1---Our alt solves all of their “transition bad” arguments---our alt isn’t economic collapse.

We can either deny this evidence, or we can face up to it. Facing up to it means rethinking the extent to which we should pursue GDP growth. Now, this is where the good news comes in. McAfee says he wants to achieve “longer, healthier lives”, improving human well-being and flourishing. That’s the goal. And here too, we agree (that’s two goals we share). But for some reason McAfee assumes that in order to do this, even high-income nations, regardless of how rich they have already become, need to keep growing their GDP, exponentially, with no identifiable end point. This is an unexamined assumption; he provides no evidence for this claim.

I get it – I used to hold this assumption too. Most people do. But the good news is that it’s not true. At least 30 years of research in ecological economics has made it clear that high-income nations don’t need to keep growing in order to improve people’s lives. They can do it right now, without any additional growth at all, simply by sharing income, resources and opportunities more fairly and investing in universal public goods. These are the interventions that matter. That’s how Spain beats the USA in life expectancy by a solid five years, and outperforms the USA on virtually every social indicator, with half of the USA’s GDP per capita. The notion that the US needs to keep growing its GDP in order to improve social outcomes is simply not supported by evidence.

By the way, we need to keep the inequality problem in mind here. According to the World Inequality Database, the richest 5% capture 46% of total global GDP. That means that nearly half of all the resources we use, and half of all the emissions we emit, is done in order to make rich people richer. In what world does this make any ecological sense? And yet McAfee has never engaged with this question.

Once we realize that we don’t need growth in order to accomplish our social goals, this makes it much easier to reduce resource and energy use, accomplish a rapid transition to renewables, and bring our economy back into balance with the living world. We should see this as liberating. And this vision is not anti-tech. On the contrary, the point is to prevent our technological gains (efficiency improvements, renewable energy, etc) from being swamped by scale effect of growth (ever-rising resource and energy demand), so that they can deliver the benefits we want them to.

Now, to McAfee’s final point: “but that would be a recession!”. And recessions, as we all know, are terrible: people lose their jobs and homes, poverty and inequality goes up, etc. Nobody wants this; and here too McAfee and I agree (that’s three). Here’s what we need to grasp, however: recessions are what happen when growth-dependent economies fail to grow; it’s a disaster. This is where degrowth comes in - to solve precisely this problem. Degrowth calls for a different kind of economy altogether: one that doesn’t require growth in the first place; one where we can reduce resource and energy use while specifically preventing unemployment and reducing inequality. The idea is to allocate resources and energy more rationally, and more democratically, to enable everyone to live flourishing lives in balance with the ecosystems we depend on.

Instead of engaging with this literature, McAfee tries to dismiss degrowth as a recession. To be frank, this is a lazy, bad faith argument. We have different words for these phenomena because, as I explain here, they are, in every respect, fundamentally different things. You can only miss this fact if you’re not reading, or if you’re intentionally seeking to mislead; either way, it is irresponsible. So, while I welcome McAfee’s engagement, this kind of claim is not helpful, and does not advance our collective understanding. My appeal to McAfee: let’s try to get beyond this sort of thing and engage more honestly with the empirical and theoretical work that has been done, so we can have more meaningful conversations. If we are going to realise our shared goals, we can and must do better.