Alt fails and no transition coming now---entrenched powerful resistance and cultural expectations of affluence means no one organizes and, to the extent that they do, they are ineffective

Hard Truths about a ‘Top-Down’ Transition ¶ I wish to conclude by acknowledging several hard truths about the feasibility of a ‘top down’ transition to a post-growth economy. The first is to note that cultures around the world, especially in the developed world, are not close to being ready to take the idea of a post-growth economy seriously. In Australia, for example, our current and prospective governments are all firmly embedded in the growth paradigm and they show no signs of questioning it – none at all. At the cultural level, the expectation of ever-increasing affluence (which assumes continued growth) is as strong as ever. In this political and cultural context, the policy proposals outlined above – however necessary they might be to confronting the limits to growth predicament – will strike most people as wildly unrealistic, overly interventionist, and probably undesirable. I am not so deluded as to think otherwise.¶ The second point to note, subtly linked to the first, is that the powers-that-be would not tolerate these policies for a post-growth economy. To provide a case in point,when a relatively fringe Occupy Movement in 2011 began to challenge undue corporate influence on democracy and make noise about wealth inequality, soon enough the executive branches of government bore down upon the activists and stamped out the opposition. Mainstream media made little effort to understand the movement. Given that a postgrowth economy would directly undermine the economic interests of the most powerful corporations and institutions in society, one should expect merciless and sustained resistance from these vested interests if a post-growth movement ever began gaining ascendency.¶ The third point to note – and probably the most challenging – is that, in a globalised world order, even the bold policies proposed above would be unlikely to produce a stable and flourishing post-growth economy. After all, how would the stock markets react if a government announced a policy agenda that would deliberately aim to contract the economy for environmental and social justice reasons? More specifically, how would the stock markets react if a government, in pursuit of sustainability and global equity, introduced a diminishing resource cap that sought to phase out the most damaging industries and reduce resource consumption by 80% of current Australian levels? I suspect there would be utter turmoil, ultimately leading to an economic crash far greater than the global financial crisis. My point is that it may well be impossible to implement a smooth ‘top down’ transition to a post-growth economy, even if a strong social movement developed that wanted this. The market economies we know today would be unlikely to be able to adjust to the types and speed of foundational changes required. A ‘great disruption’ of some form may be a necessary or inevitable part of the transition beyond growth.¶ To make matters more challenging still, in a globalised economy, it is not clear whether a single nation could adopt a post-growth economy without inducing a range of antagonistic reactions from other nations. On the one hand, there is a web of international ‘free trade’ agreements that make such a move highly problematic, and could even provoke sanctions from international institutions or other governments. On the other hand, in a globalised economy there is always the threat of capital flight the moment a government threatens to defy the neoliberal logic of profit-maximisation or talks of wealth redistribution. There is also the geopolitical risk of being a leader in a post-growth transition, as this may involve fewer funds available for military forces,weakening a nation’s relative power globally. All of these issues radically call into question the feasibility of a ‘top down’ transition to a post-growth economy, and yet these challenges are rarely acknowledged in the post-growth literature.