It fails and is a political death wish.

Let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we interpret “degrowth” as the decision to fix global GDP at its current level…Then, unless we change the distribution of income, we are condemning to permanent abject poverty some 15 percent of world population that currently earn less than $1.90 per day and some quarter of humankind who earn less than $2.50 per day…Keeping so many people in abject poverty so that the rich can continue to enjoy their current standard of living is obviously something that the proponents of degrowth would not condone.

Enforcing global degrowth would require freezing world income at about $17,000/year. That means that most people in the world would never even come close to current rich-world living standards — instead, they would at best only be able to reach the level currently enjoyed in China or Botswana. Perhaps that’s not such a horrible fate, but as Milanovic notes, this would require impoverishing most of the population of developed countries. He elaborates on this point in his new post, pulling no punches:

[In order to avoid keeping most of the world in poverty, degrowthers must] introduce a different [income] distribution (B) where everybody who is above the current mean world income ($PPP 16 per day) is driven down to this mean, and the poor countries and people are, at least for a while, allowed to continue growing until they too achieve the level of $PPP 16 per day. But the problem with that approach is that one would have to engage in a massive reduction of incomes for…practically all of the Western population. Only 14% of the population in Western countries live at the level of income less than the global mean…Degrowers thus need to convince 86% of the population living in rich countries that their incomes are too high and need to be reduced….It is quite obvious that such a proposition is a political suicide [death wish].

Milanovic quite rightly waves away degrowthers’ protestations that GDP is not a good measure of human welfare. GDP isn’t perfect, he notes, but it’s close enough where the basic point stands.

Demanding that people in rich countries accept absolutely catastrophic declines in their living standards is a political non-starter. Klein, on his podcast, tries to point this out as gently as possible:

I think that if the political demand of the [degrowth] movement becomes you don’t get to eat beef, you will set climate politics back so far, so fast, it would be disastrous. Same thing with S.U.V.s. I don’t like S.U.V.s. I don’t drive one. But if you are telling people in rich countries that the climate movement is for them not having the cars they want to have, you are just going to lose. You are going to lose fast…This is where the politics of [degrowth] for me fall apart…

I just don’t see the argument for degrowth as being anything but an extraordinarily slower way of approaching the politics, probably counterproductive compared to what we’re doing, which is I think you can make tremendous strides on climate change by deploying renewable energy technologies and giving people the opportunity to have a more materially fulfilling life atop those technologies.

Milanovic is less gentle, calling this “outright magical thinking”. He is correct. When you look at how much people in America are willing to sacrifice in terms of their material well-being in order to fight climate change, it’s far less than what Klein is talking about. And Klein is really softballing it here — it’s not just giving up beef and SUVs, it’s a dramatic reduction in the size of housing and the amount of food and the ease of transportation and the quality of medical care that people in rich countries enjoy. It is, frankly, not happening.

But even this vastly understates the political and practical difficulties of degrowth. Piper adds several key points. First of all, she notes, because developed countries have been decoupling resource use and growth for a while now, curbing resource use will actually cause a lot more restrictions on developing countries than Milanovic’s simple calculations would suggest:

From a climate change perspective, though, there’s a problem [with simply reducing rich-world living standards]. First, it means that degrowth would do nothing about the bulk of emissions, which are occurring in developing countries.

This is an incredibly important point. For example, China now produces more CO2 emissions than the U.S., the EU, and Japan combined:

(And no, this is not because of outsourcing, as you can see by looking at the trade-adjusted emissions numbers.)

Another way of looking at this is that China’s CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP are more than twice America’s, and about five times that of the EU. Any global degrowth plan that actually reduces resource use is going to entail more pain for China than its GDP numbers would suggest, simply because China is at a more resource-intensive stage of growth.

Do you think China will accept a substantial diminution of its living standards, in order to satisfy the environmental-economic diktats of activists in Northern Europe? If so, you need to rethink a great many things.

Anyway, Piper makes a second crucially important point. So far we’ve been waving our hands and talking about lowering rich-world GDP while raising GDP for poor countries. In fact, economies don’t work like that:

Second, the global economy is more interconnected than Hickel implies. When Covid-19 hit, poor countries were devastated not just by the virus but by the aftershocks of virus-induced slowdowns in consumption in rich countries.

There’s some genuine appeal to the idea of an end to “consumerism,” but the pandemic offered a taste of how a sudden drop in rich-world consumption would actually affect the developing world. Covid-19 dramatically curtailed Western imports and tourism for a time. The consequences in poor countries were devastating. Hunger rose, and child mortality followed.

Degrowth would thus require deep changes in the entire way that the global economy works. Change happens, but not like that; implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame. Klein points this out, again rather gently: