#economic degrowth

[rjzimmerman]

Ending growth won’t save the planet. (Washington Post Op-Ed)

Ever since Thomas Malthus argued just over 200 years ago that population growth would outstrip “the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,” there has been a continuous parade of Cassandras fretting that humanity is about to exhaust the planet’s carrying capacity.

Neo-Malthusian thinking inspired such 20th-century writings as Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” and the Club of Rome’s 1972 “The Limits to Growth,” which predicted civilization would end “sometime within the next one hundred years.” In “Toward a Steady-State Economy,” published in 1973, economist Herman Daly argued that economic growth should be resisted for the sake of the environment.

Climate change is drawing out such sentiments again. Yet the prescription — that economic growth must stop — is as wrong as it was when the grim Rev. Malthus predicted that a growing population would outstrip the Earth’s capacity to produce food, requiring famine, war and pestilence to bring humanity’s numbers back to a sustainable level.

“Degrowth” — the brand name for neo-Malthusianism — ignores how ingenuity and innovation have repeatedly empowered humanity to overcome ecological constraints identified by Malthus, Ehrlich, et al. Degrowthers ignore basic lessons of history: The world experienced no growth for hundreds of years. Getting ahead economically during certain periods of the Middle Ages, for example, required plundering one’s neighbor. Transactions were zero-sum. The outcome was centuries of conquest and subjugation.

Malthus made his predictions just as England and the rest of Europe were about to enter a two-century era of unprecedented economic growth, which liberated much of humanity from misery and drastically improved health and well-being. Ehrlich’s prophecies came just as the Green Revolution in agriculture was saving hundreds of millions from hunger.

Growth built a world in which one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss. Consensual politics and democracy wouldn’t have been possible without it. We wonder how Daly or his acolytes would be received in the bustling yet poor megalopolis of Lagos, Nigeria, proclaiming the end of growth (or procreation) to save the planet.

And yet degrowth is coming back in fashion. The ranks of degrowthers include progressive journalist Naomi Klein, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and even Pope Francis. At least one European university is now offering a master’s degree in degrowth.

The truth is that degrowth wouldn’t fix climate change even in the unlikely event it could be imposed. Carbon emissions from economic growth can be understood as the product of four factors: population growth, growth in economic output per person, changes in the amount of energy needed for economic production, and the change in how much carbon dioxide is released when energy is consumed.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates these variables up to 2050. One inescapable conclusion: Zeroing out growth in gross domestic product would do little to reduce emissions. Even if output per person remained stuck at 2023 levels all the way to mid-century, humanity would still miss its 2050 target to reach net-zero emissions — by 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

Halting growth in rich countries alone — allowing poor countries such as Nigeria to keep growing, hopefully to one day attain the economic well-being that affluent nations enjoy today — would do even less for the climate. Under this scenario, the world would miss its mid-century CO2 target by 38 billion tons.

Cutting emissions to safer levels would require epic degrowth. Getting carbon dioxide emissions below 10 billion tons per year in 2050 would demand inducing recessions that would cut world GDP per capita by about 5 percent per year — more than the loss during the 2008-2009 Great Recession.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving ecological objectives. This is demonstrated by a new study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science, recently published in World Development Perspectives. About 80% of humanity cannot access necessary goods and services and lives below the threshold for "decent living." Some narratives claim that addressing this problem will require massive economic growth on a global scale, multiplying existing output many times over, which would exacerbate climate change and ecological breakdown. The authors of the new study dispute this claim and argue that human development does not require such a dangerous approach. Reviewing recent empirical research, they find that ending mass deprivation and provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. This would ensure that everyone in the world has access to nutritious food, modern housing, high-quality health care, education, electricity, induction stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigerators, heating/cooling systems, computers, mobile phones, internet, and transport, and could also include universal access to recreational facilities, theaters, and other public goods. The authors argue that, to achieve such a future, strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. In the Global South, this requires using industrial policy to increase economic sovereignty, develop industrial capacity, and organize production around human well-being. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production (of things like mansions, SUVs, private jets and fast fashion) must be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries, as degrowth scholarship holds.

July 25 2024

[kp777]

In May 2023, the Beyond Growth conference was held at the EU Parliament in Brussels. Headlined by government leaders and academics, its agenda was the urgent need to change the current economic system. The culmination was a manifesto that stated: “Our world is facing an eco-social crisis…driven by the global capitalist system, centered around perpetual economic expansion (growth) and accumulation. Our obsession with economic expansion clashes with finite planetary boundaries.” The manifesto drew the public’s attention to the idea that humanity might be best served by moving away from the presiding economic model of growth at any cost. For some, particularly business leaders and investors, the concept of “degrowth” (as the idea has been named) is anathema because economic expansion is believed by many to be essential to human flourishing and freedom. Ecological economist Tim Jackson summarized their sentiment: “Questioning growth is deemed the act of lunatics, idealists, and revolutionaries.”

Read more.

[titleknown]

...You know, while I still kinda hate degrowth as a movement, I kinda realized that as one economic technique amongst many, it's not only kinda good but necessary.

Like, comrade @marsworms helped turn me around on this, but like, thinking about it in the way that; say; a gardener prunes trees or rosebushes so they can grow makes sense.

And, like, the fact that we have approximately zero economic tools to do this without everything breaking is kind of a fucking problem, especially when we need to do that to sectors like; say; finance; advertising; or fossil fuel production in favor of the World War-level effort we need on the fucking climate problem.

It gets you to scenarios like the one this is making fun of where, when everyone would be kinda okay with maintaining a holding pattern; nobody can actually do that:

But the market has a solution! The solution is, unfortunately, trying to extract everything they can before it crashes and burns so capital can escape on golden parachutes while labor fucking dies in the impact.

Which, in addition to the obvious of being extremely cruel, is also enormously wasteful and destructive. And it would be nice if we had a better option than that, especially when the the thing that would be left to crash and burn is a livable ecosystem with a functioning global society...

...Now, the reason I hate degrowth as a movement is because I trust the fuckers most aggressively advocating for it approximately zero percent to administer such things in a way that isn't miserable.

This is both because of their monofocus on it as a total societal paradigm shift (remember that old aphorism about how fire is a good tool but a terrible master), and also their garbage hippie-aesthetic anprim/neo-Amish tendencies.

You can see this in their general broad contempt for the internet and personal computing despite how, I would argue, it is a massive good for humanity that should be expanded universally.

Or how they hypocritically talk about how much time people will have to do art, despite also aggressively advocating for the sorts of resource-bottlenecks that every artist in our current system can observe currently fucking them over, probably rooted in how they don't really seem to respect any artforms more materially-intensive than folk art (See also: How they think of digital forms of art)

Or the also two-faced way that they insist that they aren't advocating for austerity despite how much they talk about how much enforcement of their hippie aeceticism as paradigm shift would be based on a local panopticon.

Like, part of my initial broad-spectrum antipathy towards even the techique probably came from the people I first heard it from, like this site dedicated to news about transition towns, this one site that was heavy on what I'd later realize was a lefty version of the "great reset" theory, garbage like Peter Gelderloos' "An Anarchist Solution To Global Warming" or Giorgios Kallis' awful book "Limits" (Ask me about the fucking boat sometime, I have Words about that bit) or the sorts of people who unironically say "the concept of emerging technologies is a capitalist grift"

And, while I have added nuance, I still can't get over the sneaking suspicion that a lot of people who advocate for degrowth most actively are; in their hearts; still mostly kinda Like That...

[protoslacker]

This “green production” requires mobilizing massive amounts of labour, factories, materials, engineering talent, and so on.  In a growth-oriented scenario, this is difficult to do because our productive capacities are already devoted to other activities (activities that are organized around profit and which may not contribute to social and ecological objectives). So we need to either compete with existing forms of production (for labour, materials, energy etc, which can drive prices up), or otherwise increase total productive capacity (i.e., grow the economy).  This cannot be done at just any desired speed.  Under these conditions, there are very real physical limits to how fast we can decarbonize. 

Jason Hickel on his blog. Accelerationist Possibilities in an EcoSocialist Degrowth Scenario

[eelhound]

"Economic growth, which viewed from the point of view of economics, physics, chemistry and technology, has no discernible limit, must necessarily run into decisive bottlenecks when viewed from the point of view of the environmental sciences. An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth — in short, materialism — does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited. Already, the environment is trying to tell us that certain stresses are becoming excessive.

As one problem is being 'solved,' ten new problems arise as a result of the first 'solution'. As Professor Barry Commoner emphasises, the new problems are not the consequences of incidental failure but of technological success."

- E.F. Schumacher, from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, 1973.

[humanecosystem]

I am someone who is inclined to doomscroll. In my very-online young adult life, I am susceptible to all kinds of algorithmic traps on social media. Like many others online, I can quickly become hyperfocused on systemic violence, poverty, suffering, and environmental destruction. This trend has horrific impacts on our wellbeing; I myself have been to some very dark places. Pessimism becomes the only worthy default setting. How can any of us go on living in a world driven by billionaires for selfish gains at the expense of the individual, of their community, livelihood, and dignity?

In the past year and a half, I have been developing a new consciousness, a new way of thinking about wicked problems that are reduced to tiktoks posted a million times an hour. I found this possible as a result of my courses in ecological economics. Though it's a niche academic field that requires a systems-thinking approach, I think many of the ideas being discussed by modern scholars can easily be digested. They make deeper sense to me than anything I've studied so far. For these reasons, I think this information has the power to help us zoomers adopt a holistic worldview and a greater purpose as individuals and as a generation. I hope to share more accessible information on this blog and to foster discussion of sustainability that rejects corporate nonsense.

There is a lot more I could say in this post, and I will revisit this notebook page to summarize its content. But for now, this is just my introduction.

[perhaps-relax]

heeey im not a human geography expert, and ive bit my tongue about this before but.....endless population growth is actually an existential crisis facing the human race. its very tempting to brush off all warning around the earth's carrying capacity as malthusian pseudoscience used to shift the blame for resource scarcity on emerging nations, but the truth is that we are globally failing to feed and house 7 billion people, and not just because of greedy neoliberal politics or wasteful supply chains. its just a Lot of people and a Limited amount of land.

its not impossible, but i just think its important not to downplay the inherent logistical challenges, even in a scenario where enough of the world's decision-makers came together to solve world hunger. and some of the solutions are likely going to involve policies that accommodate population de-growth, at least in wealthy nations.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

A rising tide and a bigger pie: Economic growth has long been considered such an obvious boon that it’s pursued by governments across the world as a matter of course. But in 2016, when a London professor warned an audience in Newcastle that Brexit would lead to a precipitous drop in Britain’s gross domestic product, that well-worn measure of economic activity, one woman’s heckling caught him by surprise. “That’s your bloody G.D.P.,” she shouted, “not ours!”

The eruption tapped into a suspicion supported by reality: Gains in economic growth have too often buoyed the fortunes of the richest instead of lifting all boats. Prosperity even in the most prosperous countries hasn’t been shared. But all the attention to inequality is just a crack in the edifice of economic orthodoxy. Now a much more radical proposition has emerged, looming like a wrecking ball: Is economic growth desirable at all?

Less than two decades ago, an economist like Herman Daly, who argued for a “steady-state economy,” was such an outlier that his fellow economist Benjamin Friedman could declare that “practically nobody opposes economic growth per se.” Yet today there is a burgeoning “post-growth” and “degrowth” movement doing exactly that — in journals, on podcasts, at conferences. Consider some of the books published in the last several years: Tim Jackson’s “Post-Growth: Life After Capitalism,” Kate Soper’s “Post-Growth Living,” Giorgos Kallis’s “In Defense of Degrowth,” Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson’s “Exploring Degrowth,” Jason Hickel’s “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.” The proliferation of the term is as good an indicator as any: The literature of degrowth is growing.

In 1972, the French theorist André Gorz coined the word décroissance to ask whether “no-growth — or even degrowth” in material production was necessary for “the earth’s balance,” even if it ran counter to “the survival of the capitalist system.” Gorz was writing the same year that “The Limits to Growth” was published, a report by a group of scientists warning that surges in population and economic activity would eventually outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet. “The Limits to Growth” was initially met with skepticism and even ridicule. Critics pointed to humanity’s undeniably impressive record of technological innovation. As one representative economist put it, “Our predictions are firmly based on a study of the way these problems have been overcome in the past.”

And so degrowth remained on the fringes of the fringe for decades, until increasing awareness about global warming percolated into public debates in the early aughts. The realization that we hadn’t innovated our way out of our ecological predicament, along with inequalities laid bare by the 2008 financial crisis, fueled a more widespread distrust of the conventional capitalist wisdom. Maybe relentless economic growth was more poison than panacea.

[probablyasocialecologist]

[kp777]

By Edward Carver

Common Dreams

June 7, 2024

Amid elections in Europe, opponents of ongoing planetary destruction argue that the "science is clear: politicians' obsession with infinite economic growth is leading us straight to disaster."

A group of about 20 scientists and allies on Friday blocked the doors to the European Commission office in Brussels to demand degrowth policies as European Union elections unfold in which no party has such an agenda and pro-environment candidates are expected to lose seats.

The degrowth advocates, who came from Scientist Rebellion and affiliated groups, called for the EU to stop using Gross Domestic Product as an index of prosperity and an end to "over-consumption and the advertising that drives it," among other demands. Carrying placards with messages such as "Green growth is a myth," they prevented employees of the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, from getting to work Friday morning, they said in an emailed statement.

Wolfgang Cramer, an environmental geographer at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology in France and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author, supported the action from a distance.

"Economic growth is a concept that was useful almost 100 years ago to help politicians overcome the disaster of the 1929 world economic crisis," Cramer said, according to the statement. "Today, it has become a leitmotif to justify the destruction of our natural resources and to support the redistribution of wealth to the richest. What we need is an economic system that guarantees the well-being of everyone, while respecting the planet's limits. This is entirely possible if we have the political will."

The degrowth movement, which began in the 2000s following work in the field of ecological economics, seeks to address not only the climate crisis but also other ecological crises. Its proponents argue that economic growth is linked with energy and resource use—the more growth, the more difficult to stay within planetary limits on carbon emissions, or, for example, nitrogen and phosphorous use, they argue.

Degrowth is the subject of mockery in some legacy media outlets that hold economic growth sacrosanct and is a matter of fierce debate among leftist political thinkers, some of whom strongly oppose it. Despite the criticism, degrowth has grown in influence, especially in Europe, where the topic has moved from the "policy fringes" toward a "mainstream audience," Financial Timesreported last year. The economic paradigm questioning endless expansion has even received favorable mention in EU policy briefs and IPCC reports.

"It is unlikely that a long-lasting, absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts can be achieved at the global scale,” a European Environment Agency briefing says. "Therefore, societies need to rethink what is meant by growth and progress and their meaning for global sustainability."

Many climate policy researchers are in fact skeptical of "green growth" and support "growth agnostic" or degrowth policies, a 2023 study in Nature Sustainability found.

In a manifesto Scientist Rebellion pointed to on Friday, the group argued that, "The science is clear: politicians' obsession with infinite economic growth is leading us straight to disaster."

The group's Friday action comes on the second day of this week's EU elections, which run from Thursday to Sunday. Right-wing parties are pushing anti-environment messages with great success, The New York Timesreported Friday.

"The right wing is ascendant," according to the Times, which explained that the European Greens are polling poorly this year, after having won a record 10% of seats in the EU Parliament in 2019—a year of large climate protests, when the "zeitgeist was green."

That victory helped propel the EU toward the European Green Deal, a set of environmental laws and regulations centered around a legally binding target to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030.

However, inflation and high energy prices due to the war in Ukraine have changed some of the political dynamics. Rising prices have helped lead to what the European Council on Foreign Relations has called a “growing greenlash.”

Ahead of the elections, farmers' groups have protested regulations on agricultural pollutants, showing that "agriculture has been instrumentalized by the populist and hard-right groups throughout the 27-nation bloc," The Associated Pressreported.

Yet climate activist groups remain determined to push forward. Scientist Rebellion seeks to draw attention to what it sees as the blind spots in the political platforms of even Europe's left-wing and green parties.

"We deplore the fact that virtually no party is proposing a program that is up to the social and environmental challenge," said Laura Stalenhoef, a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology in Germany who took part in Friday's action. "But we do not just denounce political inaction, we put forward concrete proposals for change: we urgently need to abandon GDP as an index of prosperity and organise a voluntary contraction of the economy before we witness ecological and social collapse."

[castilestateofmind]

"Given that economics has come to be viewed in Marxism and liberalism as the only means of achieving social justice, and understood by them as the equalisation of material conditions, the result has been the emergence of sentiments of injustice much stronger than before. Indeed, economics is by definition a place of domination. Trying to create out of it the means of emancipation is an absurdity that provokes social schizophrenia, already known to us".

- Guillaume Fayé.

[consolecadet]

Currently learning how mutual funds work. I didn't realize this job was going to teach me many of the basics of finance, but. . .cool? Maybe I will need this information some day?

[protoslacker]

The challenges we face are not insurmountable. We already know what needs to be done, the problem is that we do not have control over our own productive capacities and, as a result, they are woefully misallocated.  This approach – credit/investment guidance and public finance – democratizes the power of money and therefore democratizes power over our collective productive capacities. It would enable us to radically accelerate improvements in people’s everyday lives and social outcomes, and radically accelerate progress toward decarbonization and ecological sustainbility.

Jason Hickel at his blog. Credit guidance: how we achieve degrowth