Why the Degrowth Movement Is Having a Moment

We're going to be looking into something called the d growth movement.

I didn't see a lot of poverty. People did seem happy, but I did see a lot of small farmers, like people who look like they are, you know, farming for a living and not going to do much better than that. So anyway, the happiness index is something I too, am

really obsessed with when it comes to D growth. If you ask economists who believe in D growth who ascribed to it, what they're going to tell you is it's not a very well defined thing, and we really want to avoid terminology that scares people, and de growth is a word that scares people. But I did come across a very good definition. It's from the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. He wrote a book in twenty twenty called Less is More that I've seen described as like the Bible of

D growth. And here's what Jason Hickel says. He calls D growth quote a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduced is inequality and improves human well being. A lot of that sounds really good. I think the word that is almost designed or destined to trigger people in economics is planned, right, planning to shrink and who's going to be responsible for that?

So that's that's what de growth is. It's saying we have gotten big enough and now is the time to get smaller. They're not calling for like a catastrophe like we saw during twenty twenty. I remember being on air when COVID hit and I remember saying, this is the worst you know, these are the worst jobs numbers since the Great Depression, and I could not believe those words were coming out of my mouth. I was like, this

is a catastrophe. What Jason Hickel and other de growths would say is right, right, right, But that was entirely unplanned. We didn't expect COVID. The way to do this is take it in hand and make it happen deliberately.

economy on some level planned. To my mind, the question is why do we need less growth or less economic activity to bring the sort of ecosystem or environment into balance, Because some would say we can do both, right, we can have growth, but also we can find ways to decarbonize the economy, other ways that the growth can be more sustainable without just having less activity.

this is a belief that has a very interesting history. Right, So I'm going to take you back to the late nineteen sixties, Americans other people worldwide, Europeans have started becoming concerned about what is happening to the environment, and they start asking themselves questions like, what's going to happen if we just keep on this trajectory. This is also around the time that the Population Bomb the book comes out and it predicts that if we keep reproducing, we're all

going to starve to death. Right, there's this very like Malthusian kind of vibe in the air. So a think tank called the Club of Rome forms in Rome. It is founded by an industrialist and an economist named Aurelio Pitchai. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. This in nineteen sixty eight, he invites some leading thinkers, economists, physicists, chemists, other kinds of academics into a room and he says, let's map out what's going to happen if we keep growing the

way we're growing. Right, So four of them go back to MIT, which is using very early but very very good computer technology, and they sort of feed scenarios into the computer. What happens if we keep repricing at the same rate, What happens if we keep eating at the same rate, What happens if we keep clearing forests at the same rate. And they keep coming up with really bad news. The planet will be burning, we will not

have enough, we will all starve to death. They write this book called The Limits to Growth in nineteen seventy two, and shockingly, you guys the New York Times, I thought this was like a pamphlet. Okay. When I first started studying this, I was talking to the d growths and I got the sunset like, Okay, they're playing it up a little bit. It's probably like a pamphlet that people got, you know, that got handed out in the street. The New York Times reviewed this book in nineteen seventy two.

There is an old review online and it is very critical of the conclusion, and it acknowledges that, you know, these guys are using computers and this is a new thing and that's very important in statistics. But then it says like there's been dumerism for a long, long, long long time, and this just seems like more doumerism. So from there you have this movement of people. The Club of Rome seems fascinating to me right like it's an informal think tank. They meet a couple of times a year.

We have a website now, and they for the past fifty years have continued to bang this drum and have continued to say, if we keep going along these lines, we're going to burn ourselves out. They will use words like suicide, you know, very very colloquially. And if you look at what's happening with climate change now and with stories about glaciers melting and forest being raised, it does

sort of seem like back in nineteen seventy two. They predicted quite a bit in the way we think about the environment now, which is we are all very concerned about it and we don't really have ways to fix it, they would argue.

Herman Daily was an advocate of steady state economic growth. He passed unfortunately. I believe it was late last year. There is a gentleman named Dirk Phillipson. He's a professor, a Duke and economic historian. He wrote a very good book called How GDP Came to Rule the World, which is, you know, an argument against taking GDP, as you said in your intro, taking GDP as the fundamental underpinning of our economy. There's a really interesting guy named Tim Jackson,

also an economist, identifies as an ecological economist. That was not a term I had encountered until I started reporting on this. And Kate Rayworth, the famous one who wrote the book Doughnut Economics in twenty seventeen and caused a big stir. Now. I don't know if Kate identifies as a d growth, but they certainly identify with her. We looked for the physical center of the movement. There's a lot of activity in Barcelona. There's an economist whose name

I Hope. I pronounced correctly. Georgis Callis. He's a Greek guy, And it does seem like they're mainly concentrated in Europe, which you know you might expect, but these are people who know each other, who speak to each other. And to your question about is this more popular now, yeah, I really think it is one of the things that

I couldn't help. But notice is suddenly around twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, everybody has a d growth piece, right, So The New York Times is interviewing Herman Daily, the man who has been arguing for five decades that we should stop obsessing overgrowth, and has gotten a lot of respect. I mean, he's not a crackpot. The New Yorker has on Cassidy writing, is prosperity possible without growth? And I believe?

Twenty twenty twenty twenty one, and then just a few months ago follows up with Bill mckibbon is it time to take de growth seriously? In The Financial Times? Martin Wolfe the Great, the esteemed columnist too. I'm sure we all read he recommends as one of his top books of the year. Jason hickeles less is more about de growth? So I definitely think we are starting to see this permeate in a real way. And I think it's probably because so many of us are very worried about what's

happening with the environment, with the ecology. But I actually think there is another reason for this, and I can speak about what happened to me personally when I started reading about de growth. If you guys don't mind, go for it, yeah, I started to agree with them. I started to full on agree with them. My dad had worked on Wall Street in the nineteen seventies, before financialization,

before securitization, so before there was real money. But he walked away from Wall Street in his early forties really hating Wall Street, and he told us as kids, you know, money isn't everything, and you should never work in this life just to get money. It was like one of the most firmly ingrained things in my brain from the time I was four or five years old. So I grow up and I'm a journalist, and journalists don't care very much about money. But then I moved overseas and

I started covering conflict in African nations. I was a war reporter, and I was looking at what happened when a country like Sudan, where I was based for a long time, didn't have an economy to speak of, and then suddenly Sudan discovers oil in additional places, and all of a sudden, there's roads and there's bridges, and there's towers, and so from that point on, I looked at growth somewhat suspiciously, but I was able to see, like, Okay,

this is the real world impact. Right. A person who dropped out of school at nine or ten because of war, because of conflict, because there was no money, and then the oil boom happens, and this guy is sending his kids to college. I can't think of a more perfect encapsulation of growth, right. What it means for real people when an economy grows, And yeah, it means things for CEOs too, It means things for fat cats. But if you're an ordinary person, it means a lot for you

as well. And so I've been very pro capitalist in my thinking, but like everyone else, I've been really concerned about what is happening to the environment. But along come these de growths, and they look at society in a very philosophical way, and they ask questions like, are we really happy with all this stuff we have now. The guy in Sudan who was sending his kid to college, he's very happy, was sending that kid to college. Do

I need all of the things that I have? And that's what really made me start thinking about where do I shop and how do I shop?

ankst that many people feel about inequality and the economy? Like, is this the sort of current manifestation of a sort of underlying anst that ten years ago or eleven years ago presented as the occupy movement?

what the hell is going on? Why are my cool friends in the zeitgeist talking about it and I'm not talking about it on air. So we did a bunch of research and we started seeing, to your point, the point in US history that we all started talking about capitalism. It was first the Tea Party and then it was Occupy Wall Street. Right, these two movements emerge together and suddenly we are hearing, we're hearing the sea word capitalism

all the time. The Tea Party and Occupy were very very carefully tied to the financial crisis, and they were two very different movements that wanted different things, but they absolutely wore a reaction, they absolutely wore backlash. And d growth strikes me much the same, it really does. It strikes me much the same. But the financial crisis at a certain point ended. I think what it's gonna take. And the financial crisis ended, and the young people are

still out there yelling about capitalism. We see that in Pugh service. Every year they take a new Every year or two, Pew does a new round of data on capitalism. And every year you see the young people a little bit less, a little bit fewer, a little bit fewer have faith in it. Right, So the financial crisis ended, but this is a long tail of us doubting capitalism, the environmental problems that the world is facing. And these are things you know, I see in my daily life.

I'm a big hiker. I like to go out west. These are things that I see my daily life. I don't know that they end the way the financial crisis ended. I think they have an equally long tale. And so I do wonder. I mean, I said to Dirk Phillips and the economic history, and I said, look, you know that an American president or an American politician could never get elected on a platform of de growth. And he mentioned,

and I can't believe I didn't see it coming. He mentioned Rfk's famous speech in Kansas, and I believe it was nineteen sixty eight when he talks. RFK talks about GDP not measuring the health of our children, the happiness of our children, the health of our waters. You know how sane we all are. And he said, you know, Dirk Phillipson tells me, as far as I understand it, RFK may very well have been elected president, right, And it was one of those moments where I was like,

I don't have an answer for that. I actually don't have an answer for that. It's a really interesting point, and I'm not going to clap back at you because I want to think about it for a while. And so, yeah, I to your point is this just is this a blip, is a furious blip? Maybe it very well might be. Many things are furious blips. But if we continue seeing what climate change is doing to us, I could see this having a bit of a longer tail. And the thing is, you never know what the kids are going

to do a generation from now. You just don't.

different position. How does the de growth movement take them into account? And how does it tell people to think about you know, when are you big enough?

it's not Sudan that needs to stop growing. It's the United States, it's Western Europe. It's not like we've had our time, but it is we have enough. We have to decide that we have enough. And Sudan doesn't, and Molly doesn't, and much of the African continent and much of the developed world doesn't, and we have to be okay with letting them grow, and we have to work with them to make sure that they are growth is greener than our growth was through industrialization right and into

the present day. So this is not a movement. And again this is why I find them sympathetic. It's very easy for me to dismiss people who have never thought about Sudan as somebody who lived there for three years and covered that country for three years. If you haven't thought about Sudan and you're making some big grand point, then I've got some things to say to you. And so it was fascinating to hear them say, oh, no, no, no, we're not saying that these countries that need to grow

are the problem. We're asking about the manner in which they grow. I mean Sudan and its oil money. That's not a great thing for degrowths. However, it is a good thing for impover Sudanese people. And I think what they would almost certainly say is let's get the impover Sudanese people up out of poverty. Right. But yeah, they have taken the developing world into account, and the prescription to me seems to be it's the developed world that has to change.

all around the world. A lot of growth comes, people would argue, comes from trade and relationships and networks, et cetera. And that the US would and the developed world would not be doing any favors to poorer countries to retrench, to buy less, to consume less oil, to consume less food, to consume less crops, to consume fewer manufactured goods that

are made in the developed world. It seems like on some level there's like a fundamental rejection of this assumption, or there's this fundamental belief that, like there is only so much pie to go around, and that the developed world needs to take less in order for the developing world to have more.

general stop buying products that are exported from Sudan. Actually don't think we have many exports many imports from Sudan. But you know what I mean, Like it is this thing where on an individual level, it makes a lot of sense to me. But when you start talking about a globalized world, a globalized economy where we're all really interconnected,

I mean, there's a gloss on that. They can gloss over that, but fundamentally, what you find yourself wanting, what I find myself wanting at the end of the day is like, just tell me how this would work. And I think I didn't get a good answer in this series. I didn't get a good answer. I got some good individual things. You know, an end legislate, an end to planned obsolescence, right, my iPhone will last for fifteen years, not three, the way Apple wants it. To eliminate advertising

in city centers. Paris, France loves the de growths. Paris has actually gone about eliminating advertising, as I understand it, in certain parts of the city, and they love that, and they look at that and they say like, look, this is a moment for us. But I mean, I think if you look at the world the way it is now, it's very hard to see how any of

this becomes policy. It just seems to me like it's going to become individuals making choices that, of course, at the end of the day, don't add up to very much.

D growth world? Because really, you know, the idea of maximizing shareholder value seems to be at complete odds with the idea of, you know, shrinking economic growth.

I'm going to have to pay for college someday. And when you are up against that, you know, I wish I could have put her in a room with Dirk Phillipson or with Tim Jackson. And I imagine what they might say is, couldn't your daughters go to community college? Couldn't your daughters go in state? But that is fundamentally at odds with the way human beings work these days.

And these are people who have a very like positive, very positive notion of what human behavior could be if we were not all convinced that we're in competition with each other. And one of the things that's interesting about them is they do believe human nature has been perverted by capitalism, so that we do think we need more, We do think my house has to be nicer, my car has to be nicer, when in fact we're just being fed that. So there's a lot of stuff that

you would have learned you would have come across in college. Right, But again, the question of what do we do with companies that actually need to engage in shareholder capital, And because so many of us are invested in the stock

market and like need it to retire. I mean, at a basic level, I don't retire if the stock market doesn't grow, or I retire under a bridge, and so this is this is where again I would think that this movement probably probably has a lot to say about individual behavior that many people in the future might find and even even in the near future might find really really compelling. But I can't really see a CEO sitting down with any of this material and being like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea.

individual agency or one firm community. I just have one last question, and I want to go back to your point about how like in the developing world, places that have gotten a lot richer thanks to globalization, exports growth has been generally seen as a good thing, and many, very few people would dispute that, Like, you know, if it resonates in Europe, it resonates in the US with a certain subset of the pop So people might listen to this and say, like, it's not really about capitalism,

it's not even really about the environment. It's about some sort of like deeper spiritual malaise, like we're lonely people. When you mentioned the iPhone, Actually where I thought you might we're gonna go is like we spend hours on a day looking at screens and it seems to be making people lonelier and we have less interaction with other people Like that seems to be well known and you know people have like families later in life and so forth.

Like how much does it feel like is it really about GDP, is really about carbon or just sort of a reaction to this sort of I don't know, like spiritual crisis. Some might say that there's in a rich Western countries.

me question what is enough? And if somebody in another part of the world can do better, if I have a little bit less, is it worth it for me to have a little bit less? And the answer that I came to is, yeah, no doubt it is. You know, I think in the seventies and the late sixties and seventies, it was about it was just about the environment. I really do believe that. I think people weren't as malaised.

Forgive my language, forgive my inventing words. I think people weren't as spiritually sick as many of us do feel now. They weren't as lonely, they weren't as divorced. And I think d growth speaks to the current moment in part because, as you said, it's less about the economy and more about as an individual, do I feel like capitalism has worked for me? And one of the things that we really try to trace in this series is that it's a vibe. The revolt against capitalism is a vibe more

than it is anything else. It is people being sick and fed up and feeling like they're being screwed and feeling like they're lonely. And there's student debt, and then you have a bad job and then you don't have a pinch at anymore. Like all of these things really really really make us anxious, And if we were not anxious about those things, with something like d growth, would it appeal as much. No, I don't think you'd need this kind of philosophy. I think there would still be

people advocating it. But I think the reason as a as a philosophy, not as an economic argument, but as a philosophy. The reason I think it works is because these are exactly the times that we're in. That's probably why you didn't hear much about de growth in the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties. It's a very twenty twenty three phenomenon here, right, All right, Well, the series is Blame Capitalism.

on it. Noel touched on it in that last answer, is that like on an individual basis, I'm not surprised that more and more people feel like they need like some individual recent right, not necessarily on a policy standpoint, but like individual reset regarding consumption or diet or meet use, et cetera. And you see that, and so I guess, like it makes sense to me that like, more and more people feel like they need something like that in their life.

and people like to be able to modulate that. But I don't think people like having the feeling imposed on them that what I have or what you know is cost more next year or I have less than that. That being said, you know, there may be you know, there could be an argument that like climate does impose this sort of like hard limit on consumption in some way, and then it's interesting.