Degrowth

Jason Hickel

As the climate crisis worsens and the carbon budgets set out by the Paris Agreement shrink, climate scientists and ecologists have increasingly come to highlight economic growth as a matter of concern. Growth drives energy demand up and makes it significantly more difficult and likely infeasible for nations to transition to clean energy quickly enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. In recent years, IPCC scientists have argued that the only feasible way to meet the Paris Agreement targets is to actively scale down the material throughput of the global economy. Reducing material throughput reduces energy demand, which makes it easier to accomplish the transition to clean energy.

Ecological economists acknowledge that this approach, which is known as degrowth, is likely to entail reducing aggregate economic activity as presently measured by GDP. While such a turn might seem inimical to human development, and indeed threaten to trigger a range of negative social consequences, proponents of degrowth have argued that a planned reduction of throughput can be accomplished in high-income nations while at the same time maintaining and even improving people’s standards of living. The policy proposals focus on redistributing existing income, shortening the working week, and introducing a job guarantee and a living wage, while expanding access to public goods.

As debates unfold around what these policies might look like and how to implement them, here I step back to consider the deeper economic logic of degrowth theory.

[A continuation of this discussion will be found in Jason Hickel’s paper, reference 1 – Ed.]

Source:
Real World Econ Rev blog, 30 Aug 2023 https://rwer.wordpress.com/2023/08/30/degrowth/

1. Hickel, Jason (2019) “Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance”, real-world economics review, issue no. 87, 19 Mar, pp. 54-68 http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/Hickel87.pdf