandemic with its economic lockdowns, shutdowns and massive job losses provided the first real-world test of the degrowth theory that scaling back economic activities to curtail environmental damage is a workable strategy.
The results or this accidental “degrowth” were not pretty. True, carbon emissions were down by the largest percentage since World War II but those temporary gains came at the expense of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.
The World Bank estimated that the global economy contracted by 4.3% in 2020, a turnaround of 6.8 percentage points.
A Pew Research Center analysis found the ranks of the global middle income — those who live on $10.01 to $20 a day — fell by 54 million in 2020 compared to the number projected before the pandemic, while the number of global poor rose by 131 million.
The number of people in the global high-income tier (more than $50 daily) is estimated to have decreased by 62 million in 2020, erasing about half of the gain since 2011, with most of the change emanating from advanced economies.
This will not be enough to make the true degrowth believers see the error of their ways but it should. Too many of them believe that cleaning up the global economy by switching from fossil fuels to zero-carbon sources of energy won’t be enough. Growth itself is the real culprit.
That is simply the inverse of reality. As economic Max Roser wrote in a recent Our Word in Data post:
The huge majority of the world today is very poor. About 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day and 63% live on less than $10 per day.1 I believe, for reasons I’ll explain below, that if this should change it will require very substantial economic growth of the economies that are home to the poorest billions of people in the world.
The reason I wrote this text is that I believe some commentators on global poverty are not clear about the reality that very substantial growth is needed if people in poor countries should have a chance to leave poverty behind. I believe that if we do not express very clearly that economic growth is needed we are damaging the prospects of the poorest people in the world to leave poverty behind.
Many of the degrowthers disagree on just how much degrowth is the right amount of degrowth but almost all of them share a skepticism of “sustainable development” which they view as a compact between governments and large corporations to keep on doing the same old things by nibbling at the edges of the climate crisis.
In truth, much of the real climate heavy lifting being done right now is through the efforts of large and small global enterprises. We don’t need degrowth, we need cleaner and more sustainable growth in advanced countries and a clear pathway and assistance toward clean environmental goals in countries that are still developing and raising their citizens out of poverty. We need to finally address the problems of poverty and wealth inequity everywhere. Growth is not the enemy. We are our worst enemies.
Dig Deeper
The Pandemic Stalls Growth in the Global Middle Class, Pushes Poverty Up Sharply
DEGROWTH: A vocabulary for a new era
John Stuart Mill and the Idea of a Stationary State Economy
Choose Growth: Shaping Europe’s Future Now
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You quote "Degrowth is a designed reduction..." but when there's "accidental" degrowth, you think the mess isn't to do with "accidental" versus "designed"? To me the fact that something that should be designed has poor outcomes when it happens accidentally (landing a plane, putting a dog to sleep, having a vasectomy) isn't unexpected, and I generally feel it's the "accident" part that causes problems. I suspect you don't generally consider the poor outcomes of an accident to be an accurate reflection of what would occur when something goes to plan according to it's design (c'mon, you know how nutty that would make you sound for literally anything else!). So why try to make that an argument here?
Jerry, I have been enjoying your EarthWatch postings, and am impressed by your the depth of your reading and understanding. However today's posting is not your best. The points you bring up are very pertinent, but you seem to skate over them, and I would appreciate a more in-depth article on these issues. We must all understand the major shift that is coming as we move to a post capitalist society. Can you re-visit the de-growth topic with more insight? All the best, Peter