The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy
Endless growth is destroying the planet. We know how to stop it.
The New Republic, Alexander Zaitchik
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/alexander-zaitchik>/December 28, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM LAHAN
In July 1979, shortly after installing a set ofsolar panels
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/>over
the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime
president. Heasked Americans
<https://www.c-span.org/video/?153917-1/president-carter-address-crisis-confidence>to
sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community
over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development,
including solar. From our vantage, this may sound very farsighted and
bold. But any prescient, planet-saving leadership seen shimmering
through hindsight is a mirage. The speech and the panels advanced a
program with the narrow goal of energy/independence/, not
decarbonization. Carter wanted to expand and secure the nation’s
economic wheel beyond OPEC’s reach, not question it, shrink it, slow it,
or “green” it. “We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi
Arabias [and] more coal than any nation on earth,” he boasted in the
speech. “We have the national will to win this war.”
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9781785152498>
Penguin, 336 pp., $28.95
It’s a different event, buried in the Carter record, that offers a flash
of the ecological vision often falsely ascribed to the ’79 energy plan.
On the afternoon of March 22, 1977, between meetings with the prime
minister of Japan and the National Security Council, Carter sat down in
the Oval Office with a British-German economist namedE.F. Schumacher
<https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/legacy/ernst-friedrich-schumacher/>.
Four years earlier, Schumacher had achieved international fame as the
author of/Small Is Beautiful
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/10/small-is-beautiful-economic-idea>/,
a trenchant critique of the spiritual poverty and delusional frameworks
of mainstream economics. His White House visit made him the most radical
guest of a sitting president since Warren G. Harding requested
anaudience with Eugene V. Debs
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/09/22/socialist-who-ran-president-prison-won-nearly-million-votes/>.
Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics
<https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-economics/>,”
Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see
liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management
structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a
deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This
would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.”
As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and
spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of
growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its
patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree
of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.”
Schumacher was not alone in his concern. Starting in 1970, a group of
system dynamics scientists at M.I.T. began feeding data into a
supercomputer to examine where humanity was headed if it continued to
consume energy and materials, and to create waste, unabated. They
determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite
planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism
would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle
of the twenty-first century.
*Special Offer*Postelection updates:
3 months for $5Subscribe
<https://tnr-reg.onecount.net/onecount/form/display.php?id=1b73609a-5e22-43ba-845d-da089d3e802f&src_code=1005>
This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller/The Limits to Growth
<https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/>/, has
aged better than the scorn heaped on it by two generations of pro-growth
economists and pundits. We are now witnessing what appears to be the
beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago. Yet critics of
growth have achieved only a tenuous foothold in an increasingly dire
debate over how to maintain the conditions for civilization in an age of
climate emergency. In his new book,/Less Is More
<https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more>/, Jason Hickel, an
anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive
critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing
through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth,
not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In/Less Is
More/, Hickel traces its origins to theenclosure of the European commons
<https://thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain>in
the sixteenth century. Between roughly 1350 and 1550, the free peasants
of Europe had organized subsistence agrarian societies that shared and
managed resources—such as fuel, food, and building materials—taken from
the common land. This did not sit well with the nobles, who grumbled
that “servants are now masters and masters servants.” When elites began
to enclose the common land, it triggered peasant rebellions that were
violently suppressed, followed by what Hickel describes as a
“humanitarian catastrophe”: Starving refugees were scattered and forced
into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor.
Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.
This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary
scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of
pre-capitalist Europe. Thedualism
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/>of Francis Bacon and
Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter. As the
sole possessor of mind, humanity was elevated above and cast in
opposition to everything else on the planet. The pagan-agrarian
understanding of the natural world as a nurturing mother gave way to
Bacon’s view of nature as “a common harlot.” This way of thinking,
Hickel argues, also encouraged European colonists to treat the
non-Christian inhabitants of the New World not as human beings, but as
resources to be exploited, whose enslavement in silver and gold mines
fueled a second wave of capital accumulation. Descartes’s mechanical
philosophy and theory of matter “was an explicit attempt to disenchant
the world,” writes Hickel:
Once nature was an object ... whatever ethical constraints remained
against possession and extraction had been removed…. Land became
property. Living beings became things. Ecosystems became resources.
By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions.
Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural
world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and
prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own
end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and
resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and
more productive conversions of labor and resources. This ideology
subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the
classical economists, until eventually the field even lacked words for
noneconomic considerations, let alone ends. From being a sign of God’s
approval, Growth became God, a new deity for the new species called/Homo
economicus/.
This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical
economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not
only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw
economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations
would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progress.Not
even John Maynard Keynes
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/10/can-we-have-prosperity-without-growth>,
the quintessential modern growth economist, believed in infinite
economic expansion for its own sake.
*Special Offer*Postelection updates:
3 months for $5Subscribe
<https://tnr-reg.onecount.net/onecount/form/display.php?id=1b73609a-5e22-43ba-845d-da089d3e802f&src_code=1005>
Hickel punctuates his history of growth with the caveats issued bySimon
Kuznets
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/facts/>,
father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s
universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel
points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of
economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive
and destructive behavior. A measure of an economy’s total consumer and
government spending, investments, exports, and imports, it
institutionalized the celebration of a soulless and dangerously
incomplete ledger. “If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up,”
Hickel writes. “If you extend the working day and push back retirement
age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes
up. But GDP includes no cost accounting. It says nothing about the loss
of the forest as a habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions.”
GDP also ignores the existence of unpaid labor—like child-rearing or
caring for a sick relative—a fact that explains why feminist economists
were some of the earliest andmost astute critics
<https://mises.org/wire/these-feminist-economists-are-right-about-gdp>of
the metric.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all,
through the idea of “green growth <http://www.ecomodernism.org/>.” This
is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that
technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw
materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as
dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological
impacts. As proof that this is not only possible but already happening,
boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from
manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in
energy and in the use of materials. The process that replaced letters
with email, and compact discs with digital files, will continue until we
live in a spectral economy where little at all is manufactured or
transported, save those things that can be pulled from thin air by, one
presumes, solar-powered 3-D printers.
The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism”
or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites
who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological
boundaries. In 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in
anarticle for/Science/magazine
<https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6321/126>, maintaining that
signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument
that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a
lower standard of living.”
The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis
may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on
the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality more closely
associated with Obama’s successor. As Hickel points out, the argument
for decoupling requires counting only those emissions released within
national borders, and not those further upstream in the global
production chains. By only counting the emissions created within a
country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers,
you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the
books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A
number ofrecent studies
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/why-growth-cant-be-green/>show no
evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the
world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some
materials more efficiently.
The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed
by the nineteenth-century economistWilliam Stanley Jevons
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/william-jevons/>: In a growth
system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater
equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back
into the growth cycle. A classic example of this dynamic is the advent
of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many
trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging
companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek
by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they
otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is
used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to
do/more stuff in the same amount of time/,” Hickel writes. “In a system
where technological innovation is leveraged to/expand/extraction and
production, it makes little sense to hope that yet more technological
innovation will somehow magically do the opposite.”
The dynamic helps explain what is happening in the energy sector.
Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading
to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables/and/fossil
fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t
replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top
of them.”
Green growth, Hickel concludes, is anecologically incoherent
<https://isreview.org/issue/97/origins-and-delusions-green-growth>“fairy
tale.” If this seems harsh, consider what the ecomodernist position asks
us to believe. The current systemrequires annual growth
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/zm988y/ecosocialists-believe-the-only-way-to-save-the-planet-is-to-abandon-capitalism>of
roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling
the size of the economy every 23 years. The economy of 2000 must be 20
times larger in the year 2100, and/370 times larger/in the year 2200.
The green growth position rests on the assumption that this can go on,
basically forever, because innovation will “dematerialize” the economy.
Yet 2000 was the first year that, according to experts, humanity used
more energy and materials than the safe limit. And the growth economy,
far from dematerializing, remains geared toward expanding future markets
for extremely materials-heavy products like Tesla cybertrucks and Apple
iPhones. Comparing this to a fairy tale is, if anything, too generous,
since children’s stories usually involve some kind of moral lesson
applicable to the real world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or
otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste
generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world
will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?”
In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth
economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that
allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to
keep a few in luxury. In a word that never appears in the
book:ecosocialism
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/zm988y/ecosocialists-believe-the-only-way-to-save-the-planet-is-to-abandon-capitalism>.
Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future
than are growth critics based in economics departments, likeTim Jackson
<https://timjackson.org.uk/>andKate Raworth
<https://www.kateraworth.com/2013/05/22/whos-looking-beyond-growth/>,
and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourishing
that he believes will follow from unshackling the economy from the
growth imperative. That this will happen, Hickel has no doubts, and he
makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the
“command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some
back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”
Ecomodernists huff loudly at claims that any kind of economic
downshift—planned or unplanned—can result in anything but a drastic
deterioration in human welfare. The evidence may suggest they are wrong.
A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between
“happiness” and growth beyond a certain point. In the rich countries,
general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes
were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern
historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be
reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain. Hickel describes a
post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom
and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the
god of growth. He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down
by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its
citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of
endless growth: life expectancy.
Attaining the benefits of the post-growth economy would, however,
require what the present consumer society considers “sacrifices.” Even
as polls show majorities around the worldgrowing skeptical
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/capitalism-draws-fire-despite-strong-global-economy-11579471201>of
capitalism, it’s not clear how many of them are ready to give up its
superficial pleasures enabled by consumer debt. When Hickel turns to the
details of this trade-off, he can sound hesitant. His list of economic
sectors that are incompatible with growth focuses on “fossil fuels,
private jets, arms and SUVs.” Letting go of these things would not
necessarily prove a great imposition on the day-to-day lives of most
people. At other points in the book, he comes closer to the truth: that
degrowth will entail a steep reduction across a much wider range of
high-energy consumer goods. Keeping a global economy within safe
ecological limits is a zero-sum game. When limited resources are
directed toward clean energy infrastructure, public health care, and
regenerative agriculture, it will still be possible to build and power
modern 24-hour hospitals in every city, but not to have Xbox consoles,
two-car garages, and giant appliances in every home. The post-growth
economy could not succeed solely by redistributing wealth; it would have
to redefine it, too.
Among nations, there’s also the question of fairness: Wouldn’t it be
unjust to impose degrowth across the world, when it’s disproportionately
the countries of the global north that have spent centuries burning
through the planet’s resources? Hickel, whose first book examined the
deepening inequality between north and south, has thought about this. He
argues that short-term growth would have to continue in those countries
that have still not achieved the basic levels of sanitation,
infrastructure, and education needed for a decent standard of living, to
close the gap. Their larger goal, meanwhile, would be to break free from
their historical role as a source of natural resources and cheap labor
for the north. As they built sustainable economies on their own terms,
they would bring about the end of a 500-year cycle of dependence based
on the same extractive industries that provide raw materials for the
growth economy that is destroying the planet.
For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction
in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest
damage to the planet is currently being done. One person in a low-income
country has a materials footprint of roughly two tons per year, a
measure of total raw materials consumed, including those embodied in
imports. In lower-middle–income countries, that number is four tons; in
upper-middle–income countries, 12 tons. In the high-income nations of
North America, Europe, and Asia, the number leaps to 28. Ecological
economists generally agree that the safe outer limit is eight tons.
The gap between nations only gets more extreme when you move from
materials to emissions. The wealthiest 20 percent of the human
population is responsible for 90 percent of “overshoot” carbon in the
atmosphere (that is, a level of carbon that exceeds the limit needed to
keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius). The planet’s
richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest
half of the world’s population combined. This output tracks to the one
percent’s share of global wealth—a number equal to the GDP of the bottom
169 countries. For the global north, degrowth not only starts at home,
it starts with the biggest houses.
Even just one more century of growth—which so far has shown no sign of
taking a less destructive form—will require multiple earths.
Even if you accept the argument that inequality would be best addressed
by more centuries of trickle-down growth, you keep running up against
the simple fact of its impossibility. Even just one more century of
growth—which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive
form—will require multiple earths. This is the neatest explanation for
why Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have invested
ininterplanetary colonization and asteroid mining
<https://newrepublic.com/article/160303/monetizing-final-frontier>. They
know we can obey laws of the universe or the laws of growth, but not both.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Defenders of growth often take cheap shots at degrowthers by painting
them as anti-science, anti-progress, and all around a bit woo-woo. But
the targets of these attacks are straw men, and emerge from a
dangerously outdated view of the world. For starters, there was never
any basis for the materialist view of nature as an all-you-can-eat
buffet of inert “resources.” A number of discoveries across the life and
physical sciences have revealed the astounding complexity and
cooperation of the systems that support life, from the trillions of
microbes that process food in our guts, to planet-scale systems that
regulate chemical balances in the atmosphere and oceans. In every
field—except, notably, economics—the worldview that allows trees to be
seen as timber, and timber as a contributor to GDP, has been overtaken
by a second scientific revolution. The picture of the world to emerge
from this revolution is both more fragile and more interrelated than the
equations found in modern economics textbooks can describe.
/Less Is More/doesn’t end in a poetic appreciation for nature’s majesty,
but by teasing out its implications for the political project of
preserving a habitable planet. Hickel devotes much of the book to
explaining that degrowth must be central to this project, promising not
just survival, but real democracy, social abundance, and liberation. In
a welcome departure from much of the literature on degrowth, Hickel is
serious about bringing the system critiques of E.F. Schumacher and
others out of their traditional cloisters and into the streets, and has
sought allies in this effort. The preface to his book is written by Kofi
Klu and Rupert Read, two campaign organizers withExtinction Rebellion
<https://rebellion.global/>, a group that through direct action and
agitation opposes climate change and the loss of ecosystems and species.
They emphasize what Hickel calls the “beautiful coincidence” of
degrowth: that “what we need to do to survive is the same as what we
need to do to have better lives.”
This beautiful coincidence overlaps with policy programs like the Green
New Deal in important ways, even if they aren’t always discussed. Both
share the immediate goal of a post-carbon economy. Both involve broad
social shifts away from private consumption and toward the production of
shared public goods. Both are internationalist in outlook, and see the
world through a lens of climate justice as well as climate equilibrium.
Both require political alliances and social movements that hinge on
connecting the dots between radical system change and self-interest—that
is, communicating the many benefits of moving beyond the insecurity and
terrors of the current system, and building a new society that is
sustainable, stable, democratic, and fundamentally better in every way.
While degrowthers and those narrowly focused on rapid decarbonization
have their differences, the overlap is a good place to start. Systems
scientists and ecological economists have been warning for decades that
degrowth is not a political decision that can be put off indefinitely,
but a matter of throughput math and physics. The choice before us is the
form we will allow degrowth to take—humane and controlled collective
action and transformation, or chaotic civilizational tailspin, crash,
and ruin.
Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist and the author of/The
Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America/.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#4918): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4918
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79268166/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
