Shrink the economy, save the world?

A RISING tide and a bigger pie: Economic growth has long been considered such an obvious boon that it’s pursued by governments across the world as a matter of course. But in 2016, when a London professor warned an audience in Newcastle that Brexit would lead to a precipitous drop in Britain’s gross domestic product, that well-worn measure of economic activity, one woman’s heckling caught him by surprise. “That’s your bloody GDP,” she shouted, “not ours!”

The eruption tapped into a suspicion supported by reality: Gains in economic growth have too often buoyed the fortunes of the richest instead of lifting all boats. Prosperity, even in the most prosperous countries, hasn’t been shared. But all the attention to inequality is just a crack in the edifice of economic orthodoxy. Now, a much more radical proposition has emerged, looming like a wrecking ball: Is economic growth desirable at all?

Less than two decades ago, an economist such as Herman Daly, who argued for a “steady-state economy”, was such an outlier that his fellow economist Benjamin Friedman could declare that “practically nobody opposes economic growth per se”. Yet, today, there is a burgeoning “post-growth” and “degrowth” movement doing exactly that – in journals, on podcasts, at conferences. Consider some of the books published in the past several years: Tim Jackson’s Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living, Giorgos Kallis’ In Defence of Degrowth, Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson’s Exploring Degrowth and Jason Hickel’s Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. The proliferation of the term is as good an indicator as any: The literature of degrowth is growing.