DeFi and degrowth, or: How not to fix capitalism

CAPITALISM is broken and must be replaced. That’s an increasingly held view among younger generations, whose future prospects have been darkened by financial crises, disease and war. But some alternative utopian narratives gaining traction in the aftermath of Covid-19 risk forgetting some of its most basic lessons — with potentially dystopian results.

At one extreme lies the philosophy of degrowth. Fears of a climate catastrophe as well as signs that critical infrastructure is already buckling in record temperatures have galvanised calls to curb economic growth and consumption habits to cut carbon dioxide emissions faster.

The impact of Covid lockdowns on emissions in 2020 has given this 1970s-era movement renewed relevance. In Spain, where a 2016 poll found 37 per cent of people would prefer ignoring or stopping growth to help the environment, a member of the ruling coalition recently backed degrowth as a policy. In France, a former ecology minister last year called it “the only real alternative.”