Is decoupling happening, yes, or no? And if not, could it ever happen? Over the course of a few weeks, The Guardian published several pieces on the topic that may appear contradictory, arguing both that “economic growth [is] no longer linked to carbon emissions” and that “economic growth is still heating up the planet.”[1] This is perfect timing because […]
Tag: degrowth
I’ve just finished Growth: A Reckoning (2023) by Daniel Susskind. Professor of business at Gresham College in London, he’s a skilful writer and anyone interested in the study of economic growth should enjoy this book. There is much to comment, but to remain within my area of expertise, I’ll only analyse his take on degrowth, a topic he addresses […]
Good news, the Financial Times ran a piece on degrowth. It’s a 3-min video titled “Could the degrowth movement save our planet?” starring economics columnist Soumaya Keynes. Perfect opportunity to prolong the discussion by mobilising some of the academic literature on the topic.[1] Since this is not a direct critique of degrowth, I shall not write my usual response. […]
Literature reviews are usually quite uncontroversial. But this is not the case of “Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?”, a recent paper by Ivan Savin and Jeroen van den Bergh, two economists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “The piece sparked a meltdown,” explains Glen Peters, who witnessed the online stir […]
On February 23rd, 2024, the New York-based socialist magazine Jacobin published “4 problems for the degrowth movement,” a short piece written by Daniel Driscoll, a social science researcher at Brown University. Like all the previous Jacobin articles touching on the topic[1], this one is firmly against degrowth. On social media, the article has been intensely bashed. “Pure ideological blinkers” (Julia […]
This piece is not going to be my usual point-by-point debunking. First, I’ve been doing plenty of that already (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) and there is nothing special in Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World (2024) that would warrant a specific response. After listening to her interview with Rachel Donald on the Mongabay podcast, it is evident that the […]
Categories
How to Blow Up an Economy
This is the transcript of a speech I gave at The Conference in Malmo (Sweden) on August 29th, 2023. The video can be found here. Demolition is an essential part of construction. That which is true in the world of material infrastructures is also valid for immaterial institutions. To construct a new, alternative economy – we’ll first […]
On May 18th, 2023, The Economist ran a piece titled “Meet the lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy,” commenting on the Beyond Growth conference organised in the European Parliament on 15-17th May. There is nothing remarkable about this article. It’s one of these superficial anti-degrowth boohoos one (too) often finds in dominant media.[i] The fact that the author (Stanley […]
Who is still actively defending green growth? There is the boastful – yet scientifically frail – More from less (2019) by Andrew McAfee (rebuttal here); Per Espen Stoknes (Tomorrow’s economy, 2022) and his attempt to make growth “healthy green.” There is Sam Fankhauser engaging in mouth-to-mouth combat with Jason Hickel, the eco-modernists from the Breakthrough Institute, a small gang of promethean […]
Periodically, American economist Paul Krugman cherry-picks a few numbers to argue that economic growth is more sustainable than we think. While these short outbursts of optimism usually stay within social media (see, for example, these tweets from last Summer), it somehow made it to The New York Times last week (“Wonking Out: Why growth Can Be Green”). […]