It fails --- especially in terms of a job guarantee.

We pursue common purposes through collective action when it promotes the general welfare or general security against great dangers. We impose mask and vaccine mandates to ward off a deadly virus, and even that provokes backlashes. We shift industry to wartime footing, commanding the production of weapons and materiel when invasion or humanitarian catastrophes abroad threaten. And yes, we collectively submit to rules and regulations to protect our natural environment. Yet in all of these cases the measures implemented are for some tangible greater good, worth the abridgments to freedom even by the lights of those making sacrifices. Degrowth imposes limits for the sake of limits, on the abstract postulate that extending our frontiers and expanding our capabilities is intrinsically suspect.

People who are socialized in this way, in consumer society, can be characterized as ‘growth subjects’. In analysing ‘growth subjects’, which are often conceptualized according to the model of the bourgeois white man, three characteristics are particularly noteworthy: (1) having the status of an apparently completely independent individual; (2) an orientation towards maximizing one’s own ‘world reach’, or making ever larger parts of the world available to oneself, through for example, travel, consumption, media usage, and so on; and (3) striving for personal assertiveness in order to achieve these goals under competitive conditions. (FID 111, emphasis added.)

On the degrowth view, growth subjects—ordinary people living ordinary lives in liberal democracies—must be taught to narrow their sights and dim their dreams. Why do you want to try new things, ideas, foods, sports, etc? Why do you want to see the world? Why do you want to consume so much media, read so many books, eat exotic foods, explore expensive hobbies? “Want” itself is the object of suspicion. In degrowth Need is king. Degrowth requires a radical reorientation of human life—individual and social—from the liberal openness of dreams and aspirations to the stagnant closet of necessity. Human beings should be satisfied with having their basic needs met, on a generous basis to be sure, and must learn to think of this as true freedom.

Degrowth explicitly commends a bottom-up, democratic social transition away from growth and rejects violence and tyranny in pursuing its ends. But pursued to its logical ends degrowth must turn to central planning and social control. Under degrowth the natural propensity to pursue our wants by truck, barter, and trade is held in suspicion or even contempt. Seeking profit, investing, consuming, and even saving are all pursued to better our own conditions and possibilities or those of our families, friends, or communities. Because the urge to improve our lot in life is so primal and so strong, these activities must be sharply guided or outright controlled.

There is no conceivable, stable scenario where the great preponderance of individuals, business interests, and governments choose to reduce wealth and productive capacity—to become poorer—voluntarily. Individuals will resist this for the sake of their own comfort and the welfare of their families. Businesses will resist decreasing profits and production as an existential matter; they risk going out of business. Politicians will resist imposing limits on growth for basic budget logic, and will resist curtailing consumer comforts lest they draw the ire of their constituents. Governments will shun deindustrialization for fear of losing geopolitical position and security.

A degrowth advocate could readily retort that human “freedom” is just the price that must be paid to avert ecological catastrophe. But even on its own terms degrowth is destined to fail to meet the basic needs it centralizes. Few economic or historical lessons have been harder learned than the inability of centrally planned economies to provide the basic needs or protect the basic rights of its subjects. Lest my charge of central planning be mistaken for red-baiting at the hint of an enlarged public sector, I’ll say now that mitigating climate change demands massive public spending, and a greatly expanded public sector providing “public options” for healthcare, child care, banking, transportation, and other necessities could provide a solid basis for all individuals to live productive and flourishing lives. This may or may not be socialism but it is not central planning. Central planning enters the picture when everyday consumption choices and entrepreneurial ventures are treated with suspicion, presumptively forbidden without special approval from “democratic” councils.

To make [degrowth] possible, economic decisions must be seen as political problems. This means putting the economy in the hands of people and involving more and more people in key decisions – such as the producers in a factory, the neighbours of a farm, the users of a community-owned power plant, or the care recipients in retirement homes deciding what is produced, how to relate to the environment and other economic agents, which services are needed, and how work is organized. (FID 215)

The presumption of freedom—to do what we like, buy, sell, and trade what we like, and toil how we like—is replaced by the presumption of needing approval from authorities. This is the political economy of the homeowners association at the local level, and at the national (and international) level it is picking and choosing whole sectors of the economy that need to be purged for the “common good” of degrowth. For the industries that remain, political powers must choose what products and which producers are truly necessary and which must be cut as wasteful excess.

Organizing society according to the mercy of official approval will empower busybodies at best, and truly tyrannical personalities lusting for domination at worst. It’s also fertile soil for corruption, as those with connections on the councils will just happen to be the most essential entities. Corruption in turn augurs ineffective governance as public purposes—say, degrowth—are subverted in favor of the leaders’ personal aims.

It’s worth dwelling on what a shift to a command-and-control economy would look like in human terms. Degrowth may involve a universal job guarantee, but choice of work would radically diminish. Do you want to move to be with your family? Do you want to escape a lousy work environment? Do you want to study German literature or economics at college? These sorts of decisions may need approval from planners, especially as five-year degrowth plans begin missing their targets.