I recently participated in a panel put together by Boise State’s Hazard and Climate Resilience Institute as part of their Resource Nexus for Sustainability Grand Challenge. Together with 3 other economists (including the moderator), we met virtually to talk about the role of economics as a discipline for advancing the social goal of sustainability put in the context of the climate crisis. The name of the event was “Can economics help save the world?” (I’ll add the link to the video when it’s available.)
The discussion was pleasant, I think. Although to be honest, I can’t say I truly remember what went on. It was very dynamic and “real-time” in the sense that we tried addressing participant’s questions as they appeared in the chat–thus serving for a kind of authentically and beautifully chaotic episode of collective consciousness.
In preparation for the event, a few questions were distributed for panelists to organize their ideas around central topics chosen by the moderator. These questions were not easy and my answers to them kept evolving through the couple of weeks we had to prepare for the event.
So much of what I wanted to say may not have come across the way I wanted to or may not have been said simply by the very non-curated nature of live events. I want to post my evolving thoughts around these questions because the process of discovering those answers was truly edifying and spurred what felt like a moment of self-actualization. I’ll post them one at a time to keep things tractable, but I’ll add links to other reflections at the bottom of each commentary.
Without further ado, please join me in the discovery of some quite provocative questions put together for us by someone who genuinely was seeking to find new ideas and host a fun but illuminating discussion.
Q5: In recent years, significant attention has focused on the idea of degrowth. How do you feel about this concept?
I believe degrowth puts forward is a reasonable and noble goals for worldwide economic change that are worth pursuing regardless of their function in addressing climate and ecological crises. Degrowth proposes the planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back to balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves well-being.
It’s really too bad that the name is loaded simply by invoking the word “growth” and making the whole proposal sound like a destructive process. But marketing aside, degrowth is absolutely sensible: The whole thing is that we can choose what sectors to grow, for example regenerative agriculture and clean energy, as well as which sectors we need to shift resources away from, like all those that simply put profit for the sake of profit at the center of their existence–for instance anything that utilizes planned obsolescence, that protects patents over important knowledge and products for the well-being of society, and immoral marketing prices that manipulate children’s emotions to create demand for unnecessary products.
In my mind it just says let’s produce less waste. It’s like deciding to eat less when the goal is to lose weight. And we don’t seem to have a problem understanding the mechanism in contexts like food intake: more is only better when there’s not enough. When there’s already an excess, it makes things worse*. Degrowth means we are going to consume less junk (flash news for you: much of what we consume with so much pleasure is garbage). When we stop to think about it, much of what we consume is stuff we don’t need and we don’t event want and make us anxious and angry! (very much in the way David Fincher portrays in the super great movie Fight Club).
I also really like the degrowth pursuit because it is built on principles of justice. It doesn’t mean people are going to be worse off and poor people are going to get their stuff taken away. It means we are going to be producing less garbage and w are going to try to stop mechanisms designed to channel resources from the poor towards the rich. It means we are going use public transit instead of each have 3 cars. Built-in obsolescence and one-time-use products would be the first things to go under a degrowth regime, for example. That’s a good thing for most people. Not for those profiting but most of those already profit enough!
It’s not news and philosophers have examined this idea of balance since for ever. They keep concluding things along the lines that it is balance, and not growth, the essence of prosperity. We would do better if we focused more on our system values and what we truly care for than if we just focus on GDP and willfully confuse excess for progress.
Now… the downsides
The question that often comes up is whether degrowth is practical at a global scale. I don’t know. I think scaling things up almost necessarily involves moving away from sustainability. However, we can think of a world with spread-out “degrowthist” communities, rather than a degrowthist world. In any case, think that pursuing degrowth objectives is a desirable thing. I think it’s an invitation to re-examine what we truly value as a society and what kinds of behaviors and morals we want to pass on to future generations.
In addition, I don’t think pursuing degrowth objectives is enough to get us where we need because I believe degrowth is incompatible with the economic system we have: capitalism. And being realistic, I don’t think we are going to change capitalism. However, I do think we can update capitalism; I think we can-reimagine capitalism, and to imagine a capitalism that brings about the radical change we need in the human-environment relationship, we need to re-examine and achieve similarly radical change in how we carry our human-to-human relationships. This is as much about being better people as it is about saving the planet.
* So, 1/5 of children in the world suffer from physical stunting, but 2/5 of those over 18 are overweight. Worldwide obesity has tripled since 1975 and childhood obesity has increased ten-fold. Today, more people die of obesity than of undernutrition. And obesity is related to diabetes, high-blood pressure, respiratory and cardiovascular issues—all important comorbidities. So why not advice people to eat less? Why not put in place regulations and incentives for food producers to sell the right foods? To stop targeting children with advertisement?
laura villegas ortiz 