Degrowth is politically impossible—confidence in decoupling and fear of impoverishment doom “the transition”

[Noah Smith, 09-06-21, "People are realizing that degrowth is bad," No Publication, ] WL

The political argument against degrowth Milanovic actually has two excellent posts on the topic of degrowth. In the first one, he lays out why forcing developing countries to stay in poverty would be bad: Enforcing global degrowth would require freezing world income at about $17,000/year. That means that most people in the world would never even come close to current rich-world living standards — instead, they would at best only be able to reach the level currently enjoyed in China or Botswana. Perhaps that’s not such a horrible fate, but as Milanovic notes, this would require impoverishing most of the population of developed countries. He elaborates on this point in his new post, pulling no punches: Milanovic quite rightly waves away degrowthers’ protestations that GDP is not a good measure of human welfare. GDP isn’t perfect, he notes, but it’s close enough where the basic point stands. Demanding that people in rich countries accept absolutely catastrophic declines in their living standards is a political non-starter. Klein, on his podcast, tries to point this out as gently as possible: Milanovic is less gentle, calling this “outright magical thinking”. He is correct. When you look at how much people in America are willing to sacrifice in terms of their material well-being in order to fight climate change, it’s far less than what Klein is talking about. And Klein is really softballing it here — it’s not just giving up beef and SUVs, it’s a dramatic reduction in the size of housing and the amount of food and the ease of transportation and the quality of medical care that people in rich countries enjoy. It is, frankly, not happening. But even this vastly understates the political and practical difficulties of degrowth. Piper adds several key points. First of all, she notes, because developed countries have been decoupling resource use and growth for a while now, curbing resource use will actually cause a lot more restrictions on developing countries than Milanovic’s simple calculations would suggest: This is an incredibly important point. For example, China now produces more CO2 emissions than the U.S., the EU, and Japan combined: (And no, this is not because of outsourcing, as you can see by looking at the trade-adjusted emissions numbers.) Another way of looking at this is that China’s CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP are more than twice America’s, and about five times that of the EU. Any global degrowth plan that actually reduces resource use is going to entail more pain for China than its GDP numbers would suggest, simply because China is at a more resource-intensive stage of growth. Do you think China will accept a substantial diminution of its living standards, in order to satisfy the environmental-economic diktats of activists in Northern Europe? If so, you need to rethink a great many things. Anyway, Piper makes a second crucially important point. So far we’ve been waving our hands and talking about lowering rich-world GDP while raising GDP for poor countries. In fact, economies don’t work like that: Degrowth would thus require deep changes in the entire way that the global economy works. Change happens, but not like that; implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame. Klein points this out, again rather gently: In other words, it is abject fantasy. Taken together, these criticisms are utterly devastating to the entire degrowth project. In its current form, it will not advance beyond a media fad. No matter how shrilly degrowthers quote apocalyptic projections, the things they call for simply will not happen. Luckily, there is a better way to save the planet. And there is a better role for the degrowth movement, if they’re willing to rethink their approach and become more fact-based, reasonable, and humble.