Empirics disprove

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

The international dimension

“[C]ommitment to degrowth leads, in an act of self-preservation and contrary to the idyllic narrative, to an insular worldview and closure from the outside world […] we can expect less exposure to outside cultures and possibly more xenophobia” (p. 75). Again, not much effort was put behind this two-paragraph long critique, which only stands on a fleeting reference to Benjamin Friedman’s The moral consequences of economic growth (2005) peppered with three mug quotes from Frédéric Bastiat, Joseph Priestley, and Montesquieu.[2]

The concept of “décroissance conviviale” (convivial degrowth) emerged in 2002 as a strategy for global justice. The promotion of degrowth in a country like France was not a self-interested struggle for survival, but rather an attempt to free the global South from the “imperial mode of living” of rich, overconsuming nations. This is even truer today. The degrowth discourse interacts within a complex “pluriverse” of visions of prosperity and stands behind a strong anti-colonial politics. If anything, it is much more epistemologically agile than the Western-vision of money-measured progress that is at the core of most “sustainable development” approaches.

Regardless of your opinion about globalisation, it doesn’t enable you to escape the laws of physics and biology. From the perspective of ecological economics, the scale of an economy is set by the carrying capacities of its supporting ecosystems. This applies to all cultures and all economic systems alike. After that, there is no prescription as to what should be made with these resources, except perhaps a direct focus on well-being. Nothing forbids communities to dedicate their fair share of world resources to travels and organise cultural events in a spirit of “open localism.” In theory, this even applies to flying. Today, less than 10% of the world population take planes, only 2-4% fly internationally, and 1% of the world population causes 50% of the emissions from aviation. If what you care about is cosmopolitanism, the best way of doing that would be to redistribute access to flying to the larger number (a socialist argument). In order to do that, we need to fly less in the global North in order for other people to be able to fly at all (a degrowth argument).

Will degrowth cause mass exodus from “all of those who are not interested in such a project” (p. 76)? This is the good old Atlas Shrugged scare, a classic move in neoliberal kung-fu. If you try to tax the rich in order to invest into public services, they will just leave. If you try to introduce stricter environmental standards, businesses will fly away like a murder of crows. The reality is less novel-worthy. New Zealand introduced the “well-being budgets” as an alternative to GDP in 2019 without causing much of a stir. The EU has banned the sales of fossil vehicle in 2035, which didn’t make Renault, Mercedes, and Ferrari move to the UK. Besides, the question is not whether we should or shouldn’t downscale production and consumption in rich countries (we’ve seen that this is an unavoidable condition for sustainability). The real question we economists should be asking is how to organise an effective ecological transition while minimising its drawbacks (capital flight, undesirable unemployment, poverty risks, public finances, etc.).

“The whole idea is based on a misreading of the global economy as a zero-sum game. Pursuing a degrowth agenda in the developed world would bring about a collapse of global trade, closing the door to any hope of fast growth in poor countries, turning economic miracles into mirages, and forcing millions to remain in extreme poverty” (p. 185). This is just another boogeyman. First, as if economic growth in the developed world was lifting the poor out of poverty. This is the “trickle-down” argument, another neoliberal fable without much scientific currency. Between 2010 and 2020, only 1% of the increase in world spending was attributed to extremely poor households. This is also true at the national level: in Australia, the top 10% income earners reaped 93% of the benefits of economic growth between 2009 and 2019. Already-rich nations, and especially their upper classes, appropriate the lion share of the financial benefits while shifting the ecological costs to the most vulnerable countries – it’s called ecologically unequal exchange (for more, see The Divide). If anything, consuming less in the global North will actually lessen the social-ecological beating inflicted by a minority of affluent individuals into the rest of the world.