This is an aff argument. Only capitalism can manage societal complexity—the alt crumbles.

A related point can be made about resilience, or the capacity of ecovillages to respond to unexpected shocks. Ecovillages are a fair-weather social construct, and function insofar as the sea is not rough. They count on the fact that the wider (capitalist) society is there to serve as safety net should things go south. What if a new pathogen spreads and agricultural crops are lost? What if an epidemic erupts? How about if antibiotic resistance becomes widespread? Or a natural disaster hits?36 Or extreme weather events become prevalent?37 Would ecosocialism be able to respond to these shocks effectively—or at least, would it be able to adapt and react as well as today’s advanced economies do? In the context of Covid-19, would a centralized degrowth economy have been able to mobilize resources quickly and scale up the infrastructure to deal with a surge in hospitalizations, or the knowledge facility to rapidly develop and distribute a vaccine? These are all open questions, and the answers cannot be found in the experience of ecovillages, which have relied on the wider capitalist system to fend off such threats.

“You’re not thinking fourth dimensionally!”

In a sequel to the film Back to the Future, brainiac time-machine inventor Dr. Emmett Brown chastises his young acolyte, Marty McFly, for “not thinking fourth dimensionally,” by which he means not taking time into account. Some degrowth recommendations are tainted by the same lapse. Several policy proposals, designed to solve blatant problems produced by the current economic system, seem to have skipped the work of thinking dynamically about implications over time.

One symptom of this harks back to Jackson’s hope for a “Cinderella Economy.” Rich economies have managed to achieve certain successes—say, advanced healthcare and widespread education—that serve humanity and the planet well. The idea is that we can simply keep these while ditching the rest. Lately, proponents of this view have pointed to the useful start made during the Covid-19 crisis, when strict lockdown measures made it obvious that some jobs or activities were essential and others were not.38 But the economic system as a whole is highly intertwined and what capitalism does, for good or bad, is to organize this complexity through the price mechanism. Is it really possible we can neatly disentangle the sectors or activities based on “care, craft, and culture” from the rest of the economy?

Let us start with an obvious example. Care in the form of nursing takes place in a hospital, which however is built of cement and steel—meaning that we need access to such production materials even just for maintenance work.39 The hospital’s advanced testing and screening machines, without which modern doctors would be severely limited, are in constant need of replacement pieces. Moreover, patients need medication, requiring a pharmaceutical industry to develop and produce them, and then update them, as is the case for antibiotics. These must also be transported, typically at cold temperatures, so care providers need access to truck manufacturing, logistics centers, refrigerator producers, and well-maintained roads. The list could go on, but the point is clear that all sectors are deeply intertwined in a complex web. The notion that we could easily identify the sectors we like, keep those, and be rid of the rest is ill-conceived.40

In a fascinating lecture delivered in 2015 at the World Economic Forum, growth expert Ricardo Hausmann illustrated this point by showing that the challenge in accelerating long-term growth in an underdeveloped country is not, for example, to bring advanced agricultural machines—say, modern combine harvesters—to its poor farmers.41 That is easy and, if that were the secret of development, we would have solved world poverty a long time ago. The hard part is building the whole economic network that allows the combines to operate: fuel supply, maintenance, logistics, training for the farmers, and so on. Without all this, any marvel of modern agricultural technology will either be useless or rapidly fall into disuse. An analogy Hausmann frequently draws is to the game of Scrabble: rather than think that a single letter will score points, you must think about combinations. Lack some other crucial letters and you cannot form the valuable word. The challenge is to understand how productive networks are built and organized (usually self-organized), and then gradually try to create them in poorer countries. This is why development has been so hard to foster.

For the historically minded, another interesting parallel can be found in the fall of the Roman Empire. At its peak, this civilization reached highly advanced road systems and food logistics, a sophisticated legal system, and plumbing sufficient to sustain the mighty city of Rome as it grew to over one million people in the second century. After the system collapsed, the rulers that came next inherited all the aqueducts and other infrastructure. These, however, rapidly fell into disuse through lack of organized maintenance. Rome’s population fell to as low as thirty thousand people. It took over sixteen centuries for a Western city, London, to reach one million inhabitants, a mark it handily surpassed after the Industrial Revolution. In Collapse, economic geographer Jared Diamond travels across centuries and continents to look at many other similar cases where societal capacities to sustain economic and social complexity were lost, and populations dropped precipitously.

The level of well-being achieved by today’s society rests on the complexity organized by capitalism in a decentralized way. Again, the idea that we could take the parts we like—advanced healthcare, high-level education, technological innovation—because “they have been achieved,” and simply ditch the rest, is misplaced. Likewise, the idea that we could manage a complex system by top-down rules, or else have it hold together because everybody embraced the principle of sufficiency, is a recipe for Diamondstyle collapse. The challenge, instead, is to scale down production of polluting items without toppling, in a domino effect, many other things that uphold society and well-being.