Only degrowth has targeted and good innovation

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

Degrowth will slow down innovation

Final argument from Terzi: “With shrinking resources available to societies and governments, and without an efficient allocation mechanism to govern complexity, ecosocialism would be incapable of sustaining such knowledge machinery” (p. 78). For Terzi, “the only credible way of avoiding a climate catastrophe is to accelerate the development and widespread adoption of ‘green’ innovation. […] abandoning capitalism would take us further away from our climate goals, by throwing sand in the gears of an innovation machinery that is unmatched in human history […] innovation and economic growth are, in fact, inextricable” (p. 22).

Innovation is our ability to solve problems. But the very definition of a problem is socially constructed. In an economic system where moneymaking drives innovation, the problems on top of the priority list reflects the needs of the wealthiest. I see no other reasons why we are wasting our best mathematicians in the design of trading algorithm and our most creative communicators to find ways to trick people into buying unnecessarily large cars. “The strength of the capitalist system on the innovation front is not that it creates more geniuses, but rather that it is an efficient organizing principle, providing strong incentives for people to develop ideas” (p. 147). Capitalism doesn’t provide incentives for people to develop ideas, it provides incentives for people to develop ideas that they can sell for money. There is a crucial difference. I’m all for making the best out of human creativity, I simply think that the capitalist framing of innovation is too narrow, leaving out an array of social and ecological innovations that should be considered crucial but aren’t currently since they are not lucrative.

This is not a matter of being for or against innovation. The real question is: On what kind of problems should we be spending our limited capacities for innovation? From an ecosocialist perspective, liberating science and innovation from the necessity to be lucrative would free some of our problem-solving capacities for some projects that have been neglected by for-profit research and development. And we’re here again facing a zero-sum game issue. In order to innovate, we need to mobilise resources: labour time, materials embedded in machines and infrastructure, as well as the energy to run them. Today, a large part of these very resources are being used elsewhere, hence the need to slow down certain activities in order to free up resources. As long as innovation requires humans and machines, there cannot be “infinite innovation on a finite planet” (p. 156). That’s the degrowth take on technological progress: we cannot have it all and so therefore we must choose (for a more detailed treatment of this question, see The political economy of degrowth, pp. 338-350).