On November 26th, Yanis Varoufakis appeared on The Jolly Swagman Podcast. For all of us economics nerds, this is the best Christmas present one could ask for. What threw me off my chair was Varoufakis’ opinion on “degrowth.” As a long-time enthusiast of his work, and considering him a pinnacle of erudition and wit, I was surprised to see him fall prey to common misunderstandings. Silver lining: this gives me an opportunity to give degrowth a proper introduction and show that the concept might be more useful that what Yanis Varoufakis thinks.
Thoughts of future past
“I’m not a degrowth person […]. I’m not one of these people saying that now we need to go back to the bush,” says Varoufakis. It is not the first time I hedge against degrowth being understood as some regressive nostalgia for some distant yesteryear, so I will try not to repeat myself too much. Let me start by saying that there are indeed people who advocate for a return to pre-industrial times, for example anarcho-primitivists. Yet, after spending the last five years carefully scrutinising the idea of degrowth, I can safely say that there is more to degrowth than just that.
The French concept of décroissance (the ancestor of degrowth) has strong existentialist roots, especially in the work of André Gorz. If people can imbue old practices with new meanings, communities should be able to decide which traditions to remember (e.g. agroecology, seasonal diets, hempcrete buildings) and which ones to forget (e.g. sacrifices, patriarchal division of labour, and lynching). This is not a travel to but through the past – becoming aware of many possible modes of existence as to educate our desire for a wider palette of desirable futures.
Degrowth criticises a vision of progress which says that whatever is new is necessarily better, and that more GDP is always desirable. The size of a market economy should not be heralded as a universal compass for development, with countries with smaller GDP per capita considered laggards. Perhaps humans are hard-wired to struggle for progress, but what constitute progress is itself an outcome of sociality. We should politicize the concept of progress as to make sure that we can democratically write our own futures. For us revolutionary economists, this means that the future of the economy is not to be predicted, but invented.
Let me borrow from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and say that degrowth starts from the assumption that “[p]erhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.” I like this sentence because, as an economist, I do find the pursuit of GDP strange, especially in situations where it conflicts with concrete social and ecological objectives. If that is so, progress might not only be a matter of new doings, but also of undoing an array of strange practices, like speculating on mortgage derivatives or driving a SUV in Paris.
Gross Domestic Art?
Yanis Varoufakis wants “to see better art, […] more art, more theatres; […] great movies, more Star Trek episodes [and] growth in the care sector, in health, in education,” and who would disagree with him. But I don’t think that economic growth is a means of achieving that. The correlation between GDP and the number of Star Trek episodes might remain a mystery, but we do know that more GDP does not always translate into higher welfare. Finland is famous for having one of the best education systems in the world, despite having a GDP per capita 25% smaller than the United States. Concerning health, Portugal has a life expectancy of 81.1 years, 2.4 years longer than the average American, with 65% less income per person. Icelanders are world first when it comes to cinema attendance and they work 325 hours less per year than Americans – this is enough time to watch 390 Star Trek episodes, every year.
Economic growth is a quantitative phenomenon. Pressing challenges having to do with food, housing, transport, health, art, or education are more of a qualitative nature. If patients need more human contact and care from their doctors, they don’t need an infinitely increasing compound rate of care, but just enough to feel better. Someone who doesn’t have a bike needs one bike – not a yearly rate of 3% in the production of bikes, forever. I doubt Yanis Varoufakis would be happy with more episodes of Star Trek if their quality was horrendous. My point is that GDP growth is a bad compass for qualitative pursuits. This is true for both positive and negative growth. It would be absurd to blindly promote a shrinking of GDP since it would also fail to capture more subtle institutional and lifestyle changes, for example the sustainability of energy sources, the democratisation of the workplace, or the reduction of inequality.
Varoufakis thinks the focus on growth is misguided. “The question is not whether we should have growth or not. What should grow and what should shrink.” The problem is that the pursuit of GDP growth remains – unfortunately – an explicit objective in public governance. One of the Sustainable Development Goals is a growth objective; the European Green Deal defines itself as “a new growth strategy”; the UK even has a “growth duty” written in law establishing that “a person exercising a regulatory function […] must […] have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth.” This is the situation today. For different institutional reasons, most governments are dependent on economic growth and thus have little freedom in deciding what should grow and what should shrink. One of the objectives of degrowth is precisely to escape this constraining growth treadmill.
Degrowth advocates argue – and they’re not alone – that certain spheres of life should remain outside of the economic logic. I’m sure Yanis Varoufakis would agree with me saying that everyone should be guaranteed access to health and education. (I’m also unsure whether the capitalist logic for-profit competition is any guarantee of better Star Trek episodes.) Market exchanges are only one mode of allocation among at least three others (sharing, reciprocity, and redistribution). On that point, degrowth is not very original and repeats an older critique of economism. This is why I like to understand degrowth as a de-economisation of social life, that is a reduction in the importance of economistic thoughts and practices in society.
Miniature nows and utopian tomorrows
I kept the point that shocked me most for last. “[T]he problem with these crude econometric exercises [I suspect he misunderstands degrowth as a sole decrease of GDP] for the purpose of confirming a Panglossian view that, in the end, we have the best system that we could possibly have.” If I understand him well, Varoufakis assumes degrowth is a mere twitching of today’s economic system, neoliberal capitalism at lower volume. This is inaccurate and it’s worth pointing out because the utopian aspect of degrowth (in the good sense of the term “utopian”) might be its most previous feature.
Degrowth would be a poor concept if it meant the decrease of everything, everywhere, and all the time. Degrowth is not less of the same, but simply different: “the objective is not make an elephant leaner, but to turn an elephant into a snail,” explains the authors of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (2014). The snail degrowthers envision is an economy with a biophysical metabolism in balance with the living world (hence the downscaling aspect). But it is also a democratic, fairer, and more convivial economy with less inequality and more free time; one that that doesn’t need constant growth in order to remain stable; an economy centred on human flourishing, emancipated from today’s triple growth imperative (GDP for governments, profits for companies, and income for people) and the supremacy of the economic over all other social and ecological concerns. There is much more to say – I actually spent my PhD dissertation “The Political Economy of Degrowth” (2019) exploring the contours of such economy. But I hope these few sentences suffice to show that degrowth is not miniature capitalism but rather a demand for an alternative to capitalism.
Yanis Varoufakis speaks of his “colleagues from the left side of politics [who] keep going on about degrowth, [whichmakes him] lose his will to live.” I have been actively engaging with the degrowth scholarship for the last five years and I find it a precious treasure trove of utopian energy. Degrowthers are as optimists as techno-utopians like eco-modernists and luxury communists, albeit about different forms of innovation and a different agenda altogether. In the twelve years since the concept was translated in English, degrowth has become a thriving field of studies, with almost 400 academic articles, recurring debates, numerous books, and a growing presence in online media (more than 200 essays on the topic in 2020 alone). There is a lot going on, and it is very exciting.
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I know this was only a 2-min answer to a side question in a podcast. I am here neither to lynch Yanis Varoufakis nor to sell concepts. Varoufakis’ work is not only brilliant but tremendously useful, and I consider him a precious ally in the grand project of deconstructing the hegemony of capitalism. I think this is an opportunity for him, and others who read him, to discover a pallet of progressive ideas that they may have never heard of (to read more, here is a selection of materials about degrowth). Not everything in there is useful, but considering the urgency of the situation and the complexity of the social-ecological crises we’re facing, the more options, the better.
4 replies on “A response to Yanis Varoufakis: Star Trek and Degrowth”
This a nice answer that simply but methodically deconstruct these critics addressed to the degrowth concept. This underlines the work that still need to be done in order to demystify the concept. The political economy of Degrowth is a (big) step towards this task. By the way, thanks for that. Looking forward to read (at least some of) it 🙂
Also, I think this critics exist (even in the mind of Varoufakis) because the word “degrowth” carries some unpleasant perspective in popular culture/speech (at least in french)… Since, I’m reading the book “Vers une société post-croissance” de I.Cassiers, K.Maréchal et D.Méda, I (try to) use “post-growth economy” instead when I talk about the degrowth concept with others … I think it is a less negatively connoted word for many people and this might help to spread these disruptive ideas more widely to public attention (if journalists (or opponents) stop propagating shallow critics of something they don’t fully understand but criticize anyway because of ideological preconception.
As Bon Pote would say, Post-Growth can go far, it just needs good marketers.
Dear Timothée,
I find it hard to disagree with anything of substance you wrote here. I am not even upset that you misrepresented my position, making me sound as if supportive/tolerant of GDP-growth as a reasonable goal (I am not and it isn’t!). Why? Because it is clear that whatever difference we have is one of semantics. I, for one, loathe the word ‘degrowth’. It is a major own goal to enter the arena against powerful opponents with a campaign to de-anything. So, let me be clear:
Any society that seeks more GDP (that is, every capitalist society) is in serious trouble at all levels – economic, social, environmental, ethical. Having said that, when living under capitalism (a system predicated on profit maximisation at the level of the firm and GDP-maximisation at the level of the macroeconomy), replacing GDP with some other metric is besides the point. If we do not like the effects of GDP-growth (and I certainly don’t) then the only feasible solution is the replacement of the capitalist mode of production and distribution with something else. What that ‘something else’ should be is, of course, the pertinent question.
In an attempt to answer this question, from a very personal perspective, I recently wrote a book of fiction entitled ANOTHER NOW, in which I describe an alternative postcapitalist present. Funnily enough (for the purposes of this exchange), there is a passage alluding to how GDP was ‘grossly demoted’ in that socioeconomic system. I copy it below for your amusement. Please note that, as a work of fiction, this is not me speaking but Eva – a neoliberal economics professor who is gradually warming up to the postcapitalist system in ANOTHER NOW.
Hope you enjoy it!
——
EXTRACT from Chapter 6 (Markets without Capitalism) of ANOTHER NOW: Dispatches from an alternative present
GROSSLY DEMOTED GDP
“It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them… It counts napalm and nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry… It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Bobby Kennedy’s famous condemnation of GDP, the dollar metric of a nation’s total income, had always irritated Eva despite its obvious poetic quality – or perhaps because of it. During her time as a post-grad in economics at the end of the noughties, GDP-bashing had become something of a cottage industry. Eva thought it was akin to lambasting a maritime navigation device for failing to appreciate the beauty of the ocean and its impact on the human psyche.
“Of course GDP rises when a terrible earthquake kills thousands,” she would argue with the students in her seminars. “That’s what it is meant to do: count the monetary expense of the rescue efforts at first and the cost of rebuilding later. And of course its needle does not move when a lover’s gesture uplifts one’s soul or a bush fire consumes a lush forest. The very point of GDP is not to condone the earthquake or to make us indifferent to intangible beauty or environmental disaster. It is to measure that which it was designed to measure: money expenditures by some that add, equivalently, to the incomes of others.”
Monetary profit drives capitalism. Under capitalism, like it or not, society’s resources are attracted by the anticipation of higher profit and repelled by anything that reduces the bottom line. Eva’s view was that GDP is a snapshot of these forces at work – a highly effective one that does not purport to be anything more or less.
“It seeks to capture capitalism’s dynamic and to map out the types of endeavour that generate money – ‘the alienated essence of our life’, as I believe your much-beloved Karl Marx once put it. To dump GDP and replace it with an arbitrary measure of something … nicer would be to take our finger off capitalism’s pulse – to ditch our only means of gauging the beast’s behaviour.”
Every time an environmentalist demanded a new, cuddlier metric with which to replace GDP, Eva despaired.
“If we want to protect trees or lakes that have no market price,” she argued, “we should just do it: slap preservation orders on them! What is the point of concocting an arbitrary price substitute by which to measure their intangible value?”
The irony is, Eva thought to herself, that these hip anti-capitalists are their own worst enemy: under capitalism, the only way a tree or a lake can be assigned a quantifiable value is by putting it up for sale to see what price it fetches. In the absence of any alternative to capitalism, Eva used to tell her students, we need to stop criticising GDP and instead invest in immeasurable public goods, like the health of our children or the beauty of their poetry.
At least, that was Eva’s view when, like almost everyone else, she believed there really was no alternative to capitalism. In the light of the latest dispatches, she was starting to re-assess.
On the one hand, markets in the Other Now appeared to be in rude health despite, or maybe because of, capitalism’s demise. A great deal of economic activity the Other Now could still be measured in terms of monetary incomes. On the other hand, much of private sector activity was driven neither by net revenue maximisation nor by market forces but by instruments such as the socialworthiness index, which played a large role in diverting resources to various activities. Compiled by customers, neighbours, artists, the community at large, it was a number with an impact on economic activity that reflected neither a price nor a quantity supplied. Or take, for example, the juries’ power to dissolve enterprises for failing the public interest. Those too created strong incentives for corporations to diverge from business plans that maximised profits. Freed from the tyranny of their share price, meanwhile, and the fear of hostile takeovers, corporations were more alive to society’s needs. So too with the County Associations, whose members allocated land for the benefit of local communities. While they exploited market forces to generate funding for social purposes, their decisions were uninfluenced by the prices generated by capitalist real estate markets.
Once capitalism died, and markets were freed from private ownership, a different kind of value had taken over. Instead of judging something’s worth by its ‘exchange value’, what it would fetch in return for something else, the Other Now judged worth according to its ‘experiential value’, what is worth in itself to the person who used it. Prices, quantities and monetary profits were no longer the sole masters of society. And the more experiential value liberated itself from the hegemony of exchange value, the less meaningful or relevant GDP could be. And so it was in the Other Now. Although it continued to play a role in measuring monetary incomes, GDP was simply one of many metrics they used to monitor the economy – a demotion that would have made no sense before capitalism died.
Very interesting read!
As an economics graduate myself, what I consider the most important thing of the text is that we should not predict the future of the economy but we should invent it instead. It is what is known as normative economics: we should not simply say how economy is or will be, but also how it should be. This is where we should focus.
Cheers!
The push for constant growth will not change unless, or until the need to pay off debts (national and corporate) diminishes.
The question should be how to achieve this? How to devalue the dollar value of debts? Can we use alternative financial systems for the general population which bypass the state controlled current monetary system thus reducing demand for those dollars?
Not Bitcoin though, that’s a load of ****