The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy | The New Republic - 0 views
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economy climate change crisis growth politics economics history Culture degrowth
shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 21
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A classic example of this dynamic is the advent of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time,”
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The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed by the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons: In a growth system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back into the growth cycle
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Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables and fossil fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top of them.”
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The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?” In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to keep a few in luxury.
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A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between “happiness” and growth beyond a certain point.
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In the rich countries, general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain
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Hickel describes a post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the god of growth
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He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of endless growth: life expectancy.
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degrowth will entail a steep reduction across a much wider range of high-energy consumer goods. Keeping a global economy within safe ecological limits is a zero-sum game.
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When limited resources are directed toward clean energy infrastructure, public health care, and regenerative agriculture, it will still be possible to build and power modern 24-hour hospitals in every city, but not to have Xbox consoles, two-car garages, and giant appliances in every home.
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would have to redefine it, too.
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The post-growth economy could not succeed solely by redistributing wealth; it would have to redefine it, too.
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He argues that short-term growth would have to continue in those countries that have still not achieved the basic levels of sanitation, infrastructure, and education needed for a decent standard of living, to close the gap. Their larger goal, meanwhile, would be to break free from their historical role as a source of natural resources and cheap labor for the north.
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For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest damage to the planet is currently being done
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Ecological economists generally agree that the safe outer limit is eight tons
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One person in a low-income country has a materials footprint of roughly two tons per year, a measure of total raw materials consumed, including those embodied in imports. In lower-middle–income countries, that number is four tons; in upper-middle–income countries, 12 tons. In the high-income nations of North America, Europe, and Asia, the number leaps to 28
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The wealthiest 20 percent of the human population is responsible for 90 percent of “overshoot” carbon in the atmosphere (that is, a level of carbon that exceeds the limit needed to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius)
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The planet’s richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest half of the world’s population combined
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For the global north, degrowth not only starts at home, it starts with the biggest houses.
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Less Is More doesn’t end in a poetic appreciation for nature’s majesty, but by teasing out its implications for the political project of preserving a habitable planet. Hickel devotes much of the book to explaining that degrowth must be central to this project, promising not just survival, but real democracy, social abundance, and liberation.
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Both involve broad social shifts away from private consumption and toward the production of shared public goods.
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This beautiful coincidence overlaps with policy programs like the Green New Deal in important way
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In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development, including solar
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Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.” As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.”
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They determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century
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This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, has aged better than the scorn heaped on it
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We are now witnessing what appears to be the beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago
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In his new book, Less Is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth, not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.
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This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of pre-capitalist Europe. The dualism of Francis Bacon and Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter.
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The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In Less Is More, Hickel traces its origins to the enclosure of the European commons in the sixteenth century
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Starving refugees were scattered and forced into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor. Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.
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By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions. Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and more productive conversions of labor and resources
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This ideology subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the classical economists, until eventually the field even l
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This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progres
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the caveats issued by Simon Kuznets, father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior
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Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all, through the idea of “green growth.
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This is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological impacts.
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boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in energy and in the use of materials
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The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism” or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological boundaries
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n 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in an article for Science magazine, maintaining that signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”
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The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality
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By only counting the emissions created within a country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers, you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A number of recent studies show no evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some materials more efficiently.
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Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent “fairy tale.”
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consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years
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he economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200.
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Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future than are growth critics based in economics departments, like Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth, and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourish
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he makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the “command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”
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Attaining the benefits of the post-growth economy would, however, require what the present consumer society considers “sacrifices.
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it’s not clear how many of them are ready to give up its superficial pleasures enabled by consumer debt
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Among nations, there’s also the question of fairness: Wouldn’t it be unjust to impose degrowth across the world, when it’s disproportionately the countries of the global north that have spent centuries burning through the planet’s resources?
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This output tracks to the one percent’s share of global wealth—a number equal to the GDP of the bottom 169 countries.
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Even if you accept the argument that inequality would be best addressed by more centuries of trickle-down growth, you keep running up against the simple fact of its impossibility. Even just one more century of growth—which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive form—will require multiple earths
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Hickel is serious about bringing the system critiques of E.F. Schumacher and others out of their traditional cloisters and into the streets, and has sought allies in this effort
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emphasize what Hickel calls the “beautiful coincidence” of degrowth: that “what we need to do to survive is the same as what we need to do to have better lives.”
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Both are internationalist in outlook, and see the world through a lens of climate justice as well as climate equilibrium.
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that is, communicating the many benefits of moving beyond the insecurity and terrors of the current system, and building a new society that is sustainable, stable, democratic, and fundamentally better in every way.
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