The intractable puzzle of growth

The degrowthers are right: There needs to be a lot less physical stuff produced, especially in the way of fossil fuels, and, for anyone with the least sense of justice, this means rich countries consuming less and poor countries consuming more. Such an apparent threat of rich-country austerity meanwhile contains, in truth, the promise of abundance: fewer but more durable goods, less work and more leisure. (Already in the 1990s, the French-Austrian ecosocialist André Gorz wanted to “build the civilization of liberated time” in place of that of wage labor.) The fact that any such global rebalancing of consumption patterns can’t plausibly take place so long as the rich countries of the Global North dictate world history is one more reason that degrowth remains a dead letter under capitalism. It is not, however, the working classes of the Global North that must drastically curtail their lifestyles: The world’s richest 1 percent are responsible for as much carbon emissions as the poorest two-thirds of the global population. Much of the work of degrowth would be accomplished by the dispossession and destruction of the class represented by this sole percentile.

As for the idolaters of growth, their god has not only failed but, Cronus-like, has started devouring its children as if these were so many chicken wings. “Growth” fantasizes one kind of fake substance, and “degrowth” another; real intelligence demands attention to how the ingredients of this world are different, not the same. Even so, the advocates of degrowth (a more attractive English word might be Samuel Beckett’s “lessness”) can boast of a sounder moral and political intuition than can the usual apologists for growth: Less stuff, more life!

Such an argument may be obviated soon enough, either way, by the specter not of degrowth communism, but of prolonged capitalist contraction. Voters and politicians whistling past the graveyard being prepared for our children may have neglected to consult a recent article in Nature which holds that “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emissions choices” (emphasis mine). Important factors in this bleak outlook include the declining agricultural yields and the massive and unpredictable damage to infrastructure attendant on climate collapse. In other words, even if carbon emissions are somehow reduced through the magic of the market, climate change can be expected to cause about $38 trillion in damages annually by the mid-century, enough to render overall economic growth infeasible. The choice facing the 21st century, then, is likely not between degrowth and growth. It is more likely between a form of capitalist contraction in which prosperity endures for a few but evaporates for the rest of us, and some kind of socialist or communist degrowth in which the well-being of everyone in general prevails over the wealth of anyone in particular. The precise politics of egalitarian degrowth are no more clear to me than they are to Saitō. But universal crisis will license strategies that theory alone could never discover.

Link to the Financial Times article the author mentioned:

The Growth Delusion by David Pilling — why GDP is misleading

Ditto for the Nature paper:

The economic commitment of climate change