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[Thomas Fazi, 12-5-2022, "The paradox of Degrowth Communism," UnHerd, ] WL

I wouldn’t mind living in a society with better parks, schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, and fewer SUVs, Primarks and H&Ms, with good jobs for all in non-polluting industries and sectors. The problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t the society envisioned by degrowthers. It’s the unintended consequences of their theory. Most obviously, they erroneously conflate energy and resource consumption, but the two are very different. The production of things inevitably entails the use of finite resources, and therefore cannot be expanded indefinitely. But the same doesn’t go for the production of energy: nuclear energy, for instance, could provide bountiful, clean, carbon-free energy, thus allowing us to potentially expand energy use — ideally to power less resource-intensive industries and sectors — while rapidly phasing out fossil fuels once and for all. And yet, most environmentalists and degrowthers are zealously opposed to nuclear energy. By Senay Boztas This highlights the second problem of degrowthism (and environmentalism in general, for that matter): its inescapable Luddite, anti-industrialist bias, which represents a conceptual obstacle to the massive state-sponsored industrial and infrastructure investment that would be needed to make our economies more sustainable — for instance, by rapidly building up nuclear capacity. And here lies the third problem: even assuming citizens in Western countries did come round to accepting a deliberate reduction in their material wealth in exchange for immaterial benefits, it is highly unlikely they’d consent to the massive expansion of state power that would be required to implement such a programme. The authoritarianism and assault on democracy witnessed during the pandemic has understandably made many fearful of unchecked government power. No programme that requires giving the state even more sweeping powers of intervention in the economy — something which I personally view as necessary — will win the support it needs until we’re able to build a new democratic social contract. This means, among other things, clawing back the only institution that has historically managed to deliver democracy — the nation-state — from the clutches of the globalists and corporate interests that have hijacked it. But this will take time — something degrowthers constantly repeat we don’t have. This is where the most concerning element of degrowthism and any other form of apocalyptic environmentalism comes in: by constantly engaging in “doomerism” — the idea that either we fix everything or we’re all screwed — they’re effectively saying that anything is justified in order to “save the planet”, including all manner of authoritarian interventions. It’s like Zero Covid on steroids. After all, if the very survival of life on Earth is at stake, surely we can’t allow the complexities of democratic debate and deliberation to stand in the way of doing what’s needed? Indeed, rather ominously, Saito cites the pandemic as proof that “rapid change is possible” — with apparently little concern for the fact that this “change” was achieved by sweeping aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarising societies, cracking down on civil liberties, and implementing unprecedented measures of social control. In this sense, doomerism offers a political cover to what is ultimately the easiest way to reduce people’s consumption levels: making ordinary people poorer — which indeed seems to be the solution pursued by elites. This highlights probably the main flaw in degrowth theory: the driving force of capitalism is not growth or even profits, but power. Those sitting at the top of the capitalist pyramid are more than happy to have less growth if this means increasing their influence. How else should one understand our ruling classes’ passion for growth-crushing austerity? This is the ultimate paradox of degrowth communism: its proponents may want to overthrow capitalism, but their ideology is actually empowering the globalist capitalist elites they claim to be fighting. You would think after nearly three centuries of being utterly discredited, this Malthusian garbage would die an ignoble death. Yet it still persists. Although capitalism needs continual consumption, it’s also driven to produce greater efficiency. We need fewer resources to produce the same amount of goods. The examples are everywhere – less land to produce more food, better fuel mileage for vehicles, less manpower to produce goods. We are much more concerned about the environment in free-market democracies than authoritarian countries like Russia or China. There’s more trees in North America than 100 years ago. We might think rivers are dirty in the west, but compare that to the Ganges. Degrowth groups like the Extinction Rebellion are death cults – period. They get zero traction with the general population and will whither away when the kids have to get real jobs.

The research we identified explicitly or implicitly speculates that declining economies affect somatic as well as psychological and behavioral morbidity primarily through three broadly defined mechanisms. The literature suggests that these mechanisms can increase (i.e., “countercyclical” effect) or decrease (i.e., “procyclical” effect) the incidence of illness in populations embedded in declining economies. We describe the counter- and procyclical variant of each mechanism below.

The stress mechanism dominates the literature. The countercyclical literature reports that declining economies increase the incidence of stressful job and financial events and that these events increase the likelihood of experiencing other stressors not intuitively associated with the economy (such as marital difficulties) (28, 144). The literature also includes reports of economic decline increasing the anticipation of stressful experiences, including job loss and difficulty meeting financial obligations (104).

There has long been substantial evidence linking job loss to shorter lives and more health-related problems. A 2009 study on the impact of the 1980s oil crisis and subsequent recession in Pennsylvania, published by economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that in the year after men lost their jobs in mass layoffs, their chances of dying doubled. And though the heightened risk tapered off over the years, it was still significantly higher 20 years later. If such trends were sustained indefinitely, the authors wrote, it would mean a loss in life expectancy of 1–1.5 years for a worker displaced at age 40.

Today, a new generation of researchers is building on this scientific foundation. Sociologist Clemens Noelke, David E. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (Pop Center), is in the final stretch of a study of the health impact of job loss during recessions and the extent to which unemployment benefits may cushion potential harms. Noelke’s research, which draws on data from a massive biannual study, focuses on U.S. workers ages 50 and older between 1992 and 2010—years that include the downturns of the early 1990s and the early 2000s, as well as the Great Recession (2007–2009). Among the health indicators he is looking at: mortality rates, cardiovascular disease, cognition, depression, and unhealthy behaviors such as smoking and drinking.

Bonaiuti and Latouche critique the capitalist mode of production but are rather vague with respect to what should replace it. For example, Bonaiuti (Citation2012) recommends “other forms of economic and social organization more suitable to the new situation.” If we take these alternatives to be roughly equivalent to ecosocialism, then ecosocialist political practice needs a robust theory to transcend capitalism. Ecosocialist theory needs to fully engage the natural, physical, and informational sciences, in particular, climatology, ecology, biogeochemistry, and thermodynamics. Unfortunately, degrowth proponents take little notice of these sciences, particularly the real thermodynamics of open systems. These sciences will inform the technologies of renewable energy, green production, and agroecologies, whose infrastructure are to replace the present unsustainable mode. Twenty-first century socialism will be ecosocialism, or it will simply remain the vision of political sects.

Serge Latouche has been a leading proponent of the degrowth movement in Europe. In a recent article he argues that degrowth is the “only political project capable of renewing the Left” (Citation2010) as it provides a “radical critique of consumption and of development…ipso facto a critique of capitalism.” Further, he maintains that the degrowth project is “not about substituting a “good economy,” good growth or good development for a bad one and repainting it green, or social, or equitable, with a stronger or weaker dose of state regulation or hybridization through a logic of the gift and solidarity economy. It is about exiting the economy.” I find this argument highly problematic for a number of reasons. First, there is no recognition of the qualitative versus quantitative aspects of growth, nor of the material requirements for a high quality of life, in particular the minimum energy consumption per capita. Second, it is a program available for only a minority of the world's people, even in the global North. Who has the option to “exit the economy?” At best, we can welcome his degrowth program as pointing to the creation of local food- and energy-producing cooperatives as complementing and supporting class struggles in the real economy; at worst, it calls for a withdrawal from class struggle, a reprise of the (failed) 1960s hippy commune culture.

In a paper that recognizes the reality of energy poverty in the global South, Martínez-Alier (Citation2010) provides a more fruitful conception of degrowth. He calls for research “on the environmental, technological, demographic, social and socio-psychological aspects of socially sustainable economic degrowth leading to a steady-state economy…in alliance with the environmental justice movements of the South” (2010, 10) and a “moderate economic degrowth (implying a lower social metabolism)…a plausible objective for the rich industrial economies. This would be supported by the EJOs [Environmental Justice Organizations] and their networks in the South which are fighting in ecological distribution conflicts” (2010, 12). While I have argued that a steady-state economy is only conceivable as an ultimate outcome of global ecosocialist transition (Schwartzman Citation2009b), Martínez-Alier is right to emphasize the need to degrow unsustainable consumption in the global North. Further, he recognizes that

Kate Soper presents an excellent overview of her “assertively utopian” vision of a “postconsumerist way of living” in which people spend less time working, traveling great distances in cars and airplanes, and shopping on the “hedonic treadmill” for things they don’t need.

I fully support Soper’s utopian vision. But that is easy to do. Her vision will be unobjectionable to most people holding even vaguely progressive sympathies. Matters only get complicated when we ask how we can most effectively transition to the good society that Soper describes, given the hard realities of where things stand in the world today.

Economic growth, as an attribute of market capitalism, has structural properties – it is needed to stabilise modern societies as it provides employment, public sector provision through tax revenues, rising wages, and hence social stability (Petridis et al., 2015: 178, Rosa et al., 2017). Economic growth is organised around and shapes a range of tightly coupled structures, including institutions, norms, discourses, culture, technologies, competences, identities, etc. Historically speaking, growth is a fairly recent phenomenon which only picked up in the 19th century together with the industrialisation of Western economies. In a co-evolutionary process, a range of institutions developed which are now coupled to a growth-based capitalist economy, including the nation state, representative democracy, the rule of law and current legal, financial, labour market, education, research, and welfare systems. These are based on philosophies which emerged to justify and give meaning to these institutions, for instance on individualism, freedom, justice, sovereignty, or power. The embeddedness of the growth-based capitalistic economic system in these co-evolved institutions and ways of thinking makes it difficult to transition to a degrowth system because the change of the economic system would need to involve a parallel transformation of those coupled systems. In Luhmann’s words, the constitution of the current system “defuturises” (Luhmann, 1976: 141) the future, it reduces the “openness” of the future; “path dependency” or even “lock-in” are related expressions that capture this idea. Two examples which directly link to people’s wellbeing can illustrate this point: the relationship between welfare states and growth, and between growth and people’s mind-sets and identities.

The satisfaction of needs is influenced by the character of socio-economic institutions, including the ways in which work, welfare, retirement, health, education and family life are governed; as well as by the structure of the distribution of a range of resources that support health and wellbeing. Welfare state institutions play an important role in these areas in high income economies, and they are closely coupled with economic growth (Bailey, 2015). Rising economic prosperity in the post Second World War period provided the resources for establishing welfare states in Europe and elsewhere, and the funding of current welfare state institutions is closely coupled to economic growth as it largely depends on income-related taxes and social security contributions. The positive relationship between economic growth and welfare states in many ways also works the other way round: welfare states support growth by enhancing the population’s health and education levels, providing unemployment and minimum income benefits for people out of work. This helps to increase productivity, maintain consumer demand, and more generally contain and minimise social conflict through redistribution and institutionalised conflict resolution between employers and employees.

Abandoning economic growth would weaken the scope for innovation, exacerbate perceived scarcity, and reduce resilience—and do so just as climate change was beginning to unleash its powerful effects. It would, in the face of scarcity and heightened uncertainty, set off a scramble for limited resources as people retreated for protection to their nation state in-groups. We can chastise all this as offensive to morality, but ignoring these human traits and historical lessons will most likely take us where we do not want to go. On the other hand, in my view, our moral compass should guide us all to try and avoid at all costs a return to a zero-sum world and a hyper-conflictual foreign relations scenario. History shows how, when the climate and environment start changing, what we should be most afraid of is intergroup conflict. And the only difference today, with respect to the past, is that human weapons are much more deadly. As societies find themselves between a rock and a hard place—facing catastrophic climate change on one side, and catastrophic conflict over bounded resources on the other—the escape route is narrow but, given the alternative, must be pursued.71 In abstract terms, it involves using technological innovation and human ingenuity to shift away from the logic that salvation can only come with national sacrifice for the global good, or fair-share valuations, to the logic that casts decarbonization efforts as investment opportunities. In practical terms, under this new logic, industrialized countries can be expected to act enthusiastically as early adopters for green technologies, attracted by the prizes of being at the forefront of the next industrial revolution and able to set its standards for years to come. In turn, this industrial revolution will reverberate through the world, following the standard paths of capitalism and globalization, propelled by the deep-rooted mechanics of emulation, and financed in part by foreign aid.

Degrowth supporters call for the adoption of a more frugal lifestyle, based on local production and food self-sufficiency, and of short food chains (urban agriculture perfectly represents this model) (Latouche, 1993, 2008; D'Alisia et al., 2015). Some people envisage a somewhat autarchic society (Latouche, 1993; Pallante, 2005, 2011 - Maurizio Pallante is a leading figure of the Italian degrowth movement). Latouche (1993, p.164e166), distinguishes between “auto-subsistence”, where the farmers of a country would produce only for their survival, turning their back to the market (and to the urban population), and “self-sufficiency”, where farmers would produce a surplus for the market, able to feed the urban population of the country. Nevertheless, this policy, according to the author, should have the global market as a benchmark. However, this relies on the assumption that a country has enough agricultural land to produce all the food it needs, and sufficient internal energy and natural resources (i.e. fuel, machinery, labour) to run agricultural activities. This may not be the case for European countries, for example.

Some authors (e.g., Latouche, 1993, 2008; Pallante, 2011; Kallis et al., 2015) argue that a more rural society relying on renewable energies would be able to quickly create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, thereby helping to reduce unemployment. At the same time, a working week of four days should also be possible, and allow people to dedicate themselves to cultural activities and social relations (Kallis et al., 2013). While such ideas can offer food for thought, actual research on agriculture and degrowth is much needed in order to start providing models and scenarios for public debate. Feasibility (the compatibility of the effort with the external constraints imposed by the environment), and viability (the compatibility with internal constraints) analyses are needed to provide insights on the potentials and constraints of agricultural practices (Giampietro et al., 2013, 2014). Giampietro points out that the concept of “desirability” (compatibility with human expectations), is also relevant when addressing sustainability, as there can potentially be viable solutions that people might not like or accept (Giampietro, 2004; Giampietro et al., 2013, 2014). Large-scale scenario analyses will allow scaling up local production systems, and check whether, and how much, local food self-sufficiency, short food chains, and low-input farming practices are compatible with a country's food security, and how new farming practices would impact on its societal metabolism. At present, this is a key step forward that needs to be taken. Alternative agricultural practices have been suggested that are surely of interest. Nevertheless, a sound analysis of the role they might play in sustaining society, or of how society should change to rely on such agricultural practices, is still missing. For example, permaculture has been referred to as a sound model for food production (e.g., Latouche, 2012). Nevertheless, to date, there are no scientific publications, and, to my knowledge, no other publications either, presenting sound data concerning the performance of this type of farming system (see also Gomiero et al., 2011a). Lately, Ferguson and Lovell (2014, 2015) published two reviews confirming that data concerning the performance of this practice are still missing. Therefore, at the moment, it is not known how much food permaculture can supply, nor at what cost, both financial and environmental. Concerning organic agriculture, quite a few works are available on its performance (Gomiero et al., 2011b; de Ponti et al., 2012; Seufert et al., 2012). Nevertheless, the overall sustainability of organic agriculture is still debated, and there is a lack of scenario analysis in relation to the impact of a large-scale transition to low-input agriculture on the food system and society. That is to say, linking the agricultural system to societal metabolism. Georgescu-Roegen advocated the adoption of organic agriculture, but he was aware that a reduction in yield was to be expected. Therefore, he argued that population should be reduced accordingly, “mankind should gradually lower its population to a level that could be adequately fed only by organic agriculture.” (Georgescu-Roegen, 1975, p. 378). Kallis et al. (2015, p. 7) also recognises that “A solar civilization can only support smaller economies, given the low EROI of renewable energies compared to fossil fuels. A transition to renewables will inevitably be a degrowth transition.” It is important, then, to carry out sound research on what the transition implies, e.g., how many people can we expect to be living in a new solar-powered society? With what standard of life?

In response to today’s urgent ecological and social problems, we often hear calls from sustainability advocates about the need to “downshift” away from consumer lifestyles, to practise permaculture and to embrace simpler ways to live. When these movements scale up, the argument goes, we will “degrow” our economies to a sustainable scale.

Important though these analyses and perspectives are, they almost always leave something critical out of the conversation. There is a very powerful reason we are currently unable to move toward a simpler and sustainable society: the costs of securing access to land for housing often mean only the relatively affluent can afford such “green lifestyles”.

Several proponents of degrowth likewise admit that it is still a hypothesis and requires to be tested through empirical studies (Kallis, 2018, p. 155). Although voluntary simplicity has always existed among small subsets of the populace, ‘[i]t does not follow that others, such as those who never had the choice, or those who enjoy their power, will not mind either’ (Kallis et al., 2012, p. 174). The ways by which degrowth bears on remuneration, employment and work must be thoroughly discussed (Martínez-Alier et al., 2010, p. 1746). Moreover, Nicholas Ashford, who argues for ‘transforming the industrial state’ from a broader perspective (cited in Kallis, 2017, p. 142), states that degrowth fails to capture the full range of issues and may trigger a scarcity of goods and services (Ashford & Hall, 2019, p. 244). This is corroborated by another critic who similarly states that degrowth ‘faces difficulty confronting today’s reality of economic crisis/stagnation’ when it is vital to ensure an adequate supply of and access to essential goods and services for all and to redress the growing inequality trends worldwide (Foster, 2011, p. 30). To attain a full-fledged post-growth order, co-optimising economic development, environmental quality and employment concerns must be prioritised (Ashford & Hall, 2019, p. 459). Economic development represents the whole gamut of change required to widen the distribution of basic life-sustaining goods and services to raise standards of living and to expand the range of socio- economic choices available to individuals and nations (Todaro & Smith, 2015, p. 24). Economic development is distinguishable from economic growth although the former does not preclude the latter given that there is ‘good GDP’ and ‘bad GDP’ (Ashford & Hall, 2019, p. 164). Therefore, it is imperative to place constraints on economic growth and at the same time avoid placing unnecessary constraints on it. We need not contract every material throughput and output as long as stringent measures are in place to curtail undesirable externalities that flow from growth (Van den Bergh, 2011, p. 890). ‘It should be stressed that being against GDP or against unconditional GDP growth is not the same as being against growth’ (Van den Bergh, 2011, p. 885). Historically, economic growth has entailed various social and environmental costs (Borowy & Schmelzer, 2017, pp. 2–14). It has not only brought about severe climate change, resulting in damage and loss of property and livelihoods of vulnerable groups but also degraded ecosystem services such as fresh water, air purification and pest control. The quest for economic growth has also led to rising inequalities within and between countries, provoking hostility among the underclass towards the established classes as well as other vulnerable people such as foreign workers and immigrants. Moreover, the present growth-oriented economic order cannot uproot malnutrition, nor can it stave off land grabbing in lowincome countries. These states of affairs are not intrinsic to growth, according to Joseph Stiglitz, who calls for more investment in public goods and macroeconomic policies that maintain aggregate demand, alleviate inequality and promote employment (Stiglitz, 2019, p. x). While some inequality is unavoidable in a market economy, a sensible approach is to design ‘redistribution’ policies, so that the underprivileged can have better access to finance as well as means of reproduction and production; simultaneously, ‘predistribution’ policies are also called for, such as those making education and health accessible to all (Ostry et al., 2019, pp. 109–110). Moreover, it is plausible to explore measures that decouple profit from unsustainable production by altering the reward structure for profit and investment (Ashford & Hall, 2019, pp. 246–249). This does not imply that degrowth must be discarded. Some of its ideas can be drawn on to pursue ‘selective degrowth’ (Van den Bergh, 2011, p. 890). First, less developed countries should be accorded greater space to ‘find their own trajectories to what they define as the good life’ (Kallis et al., 2015, p. 5). Efforts should be made to contain laissez-faire expansion of cross-border economic exchanges. They are prone to turn less developed countries into commodity frontiers, where corporations engage in practices detrimental to the conservation of local communities and ecosystems (Schneider et al., 2010, p. 516).Masaki 91 Second, degrowth initiatives, such as those mentioned above, are usually valued in accordance with the time spent by those serving others. If individuals start spending more money on people serving people, they can help ‘bypass interests promoted by the entrenched corporations and established businesses that lock-in the present economic system’ (Ashford & Hall, 2019, p. 242). This also allows us to address a pertinent and yet oft-omitted question, namely, ‘who is standing in the way of sustainable transformations’ (Ashford & Hall, 2019, p. 242). Postgrowth transitions are hampered by elite appropriation and control of the means of reproduction and production at the expense of the majority, as pointed out in a paper recapitulating a symposium on degrowth (Saed, 2012, pp. 27–28). In bypassing entrenched businesses, it is imperative to change the nature of consumer demand by enabling a larger number of consumers to earn sufficient income and encouraging them to purchase products and services of labour-intensive degrowth enterprises (Ashford & Hall, 2019, p. 733). The financial rate of return on degrowth undertakings is lower than that of profit-seeking businesses (Jackson, 2017, p. 170). Thus, they are at risk of being driven out of the economy unless the nature of consumer spending is altered as above. Demands for their products and services are normally price elastic, and they are ‘less productive’ as costs tend to rise relative to other less labour-intensive businesses (Jackson, 2017, pp. 170–171). Therefore, it is imperative to explore complementarities between growth-oriented and degrowth initiatives in a way that promotes both ‘selective growth’ and ‘selective degrowth’. A similar stance can be found in a clause of the Declaration adopted at a seminal conference held in Paris in 2008: ‘In countries where severe poverty remains, right-sizing implies increasing consumption by those in poverty as quickly as possible, in a sustainable way, to a level adequate for a decent life, following locally determined poverty-reduction paths’ (Research and Degrowth, 2010, p. 523–524). However, this should not be confined to ‘countries where severe poverty remains’ because a fairer distribution of income has become a pressing concern among rich societies (Stiglitz, 2019, p. ix).

To further elucidate the drawbacks of degrowth (described in the preceding sections), it is useful to draw on the notion of ‘partial connections’, as advocated by Marilyn Strathern (2004). This notion is instrumental in problematising the stance of degrowth debates that downplay the pursuit of economic growth. It draws attention to the need to avoid dichotomising growth-seeking and degrowth- oriented measures and instead to explore complementarities between them. The drawback of degrowth debates arises from the binary worldview prevailing among scholars who are liable, as pointed out by Strathern (2004, p. 209), to complacently accept the ‘part-whole’ distinction. Scholars thus tend to believe a simplistic view that the ‘whole’ is composed of distinctive ‘parts’ that require separate treatment, and that the relation between a ‘part’ and the ‘whole’ is irreducibly hierarchical. Degrowth debates are accordingly founded on the following dubious premises. First, the ‘whole’ debate concerning economic growth consists of the degrowth ‘part’ and the growth-seeking ‘part’. Second, by making a distinction between these two ‘parts’ with recourse to the analytic category named ‘degrowth’, it is plausible to amplify information about the ‘whole’ debate. As long as scholars are complacent with such a ‘part-whole’ distinction, however, ‘information is lost proportionate to … new information gained’ by way of a new analytic category (Strathern, 2004, p. xv). This is because each single ‘part’ making up the plurality of the ‘whole’ consists of a similar plurality that demands an equally close inspection; ‘there are always potentially “more” things to take into account’ (Strathern, 2004, p. xiv). In studying Strathern’s contribution, Holbraad and Pedersen (2017, p. 131) use the example of classifying a dog as a quadruped (a distinct ‘part’ or category of the ‘whole’ life form). This analytic category helps to reduce the complexity of data on various life forms to pave the way for a comparative analysis, say, of quadrupeds and bipeds. At the same time, it also incurs ‘information loss’ (Strathern, 2004, p. xv). A dog is also a mammal and vertebrate, and a ‘partial connection’ can therefore be ascertained, for instance, between a dog as a quadruped and a human being as a biped in that both are mammals. Against this background, ‘[c]omparability is not intrinsic to anything’ (Strathern, 2004, p. 53). On the contrary, there exists fertile ground for forging a ‘working compatibility’ between different analytic categories (Strathern, 2004, p. 35). Such categories should neither be rigidly separated from nor contrasted with each other to make high-level abstractions and generalisations. ‘Partial connections’ can be explored across different analytic categories in such a manner as to collapse hierarchical ‘part-whole’ distinctions. This allows scholars to conduct research ‘at the same order of reality and concretion as the object of study by unearthing differentiations within it’ (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 138). As noted above, in reality, growth-seeking and degrowth-oriented measures do not always collide with each other because there is ‘good GDP’ and ‘bad GDP’. The notion of ‘partial connections’ thus helps to illustrate how degrowth advocates erroneously focus on the ‘comparability’ of the two ‘parts’ and resultantly incur ‘information loss’. Instead, a ‘working compatibility’ should be explored to pursue both ‘selective growth’ and ‘selective degrowth’. This is to capture the full range of sustainable development issues, as described above. This proposed approach should not be confused with the fashionable idea of ‘green growth’. The latter fails to break away from excessive economism: It merely proposes to shift the contents of growth-seeking measures towards the development of resource-efficient technologies to stimulate rapid growth and create new jobs (Kallis, 2018, p. 149). While ‘green growth’ thus downplays degrowth, the non-dual approach, put forth in this study, encompasses ‘selected degrowth’ to overcome the economic imperatives that stand in the way of sustainable transformations.

How to fight climate change while building good human societies

Degrowth’s radicalism isn’t where I part ways with it: The future will almost certainly require us to eat much less meat, dramatically change land use, and potentially invest a significant chunk of society’s resources in mitigation indefinitely.

(Lev Menand, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, “The Logic and Limits of the Federal Reserve Act,” 40 Yale J. on Reg. 197, pg lexis//um-ef)

Second, by entangling the Fed with the executive branch, nonmonetary functions are likely to reduce the Fed's independence in determining the rate of monetary expansion and handling other banking-system-related matters. For example, because the law requires that the Treasury Secretary approve nonbank lending, the Treasury Secretary could influence many of the terms and conditions of the Fed's pandemic response without taking political responsibility. Moreover, if executive branch officials hold formal levers over some policy areas, they will be "sorely tempted to use them as informal bargaining chips over monetary policy. That's just how the world works."394 These entanglements shift the Fed's allegiance from Congress to the Executive, the part of government policymakers have long sought to separate from decisions about the money supply.

(Lev Menand, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, “The Logic and Limits of the Federal Reserve Act,” 40 Yale J. on Reg. 197, pg lexis//um-ef)

The Fed, I argue here, is the capstone of the American Monetary Settlement. Congress built it to administer the investor-owned banking system and to stabilize it both economically and politically. Drawing on the text, structure, and legislative history of the Federal Reserve Act (FRA), as amended, I argue that today's Fed was designed to address three problems with monetary outsourcing that contemporary scholars and commentators tend to overlook, underplay, or misunderstand: monetary contraction, an uneven playing field in the banking system, and a lack of public accountability and control. I then use this understanding of the statutory scheme to answer questions left unsettled in the existing literature. First, I show that the Fed is not a kitchen-sink agency: its core statutory tools all relate to its monetary mission, as does the justification for its [*204] substantial independence from executive oversight and judicial review. Second, I explain why the Fed's expanding activities since 2008 are largely the product of a shift in the underlying structure of the banking system: the rise of financial firms that issue alternative forms of money without bank charters. Third, I consider three downsides of the gap between the Fed's enlarged footprint and the logic animating its enabling act.

You’ve been highly critical of QE in the past. Could you elaborate on some of its shortfalls?

The result of QE is that the central bank of a country owns debt issued by the government of that country. However, because the central bank is itself owned by the government of that country, then in reality the government owns its own debt.

The great quantitative easing experiment was a mistake. It's time central banks acknowledge it for the failure it was and retire it from their policy arsenal as soon as they’re able.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, an integral part of central banks' play book in the US, the UK and the European Union has been QE — the practice of buying up long-term bonds and mortgage-backed securities. QE is supposed to work by lowering long-term interest rates, which boosts demand and increases lending and risk-taking.

The new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has said that a Labour government would introduce “people’s QE”, that is to say, increased government spending, perhaps on infrastructure, financed with printed money.

What on earth are we to think about this, and indeed QE generally?

Cooper said: “Quantitive easing to pay for infrastructure now the economy is growing is really bad economics. History shows it hits your currency, hits investment, pushes up inflation and makes it harder, not easier, to get the sustainable growth in a global economy we need to tackle poverty and support our public services.”

Cooper’s point is not that QE is always bad economics. She could not possibly say that since she was a member of the Labour government that first adopted the policy in 2009. Her argument is that QE was a response to a dire emergency and that the economy does not need more of it at this time.

Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed “People’s QE” has provoked consternation in the academic and central banking world. Even Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has weighed in, despite the perils of central bankers speaking out on matters of political controversy. PQE has divided opinions in the economic commentariat, but it has united all in getting us extremely hot under the collar.

PQE involves the government instructing the Bank of England to print money (or rather, the modern equivalent, creating electronic reserves) to purchase bonds issued by a Corbyn-established National Investment Bank. This NIB would then use the money to fund public infrastructure projects, or, in fact, whatever the government fancied.