No mindset shift. The growth imperative is hardwired at individual and societal levels regardless of capitalism.

The main topic of this book is the relationship between capitalism and the growth imperative, and this is an essential relationship to understand as we consider a societal rethink to address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. The point that must be accepted is that economic growth is a result of human desires, rather than a top-down imposition by capitalism on otherwise indifferent individuals. The quest for more will endure as long as humans populate the planet, whether we tear down capitalism or not. It is best to acknowledge this and craft our sustainability strategies accordingly.

While we have looked at the origins of the growth imperative from a more individual, or microeconomic, perspective, it is also possible to do so at the country level. Skeptics will surely point to historical estimates of GDP, such as the ones displayed in Figure 5.2, to claim that capitalism and industrialization brought a growth-obsession phase to an economic history previously characterized by simple stability. Such an interpretation of the data is understandable, but fallacious. Aggregate economic growth has accompanied humankind throughout its history, but it accelerated enormously from the Industrial Revolution onward thanks to certain conditions: the Scientific Revolution, better protection of property rights, presence of capital, an extensive banking system, high wages in England, and more.

To understand a hockey-stick chart like Figure 5.2, one should appreciate that behind the astounding growth since the Industrial Revolution is a previous economic history that has been obscured by it.56 More important than the calculation of how much economic growth was realized before that point should be the recognition that the quest for more—the growth imperative—was in place. Aggregate growth could materialize only to a limited extent, as new technologies were developed and spread at a slower pace (and in some cases, were forgotten altogether when their inventor died or a civilization collapsed).57 But that does not mean that early humans did not crave it.

In The Measure of Civilization, Ian Morris offers an index to gauge a society’s capacity to harness energy. It combines measures of not only food (for humans and their livestock), but also fuel (for cooking, heating, cooling, firing kilns and furnaces, and powering machines, and including wind and waterpower as well as wood, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power) and raw materials (for construction, metalwork, pot-making, clothing, and any other purposes). Using this comprehensive, standardized index, Morris shows that energy-capture capacity (and the technology to enable it) rose steadily from its baseline of four to five kilocalories per person per day in a typical pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer society, accounting for food, cooking, and little else. By the peak of the Roman Empire, it had reached over thirty kilocalories.58

Advancing energy capture and technologies could sustain an increasing population. At the onset of the Agricultural Revolution, ten thousand years ago, the human population of the planet was roughly four million. This was about what you would expect for a medium-sized mammal like homo sapiens. It reached two hundred million, however, by the time of Christ. This was made possible by great enabling inventions like domestication and breeding, language, metallurgy, agriculture, irrigation, cities, writing, money, and commerce. Each time, more available resources spurred population growth, which eventually led to a crisis of overpopulation. Each time, demographic pressure against the limits of available resources spurred inventiveness.59 Through constant struggles, the result has been a slow but steady rise in population over the centuries.60 Thus, human history can be interpreted as a constant struggle against limits imposed by nature, then shattered by tinkering and ingenuity. While climate change, and environmental degradation more broadly, is in a different league in terms of its complexity and scale, it would seem to belong to the same category of problems that humans have faced throughout history.

Famine was not the only disaster holding population and economic growth in check. There were also plagues, like the Black Death that killed perhaps 200 million people in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. And there were wars, too. If one society managed to start accumulating, it quickly attracted the attention of its neighbors, which saw violence as a legitimate way to increase their resource availability. Some civilizations failed to sustain the complexity they achieved, or to respond to changing climate or environment, and either collapsed or were conquered.61 Still, it would be a mistaken interpretation to see a patchy track record of achieving and sustaining broad-based economic and population growth as an historical absence of the quest for more.62

As evidenced by invasions and wars, relative income theory applies at the country level, too. In a context of sustained interactions with other societies, economic comparisons are not limited to the past, but also extend to one’s reference group—in this case, neighboring countries. The broader issue here is that, in a geopolitical context of confrontations among countries, economic growth is highly linked with political clout and military expenditure. This generates a geopolitical growth imperative akin to the desire to keep up with the Joneses, even just to deter foreign interventions. As noted in Chapter 3, an instructive example comes from the experience of the Soviet Union, which was not built on a capitalist system, and so was free from the price mechanism, Schumpeterian competition between firms, and other in-built growth imperatives. It had not even adopted GDP as a metric to guide economic policy. Nonetheless, it was subject to a geopolitical growth imperative due to its Cold War with the United States, and the desire to protect and project its value system in what was then called the third world.

Over the course of history, some countries actively chose to withdraw from the iron law of continued economic growth and progress, and to avoid comparisons to others, by embracing self-isolation. In all cases, domestically, this was associated with sentiments of national superiority, insularity, and less innovation. When the curtain came up, these nations were revealed to be relatively poorer, and at the commercial and military mercy of others. Two examples stand out: Ming-dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan (see Appendix B).

Harking back to the opening of this chapter, capitalism is blamed for many ills, but it is better understood as a great enabler. It is an efficient way to foster growth. It rewards ingenuity. It prods people to invent practical things and add to the store of useful knowledge. When firms compete for customers, they have an incentive to master the latest technology and learn how to produce it as cheaply as possible. This appeals to consumers, who display all the emulation and status-signaling behaviors we have discussed. In short, capitalism is efficient at delivering what people want, and people seem, due to cultural-evolutionary traits, to constantly want more. This did not start with the Industrial Revolution. The quest for more has characterized most of human history, both in periods when growth was achieved, and when it was not.

Climate change and value systems

Not everyone finds examples drawn from the past to be persuasive. Today, thanks to advanced science, people know that current methods of production and consumption of goods and ser vices are harmful to nature. Therefore, as the message spreads, and global protests such as Fridays for Future are noticed, people will simply stop wanting more, and will resist the pressures of relative income theory. Rationality will surely prevail over vague psychological instincts, will it not?

While the trend is surely positive, and we see younger generations enthusiastically embracing the environmental cause in ways their older siblings and parents did not, there are reasons to believe that a complete turnaround in preferences remains unlikely.63 For a long time, the presumption in climate change communication has been that, once scientific evidence was made available, people would quickly act upon it. But being aware and concerned about climate change does not necessarily jolt individuals into action.

Over the past twenty years, as a large gap between knowledge, concern, and action developed, so did a wide literature on the topic. A review of over two decades of research, ranging from behavioral and environmental economics to cognitive sciences, social psychology, health policy, and marketing, finds many scholars trying to understand the cognitive traits that hold people back.64 With regard to climate change specifically, the problem is that shared gains, often erroneously perceived as far in the future, are constantly weighed against personal, immediate costs. Given that, in our current technological state, CO2 emissions originate from basically every aspect of modern lifestyles, most of the actions required to bring them down clash with elements that have been, until recently, at the core of our values, identity formation, and belief system.

These are the same human traits we saw above as we explored the nonfunctional utility of consumption. For example, for over half a century, it has been a status symbol to have a luxury car, and jet-setting around the globe has been a clear marker of success—think of the iconic James Bond with his deluxe Aston Martin and secret missions involving travel to exotic locations. It has been the tradition in many countries for people’s diet to center on meat, a very CO2-intensive form of nourishment. Such norms do not evolve quickly. No matter the level of education or degree of climate awareness, when systems of beliefs clash, individuals experience cognitive dissonance and look for ways to avoid change. This conflict has not boded well for climate action, as people have relied on all sorts of justifications to evade a sense of guilt and stick to their carbon-intensive habits. Some feel compelled to question the science behind climate change, and stress the wide uncertainty surrounding estimates. Others fall back on fatalism (“we are all going to die in any case”), or the odd argument of being too busy to act. Yet others engage in wild discounting of the timeframe and geographic scope involved (“it’s going to affect people far away from here, in a future far away”), or use blame-shifting techniques (“why should I do something when China / politicians / corporations are not doing anything?”).

Fighting climate change will surely require changes in behavior by citizens, which will hinge on a complex set of incentives and regulations, as Chapter 8 will explore. We should not hold our breath, however, waiting for a spontaneous and complete turnaround of current value systems. Much less should we make this, as the degrowth agenda implicitly does, the central element of the fight against climate change and environmental degradation.