A growing problem

Ever higher GDP won't always be the solution to our troubles

As the reality of climate change sets in, interest in the “degrowth” movement seems to be on the rise. The degrowth position, generally speaking, is that progress toward emissions goals isn’t happening fast enough, and that we (meaning people in richer countries) ought to be more open to sacrificing growth in economic output as part of the push to move humankind away from the climate precipice. You can find different spins on the idea; some proponents emphasize the fact that we don’t really need to do a lot of the consuming we currently do, and that a degrowth strategy might well leave us more fulfilled as well as closer to our climate targets. 

As you might expect, the degrowth position is subjected to all sorts of criticism: some from economists, but by no means all. And these criticisms are, very broadly speaking, fair, although many are made a little less thoughtfully than one might wish. In particular, it is the case that most of the world’s population lives in places where incomes are substantially below those in rich countries, that raising the incomes of these people is of the utmost importance—to help them survive the trials of climate change but more immediately to ameliorate the problems of poverty, and that so far the most successful mechanism we have found to reduce poverty at massive scale is industrialization powered by production for export markets, which is clearly going to be a harder road for poorer countries to travel if the world’s rich consumers decide they’re not going to buy stuff anymore.

Ok. That seems right. At the same time, it also seems like arguments against degrowth should be better, in some way? So for instance, it may be the case that the above mechanism has been the most effective way we’ve found to reduce poverty at a broad scale. It can be the most effective way and yet still not be a very satisfactory way, can’t it? After all, as noted above, most of the world’s population still lives in places where incomes are well below those in rich countries. Yes, many fewer live in extreme poverty than was the case twenty years ago, as a briefing I recently wrote for the employer pointed out. But as that briefing also noted, the twenty years over which poverty tumbled was a significant break from the pattern that prevailed over the preceding century or two, and there is good reason to fear that the road toward middle or high incomes is becoming harder to follow once again. 

There are still 700m or so people living on less than $1.90 a day (or rather, there were before the pandemic, which is expected to push as many as 150m people back under the extreme poverty threshold). The vast majority live in places which are highly vulnerable to climate harms and not particularly likely to go on a two-decade spell of 10%+ annual GDP growth—which would at any rate still leave many people in sub-Saharan economies earning incomes a tenth or less of those earned by the median American today. Are we ordering lots of shit from Amazon for them, really? At some point, the “keep growing for the sake of the world’s poor” line begins to seem like an increasingly thin pretext for the fact that we’d rather not change our behavior, even if that means dooming quite a lot of people to unpleasant fates.

The argument might be more convincing if we were doing more to help people in poor countries participate in the global economy, by investing heavily in physical infrastructure across the emerging world, for instance. Or if we were allowing many more people from poor places to migrate to our rich economies. That would be good for global growth and would provide immediate, direct benefits to people in the line of climate fire. But we aren’t.

Other arguments against degrowth are also a bit less robust in the face of criticism than we might wish them to be. It’s not a realistic solution, people say. Is it not, though? Not-really-growing-economically has been the norm for human societies to a far greater degree than really-growing, over the course of history. It’s fairly common today. Most places are not rich, recall once more. There are any number of middle-income countries in the world which have gone long stretches of time without managing to achieve sustained increases in incomes per person. That’s like Brazil’s whole thing. The Economist would have nothing to put in its leader pages if governments of all sorts were not so eager to adopt measures that economists believe undermine economic growth. 

More to the point, it’s not clear to me that the keep-growing strategy is in fact an especially realistic path forward. I know: there are models which show that climate change will subtract at most a few percentage points off of GDP by the end of the century. Given that we have essentially no understanding of the robustness of our political and economic institutions in the face of the climate change we’re about to experience, I’m not sure we should have a ton of confidence in these projections. Well, rich countries at least should manage, you say. But was it not on behalf of the world’s poor that we were meant to keep growing in the first place?

Having said all of that, am I prepared to out myself as a degrower? No, I’m not, not yet. But I do feel like there are harder questions that we need to ask ourselves about growth and what it means. Writing on degrowth, Branko Milanovic describes the camp’s last line of defense as follows:

After this comes direct magical or religious thinking. Its first component, in an asceticism reminiscent of the early Christendom, is to point out [the] vanity of all material acquisitions. People indeed can live happy lives with much less “stuff”. That is true for some special people like Christian or Buddhist monks. For example, Simeon the Stylite, an early Christian monk is reputed to have lived several decades on a top of a pillar. But this is not true for the remaining 99.99% of the people who are not attracted by monastic lives. And it certainly is not true today when capitalism, and thus both the relentless search for profit and the value system that places wealth on the pedestal, is more dominant than ever (see Chapter 5 of “Capitalism, Alone”). Had degrowers preached material abstinence in 13th century Europe or 10th century Byzantium it might have had more appeal. Commercial society, capitalism, numerical abilities were far less developed than today. But now, the relevance of moral preaching of abstinence is close to zero.

So, I’m not sure that religious thinking, even of an ascetic bent, is exactly unknown in modern capitalist societies. But he’s right that asceticism doesn’t have much currency in contemporary debates about political issues. Perhaps it should, though.

Moralizing is tedious, but (as we’ve been discussing here around the old ‘stack) it also helps hold society together. The alternative—a world in which economic and political systems are so precisely designed that desirable social outcomes are achieved when everyone looks out for nothing more than their own self-interest—is neither a practical possibility or an attractive one, as far as I am concerned. 

So as long as we are and behave like moral beings, it is very much worth asking: what exactly are we doing? The logic of economic growth is clear enough when incomes are barely above subsistence level. It becomes hazier in a society like modern America where there is material abundance enough to meet every person’s basic needs many times over (even though, in practice, we don’t!). In all seriousness: what is the purpose of having more, if it isn’t to redistribute our surplus to those who need it?

I can think of answers. Firms, in their effort to satisfy our stupid desire for a new flavor of seltzer water, pursue efficiencies and come up with innovations that can be used to raise productivity in other contexts, and which thus boost our overall productive capacity in a manner which could (but in practice might not!) help those still living in poverty. Even those of us living amid abundance still suffer discomfort which could be alleviated by new products or drugs or therapies which are best discovered by markets. Our desire for more provides the motive power for a capitalist system which does have a way of producing useful stuff.

And yes, the system we have does do that. It does a lot of other stuff too, though. It does all that environmental damage that preoccupies the degrowers. It has an unfortunate tendency to create new discomforts, which, I suppose, keeps the machinery ticking over. More fundamentally, it works at every turn to keep us all completely invested in the idea that what we have isn’t enough. Even those of us who don’t feel the need to accumulate more things have other selfish ends which motivate us—and a good thing too, because the system depends upon it. There’s this piece I wrote five years ago about why we work, which ended up being one of the more widely read things I’ve ever done. I’m still fond of it, but I don’t identify with it any longer. It closes:

My parents have not quite managed to retire, but they are getting there. Even with one foot in and one foot out of retirement, their post-career itinerary is becoming clear. They mean to see parts of the world they couldn’t when they were young and had no money, or when they were older and had no time. Their travels occasionally bring them to London to see me and my family. On a recent visit the talk shifted, as it often does, to when I might be planning to return to the east coast of America, much closer to the Carolinas, which is where they and most of the rest of my extended family still live. As my father walks around the house, my three-year-old son trotting adoringly behind him, they ask whether I couldn’t do my job as easily closer to home.

I get hung up on as easily. The writing I could do as easily, just about. Building my career, away from our London headquarters, would not be so easy. As I explain this, a circularity threatens to overtake my point: to build my career is to make myself indispensable, demonstrating indispensability means burying myself in the work, and the upshot of successfully demonstrating my indispensability is the need to continue working tirelessly. Not only can I not do all that elsewhere; outside London, the obvious brilliance of a commitment to this course of action is underappreciated. It looks pointless – daft, even.

And I begin to understand the nature of the trouble I’m having communicating to my parents precisely why what I’m doing appeals to me. They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.

I would like to have a chat with the person who wrote that. Community and purpose? Man, that is all ego. Trying to be a serious person who does serious things and associates with serious people who have serious incomes. And the idea behind the economy we’ve got is that it’s ok to be preoccupied by those things, because the pursuit of one’s own self-interest, channeled through the market mechanism, serves to make others better off. Except that then we’re back to our present difficulties, in which the pursuit of self-interest has kept the world chugging along toward a climate crisis, but has not enabled much of the world’s population to earn an income which might provide them the resources they need to survive it.

So what’s my solution, then, if it’s not growth and it’s not degrowth? Well, I’d be happy to share it with you for the low price of just $10.99. No, I’m kidding. I don’t have a simple solution to hand, sadly. What I would say is that growth for growth’s sake strikes me as a strategy for social organization that is subject to diminishing returns: because it leads to crises like climate change, because it’s on the whole a deeply unsatisfying principle on which to base a civilization, and because relying upon it in a world of increasing productive capacity seems likely to push us as individuals in an ever more sociopathic direction. (I know some of you are about to Better Angels of Our Nature me, and I would simply ask you to please recall that we are seemingly about to abandon billions of poor people to their climate fate.) 

The fact that we can scarcely imagine having a moral conversation about our aims as a society and how to achieve them doesn’t change matters. And look, stepping back from growth for growth’s sake needn’t mean abandoning markets or settling for stagnation. It may mean allocating more of society’s resources through non-market mechanisms. It may mean taking less advice from experts with a very narrow view of human behavior and the nature of a good society. It may mean sacrificing some of our absurd sense of privilege as demanding consumers who are from birth owed what they want when they want it the way they want it with a smile.

But take whatever vision you have of an ideal society some way down the road and think about whether it is compatible with the values central to the operation of a modern market economy. Maybe it is; I don’t know what kind of weird visions you all have. Maybe it’s one where we all rest in isolated pods having the pleasure centers of our brain stimulated repeatedly for as long as the medicine of the future can keep us alive. 

If it is something else, then it is important to remember that to achieve it will require us to maintain the capacity, as individuals and collectively, to want something other than just: more.