Our relationship with economic growth can sometimes feel contradictory: ‘can’t live with it, can’t live without it’ .

This ‘dilemma’ of growth, as described in Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without Growth’¹, seems to be predicated on two assumptions which are in tension:

1. That growth is unsustainable because it inevitably leads to increasing planetary impacts from increasing material extraction, production, consumption, waste and energy use. Essentially, we can’t grow without breaching planetary sustainability boundaries.
2. That degrowth is unstable and necessarily leads to economic disaster, with rising unemployment and falling living standards. Less production means less consumption which means less economic activity and less demand for work.

In ‘Doughnut Economics’², Kate Raworth expresses a similar conundrum: ‘No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one’. So it seems that both growth and lack of growth can have catastrophic consequences. But neither human deprivation nor ecological degradation have been resolved and the catastrophic consequences are all too evident.

There is a great deal of compelling evidence to support Assumption 1. Growing economic activity will continue to require more material inputs and the supply of those inputs is finite. Even if we can reduce the pro rata impact of each additional increment of economic activity through productivity and efficiency gains across the cycles of production and consumption, and even if we can rapidly achieve zero Carbon emissions, the level of decoupling of growth from increased planetary damage that would be compatible with sustainability has never yet been achieved.

We also know that beyond a certain level, economic growth does not increase human wellbeing or fulfilment, in fact it can do the very opposite. Above that point, growth is simply driving profits, inequality and wealth accumulation for a few rather than making us all happier, healthier or more fulfilled.

Moving on to Assumption 2, it’s clear that in capitalism, growth is predicated on constantly increasing production and consumption as part of profit-seeking and capital accumulation. Without growth, capitalism tends to go into crisis, with rising unemployment and falling living standards.

This threat of crisis has been used as an argument against every kind of attempt to assert social objectives for economic activity, but does a ‘think of the jobs’ defence justify every extractive, destructive, exploitative, antisocial activity which employs people?

Towards a different system

Instead, we need to imagine an economic system based on a different logic, where investment in innovation, infrastructure and social and community goods is prioritised and targeted where the need is greatest. A system where there is more paid care, health, education, cultural and regenerative work being done and where the work available is shared more equitably. A system where social progress is decoupled from economic growth.

As Jason Hickel points out in ‘Less is More’³ ‘a recession is what happens when a growth dependent economy stops growing.’ He goes on to call for ‘something completely different… a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t require growth in the first place.’

A capitalist system predicated on investment for profit seeking and wealth accumulation is not capable of meeting human needs in a just and sustainable way. Any alternative programme aiming for economic and social justice will probably have to include a target of net aggregate degrowth overall, with substantial redistribution and reprioritisation.

This would mean setting ceilings on individual consumption and investing in public provision of health and social care, education and culture, housing and transport, sustainable agriculture, renewables, resilience and community building, while at the same time disinvesting from damaging and wasteful forms of individualised consumption such as fossil fuels, military technology and luxury goods. This would amount to growth for the poorest, degrowth for the richest and security for everyone.

This sort of transition cannot be achieved at the level of individual behaviours and patterns of private consumption. We will need to assert the political in ‘political economy’ and socialise the problem in order to find systemic solutions.

Democracy and planning

We need to start from people’s right to a baseline standard of living and to have a say in determining economic priorities over and above that baseline. This means bringing decision-making about investment, production, consumption and employment into the public realm at different levels and it requires a pairing of planning with democracy.

We need to develop our skills of democratic planning for human flourishing and economic and social justice within agreed planetary boundaries and baseline human requirements. This will have to be combined with a plan for transition and sharing the work that needs to be done fairly and equitably.

Planning doesn’t have to be monolithic or centralised, it can integrate high-level targets, bottom-up responses, innovation and local specificities. The risk that the planners become too powerful needs to be tempered by democratic processes, with inclusive ways of involving people in making the economic choices which affect them.

Living well within limits

At the top level, we would need to define what the global limits and the minima and maxima of resource throughput we each need to flourish, including plenty of scope for local decision-making and choices around discretionary and socialised consumption. We could then chart a global rate of progress for this overall contraction of activity and convergence towards a sustainable level of activity.

The ‘Living Well Within Limits’ project⁴ of Julia Steinberger and colleagues quantified the biophysical resources and provisioning systems necessary for human well-being. The project proposed a simple bottom-up model to estimate target minimal thresholds for the level of consumption needed to provide decent material living standards for everyone on Earth. The model showed that it would be possible to achieve a rapid reduction in resource & energy use, keeping us within planetary boundaries while enhancing and preserving well-being. Global energy use by 2050 could be reduced to 1960’s levels despite supporting a population three times larger. This would require the deployment of advanced technologies to enhance efficiency as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption.

Beyond the dilemma

The ‘dilemma’ of growth is only a dilemma if we accept the argument that capitalism generates stability rather than instability, that it can solve the very inequalities and injustices that it has created, that a ‘rising tide’ of growth will narrow rather than widen the gaps between richer and poorest and that it’s impossible to manage a planned transition to an economy designed to meet human needs in a just way.

If we understand the capitalist mode of production and consumption as the problem we can reject its logic, which seeks only profit and accumulation and creates inevitable crises and ‘dilemmas’. Instead, we need to learn how to set boundaries on resource use, how to plan and how to take social and economic decisions collectively at different levels and to understand both how to degrow some activities as well as grow others, sustainably and responsibly. Our survival depends on this learning.

Sources:

1. Jackson, T. (2017) ‘Prosperity without Growth’, Routledge.
2. Raworth, K. (2017) ‘Doughnut Economics’, Random House.
3. Hickel, J. (2020) ’Less is More’, Penguin
4. Millward-Hopkins, J. Steinberger, J,  Rao, N.  Oswald, Y. (2020) ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy’, Global Environmental Change 65 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.10216
5. Image: Iakov Chernikhov

See also:

Debating growth (Nov 2022)

Code red for human survival (Nov 2022)

Nancy Fraser’s eco-socialist common sense (Aug 2022)

Climate justice, heat justice and the politics of resilience (Aug 2022)

Education, social justice and survival in a time of crisis (Jul 2022)

Owning our crises (Mar 2022)