A response to Bryan Walsh: The card castle of degrowth

It takes time to build a card castle but less to destroy it. While the first part is quite dull, the razing is always a thrill. This is perhaps why people enjoyed Bryan Walsh’s 3-pager How stalling growth hurts the planet. The text is tiny but ambitious since it claims to debunk the degrowth argument. Having just spent my doctorate constructing a theory of degrowth, this got me curious. 

Unfortunately, it was no thrill. The piece is reaching an historical low in rigour, barely qualifying as a “critique” in any meaningful understanding of the term. It’s closer to jeering; a gut commentary that is as misinformed as it is shallow. The deterioration of the quality of the debate in certain media is worrisome. In defence, not only of degrowth, but also of intellectual rigour in general, I am here offering a critical response to the piece.         

Beyond frozen capitalism 

The text opens with a definition of the term from one of the its most popular outlets, the website degrowth.info: “societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy. Degrowth means transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.” Keep this definition in mind because it’s just about to get slandered.   

How? By associating degrowth to the “enforced economic shrinking” brought by the pandemic: “2020 represented perhaps the best example we’ve ever experienced of degrowthism in action,” writes the author. Now there is an obvious logical issue here. Was the pandemic a “prioritisation of social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption”? Did it involve a “radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy”? The answer is clearly no. Calling the pandemic a form of degrowth is like calling an amputation a form of diet – it misses the point entirely. 

Covid-19 froze capitalism for a bit, that’s all. It left us with economies in the doldrums with rising levels of unemployment and poverty. A concept that advocates just that would be infelicitous indeed. But that’s not what degrowth is about. I know this because I spent five years reading the literature on the topic. The idea is more complex: it is a structural transformation of the economy for the sake of sustainability, justice, well-being, and democracy. In times of secular stagnation and worsening ecological conditions, an economic system that can stay stable only by growing is bound to fail. What we need is rather an economy that can prosper without growth – this is the point.  

Even though it sounds like it, degrowth is not just less, but different. This has been explained so many times already that I could hyperlink each of these words to a different text. Anyone even vaguely interested in that discussion would have encountered these arguments, either in the hundreds of books on the topic, the 450 academic articles dedicated to its study, or in the many podcasts, lectures, and opinion pieces published since the beginning of the pandemic. 

The poverty of growth 

Bryan Walsh admits that advocates of degrowth do care about global equity, but he thinks they are mistaken in how to achieve it. That’s where he brings up a blog post from Max Roser claiming we would need 410% of global growth to bring everyone up to the level of the Danes. 

If anything, Roser’s number shows that growth is a poor remedy to poverty. Between 1999 and 2010, $111 of additional growth in global GDP was required to achieve a $1 reduction in poverty. Even if we take the fastest rates of growth during this period and hope they continue unabated, it would still take two centuries to bring everyone above $5 a day – not quite the Danish standard yet. Boosting GDP and hoping that it trickles down to the pockets of the poorest is delusive. Don’t trust me for it, trust Philip Alston, former UN special rapporteur on poverty, who calls growth a “convenient alibi” that legitimates the enrichment of a minority at the expense of the global South.

If that is not obvious enough, the downshifting aspect of degrowth only targets rich nations. The author cites a recent article by Charles Kenny, who makes a parallel between 19^th century England and contemporary Bangladesh. But Bangladesh only emits 0.5t per inhabitant, and so could still increase its resource use four times to reach 2.1t, the global average carbon footprint that would keep us within 1.5°C. The urgent problem concerns the 10% richest humans who represent half of all emissions, with individual footprints ranging from 20t to 70t. These people should consume less; and all the economic activities necessary for this excess consumption could therefore shrink.

No community can thrive in degraded ecosystems. Let’s remember that it is today the poorest who bear the brunt of the biocrisis while they benefit the least from the growth that causes it. Hence the degrowth credo: downsizing excess consumption in rich economies in order to facilitate the development of the global South. Less video games in California, more electricity in Ghana and Kenya.

The challenge of eradicating poverty is not a twofold multiple-choice problem with “GDP growth” and “redistribution” as answers. There are an array of other policies such as debt cancellation and the honouring of climate debts, protection of indigenous people’s land rights, trade preferences and crowdfunded resource moratoria, technology transfer, and the cessation of the ecological wreckage engendered by the imperial mode of living of the super-rich. 

Trying to eradicate poverty by boosting GDP growth is like trying to play Fortnite with a Pac-Man pad. Instead of hammering the + button, let’s listen to thinkers like Amartya Sen in India, Albert Tévoédjé in Benin, Majid Rahnema in Iran, and Manfred Max-Neef in Chile who understood that poverty is a matter of capabilities, and not solely of money.   

Is green growth really happening? 

Last blow. Degrowth is not only misguided and delusional, it is also unnecessary. For Bryan Walsh, this is because “both rich and poor countries have been able to continue to grow while reducing many pollutants through more efficiency and cleaner energy.” Proof? Andrew McAfee said so. 

Like many others, I disagree with McAfee’s analysis. Long story short: decoupling is fake news. This is how I summarise the findings of the first exhaustive review of the decoupling literature. Most of the time, if you read that “decoupling is happening,” then it means relative decoupling. This is a good start, and I would like to read this line more often, but it is nothing worth sabering champagne. Relative decoupling is not enough because it means environmental pressures are still on the rise. 

And even when decoupling is absolute, this is not necessarily problem solved. Take one of the most optimist decoupling study from 2019. The study analyses 18 developed economies between 2005 and 2015 showing that emissions decreased by a yearly 2.4% while GDP grew by 1.1%. The gains are tiny and fall a long way short of what is needed to meet the Paris Agreement targets. Plus, these historically fast rates of decoupling are partly explained by the low growth rates during the period. It is green growth without much growth – nothing too surprising.

Saying that rich countries have “decoupled” because their emissions have decreased by a few per cent would be like me saying I have “climbed” Mount Everest just because I hiked the first few meters. Factually, not untrue, but disingenuous still. (This is especially true if this decoupling is in fact a displacement of emissions in poorer countries who manufacture the products we consume.)  

Most decoupling discussions only focus on greenhouse gas emissions, ignoring other kinds of environmental pressures. For example, 80% of all decoupling studies focus on primary energy and greenhouse gases. Among the rest, only a few consider material use, water use, land change, water pollution, waste, or biodiversity loss. A “sustainable” economy in any meaningful understanding of the term must consider all the complex interactions it has with ecosystems, and not only carbon.

Here is my point: the proof of absolute and significant decoupling between GDP and all the environmental pressures that matter is nowhere to be found and it is unwise to invest all our hopes in this decoupling magically materialising in the decade to come. 

The question is complex and the future always uncertain, but consider this. On the one hand, an article from Andrew McAfee in Wired and a blog post commenting on raw data without any analysis. On the other hand, the first exhaustive review of all decoupling studies ever made – 835 scientific articles. On one side, one author promoting a book written about modern decoupling efforts in the United States and a one-pager blog post about trade-related emissions. On the other side, an international cohort of sixteen scientists from seven different universities who systematically reviewed all knowledge ever produced on the topic. Who shall we trust?  

Let’s say you wake up with issues breathing and you go get checked at the hospital. Several hundred doctors tell you that, considering the bad state of your lungs, you better ease on the smoking. But there is one guy in the waiting room who tells you it’s all fine, and that, even though it has never happened before, we might in the future be able to decouple smoking from lung damage. What would you do? Personally, I would follow the precautionary principle, and I think we should do the same when it comes to climate change. The precautionary principle means degrowth: reducing emissions where they currently are without expecting them to magically vanish in the future.  

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“Small is beautiful,” wrote E.F. Schumacher, but when it comes to knowledge, beautiful is not what we should be after. We need effective and safe solutions to urgent, practical problems. Degrowth is a strategy among many others like eco-socialism, eco-modernism, fully automated luxury communism, the wellbeing economy, economic democracy, the economy for the common good, or participatory economics. 

I invite you to see each of these ideas as a house of cards. You may not be interested in all the cards in there, but you might still find pieces useful. In any case, there would be little use in simply dismissing the idea without giving it a thorough check. 

These quick-and-dirty, castle-breaking articles are dangerous for that they capture the attention of readers more easily than the ones – often longer – with more nuance. But we need nuance. Regardless of the mechanics of modern media, we must take the time to differentiate solid ideas from flimsy ones. We need debates, yes, but debates that are informed and evolutive. This-is-bad boohoos like Bryan Walsh’s How stalling growth hurts the planet will take us nowhere.