Engrained mental models of perpetual growth make the degrowth transition impossible

At the heart of the flawed mental model that I believe is responsible for our collective failure to address climate change and resource depletion is an apparently unshakeable conviction that any future for human civilization must include the continuation of economic growth. According to this belief, growth is the engine of the current world order and, without it, the system will collapse and human progress will end. This model has several core principles embedded in it. Here are just a few of them: Economic growth has allowed us to expand our human population to eight billion, a clear sign of success. Capitalism is the best and most equitable way to drive economic growth. It balances market forces of supply and demand and allocates resources in the most efficient, and therefore just, manner possible. Economic growth within a capitalist framework is best measured by increases in Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Economic growth is necessary to meet constantly increasing consumer demand for goods and services. Growth fuels demand, demand requires growth. Economic growth produces human happiness, more growth produces more happiness. Supply scarcity does occur, but it triggers self-correcting responses: investments to find additional supplies and inventions to create substitutes for depleted resources. (source) This system is a perpetual motion machine that can and will continue to produce positive outcomes indefinitely. I am not going to debate the empirical accuracy of these principles here. All are demonstrably false, as others have cogently shown (source, source), including here on Medium (source, source, source). The question I am interested in is not why they’re false, but why the world’s elites appear to be doubling down on them when they are known to be false. I believe this is because of the inherent nature of deeply-embedded mental models. In this case, the mental model underlying the faith in economic growth is not only embedded in decades (centuries?) of economic thought, it is also enshrined in the practices, legal frameworks, and institutions that power the global economic system today. This is why an often-repeated quote rings as true today as it ever has: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” (source, p. 1) Adherence to the gospel of economic growth permeates many of the most popular climate change mitigation and adaptation scenarios in circulation today. Indeed, although the IPCC started issuing climate change reports in 2000, it was not until 2022 — and then only after numerous calls by climate scientists (source, source, source) — that a self-described Low Energy Demand (LED) scenario was added to the portfolio of models (source, Table 1.1, p. 174). Why do we cling so desperately to the idea that civilization cannot survive without economic growth? There are most likely two reasons why the world’s political and economic elites cannot acknowledge that we have entered an era in which economic growth must inevitably come to an end with the depletion of fossil fuels. First, our political leaders can’t give up on the idea of growth because, without growth, the only way they can respond to climate change and resource depletion is by radically decreasing human resource consumption, primarily in the global North. This is seen as politically unfeasible and career suicide for any politician who might suggest it.¹ So no political leader, with the possible exception of the Secretary-General of the UN (who is not the leader of a sovereign nation), is willing to talk about it. One consequence of this reticence among our political leadership is that the general public knows much less about resource depletion than it does about climate change. This is likely to leave the world’s population dangerously unprepared for understanding the shortages and scarcities that are already beginning to appear, as climate change disrupts food production, manufacturing, and distribution channels around the world (source). The second reason our political and economic leaders can’t give up on the idea of economic growth is because, without growth, capitalism has no solution to the problem of persistent economic inequality, both within and between nations. Defenders of capitalism like to point out that “economic growth has lifted billions of people out of poverty” (source). This assertion may be technically correct (although there is strong evidence it is not), but it masks a deeper fact: the rate at which growth has contributed to reducing poverty at the bottom of the income ladder is minuscule compared to the rate at which growth has concentrated income and wealth among the world’s most wealthy. According to one recent report on global inequality: “Some countries have reduced the numbers of people living in extreme poverty. But economic gaps have continued to grow as the very richest amass unprecedented levels of wealth. Among industrial nations, the United States is by far the most top-heavy, with much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1 percent than any other country.” Increasing inequality is a feature, not a bug, of modern capitalism (source). As French economist Thomas Piketty has shown, because return on capital historically grows faster than return on labor, capitalist accumulation inevitably increases the gap between rich and poor. As long as the whole system continues to produce growth, the needs of those at the bottom can presumably be met without sacrificing any of the wealth of those at the top. But without growth, the economic pie becomes fixed and any gains at the bottom must come out of the shares of those at the top, most likely through much-feared and highly-resisted wealth taxes. Or so it is believed by our political and economic elites, which gives them a compelling second reason to reject imagining a world without growth. As one commentator has put it: “economists and policymakers often regard growth as a substitute for equality: it is politically easier to grow total income and expect that enough will trickle down to improve the lives of ordinary people than it is to distribute existing income more fairly, as this requires an attack on the interests of the dominant class.” (source, p. 57) Capitalism is not a system for maximizing abundance or human wellbeing, it is a system for maximizing capital accumulation. This leads to a kind of abundance, but only for some, the small minority of capitalists at the top of the global economy. Ultimately, these people are so deeply invested — both financially and cognitively — in the system that nurtures them that they seem unable to even imagine a world in which it no longer operates. So, why do we cling so desperately to the idea that civilization cannot survive without economic growth? The short answer is: because capitalism cannot survive without economic growth, capitalists cannot survive without capitalism, and the modern neoliberal order cannot survive without capitalists. QED, civilization — as we know it today — cannot survive without economic growth. Ironically, that’s something pretty much everyone can agree on.