Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it

The Conversation

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Time to get off the economic growth train? Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock

What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever.

This week’s Addicted to Growth conference in Sydney is exploring how to move beyond growth economics and towards a “steady-state” economy.

But what is a steady-state economy? Why it is it desirable or necessary? And what would it be like to live in?

The global predicament

We used to live on a planet that was relatively empty of humans; today it is full to overflowing, with more people consuming more resources. We would need one and a half Earths to sustain the existing economy into the future. Every year this ecological overshoot continues, the foundations of our existence, and that of other species, are undermined.

At the same time, there are great multitudes around the world who are, by any humane standard, under-consuming, and the humanitarian challenge of eliminating global poverty is likely to increase the burden on ecosystems still further.

Meanwhile the population is set to hit 11 billion this century. Despite this, the richest nations still seek to grow their economies without apparent limit.

Like a snake eating its own tail, our growth-orientated civilisation suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. But rethinking growth in an age of limits cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.

Degrowth to a steady-state economy

The idea of the steady-state economy presents us with an alternative. This term is somewhat misleading, however, because it suggests that we simply need to maintain the size of the existing economy and stop seeking further growth.

But given the extent of ecological overshoot – and bearing in mind that the poorest nations still need some room to develop their economies and allow the poorest billions to attain a dignified level of existence – the transition will require the richest nations to downscale radically their resource and energy demands.

This realisation has given rise to calls for economic “degrowth”. To be distinguished from recession, degrowth means a phase of planned and equitable economic contraction in the richest nations, eventually reaching a steady state that operates within Earth’s biophysical limits.

In a world of 7.2 billion and counting, we need to think hard about our fair share. Karpov Oleg/Shutterstock

At this point, mainstream economists will accuse degrowth advocates of misunderstanding the potential of technology, markets, and efficiency gains to “decouple” economic growth from environmental impact. But there is no misunderstanding here. Everyone knows that we could produce and consume more efficiently than we do today. The problem is that efficiency without sufficiency is lost.

Despite decades of extraordinary technological advancement and huge efficiency improvements, the energy and resource demands of the global economy are still increasing. This is because within a growth-orientated economy, efficiency gains tend to be reinvested in more consumption and more growth, rather than in reducing impact.

This is the defining, critical flaw in growth economics: the false assumption that all economies across the globe can continue growing while radically reducing environmental impact to a sustainable level. The extent of decoupling required is simply too great. As we try unsuccessfully to “green” capitalism, we see the face of Gaia vanishing.

The very lifestyles that were once considered the definition of success are now proving to be our greatest failure. Attempting to universalise affluence would be catastrophic. There is absolutely no way that today’s 7.2 billion people could live the Western way of life, let alone the 11 billion expected in the future. Genuine progress now lies beyond growth. Tinkering around the edges of capitalism will not cut it.

We need an alternative.

Enough for everyone, forever

When one first hears calls for degrowth, it is easy to think that this new economic vision must be about hardship and deprivation; that it means going back to the stone age, resigning ourselves to a stagnant culture, or being anti-progress. Not so.

Degrowth would liberate us from the burden of pursuing material excess. We simply don’t need so much stuff – certainly not if it comes at the cost of planetary health, social justice, and personal well-being. Consumerism is a gross failure of imagination, a debilitating addiction that degrades nature and doesn’t even satisfy the universal human craving for meaning.

Do we really need to buy all this stuff anyway? Radu Bercan/Shutterstock

Degrowth, by contrast, would involve embracing what has been termed the “simpler way” – producing and consuming less.

This would be a way of life based on modest material and energy needs but nevertheless rich in other dimensions – a life of frugal abundance. It is about creating an economy based on sufficiency, knowing how much is enough to live well, and discovering that enough is plenty.

The lifestyle implications of degrowth and sufficiency are far more radical than the “light green” forms of sustainable consumption that are widely discussed today. Turning off the lights, taking shorter showers, and recycling are all necessary parts of what sustainability will require of us, but these measures are far from enough.

But this does not mean we must live a life of painful sacrifice. Most of our basic needs can be met in quite simple and low-impact ways, while maintaining a high quality of life.

What would life be like in a degrowth society?

In a degrowth society we would aspire to localise our economies as far and as appropriately as possible. This would assist with reducing carbon-intensive global trade, while also building resilience in the face of an uncertain and turbulent future.

Through forms of direct or participatory democracy we would organise our economies to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, and then redirect our energies away from economic expansion. This would be a relatively low-energy mode of living that ran primarily on renewable energy systems.

Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy-intensive global society of high-end consumers. A degrowth society embraces the necessity of “energy descent”, turning our energy crises into an opportunity for civilisational renewal.

We would tend to reduce our working hours in the formal economy in exchange for more home-production and leisure. We would have less income, but more freedom. Thus, in our simplicity, we would be rich.

Wherever possible, we would grow our own organic food, water our gardens with water tanks, and turn our neighbourhoods into edible landscapes as the Cubans have done in Havana. As my friend Adam Grubb so delightfully declares, we should “eat the suburbs”, while supplementing urban agriculture with food from local farmers’ markets.

Community gardens, like this one in San Francisco, can help achieve sufficiency. Kevin Krejci/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

We do not need to purchase so many new clothes. Let us mend or exchange the clothes we have, buy second-hand, or make our own. In a degrowth society, the fashion and marketing industries would quickly wither away. A new aesthetic of sufficiency would develop, where we creatively re-use and refashion the vast existing stock of clothing and materials, and explore less impactful ways of producing new clothes.

We would become radical recyclers and do-it-yourself experts. This would partly be driven by the fact that we would simply be living in an era of relative scarcity, with reduced discretionary income.

But human beings find creative projects fulfilling, and the challenge of building the new world within the shell of the old promises to be immensely meaningful, even if it will also entail times of trial. The apparent scarcity of goods can also be greatly reduced by scaling up the sharing economy, which would also enrich our communities.

One day, we might even live in cob houses that we build ourselves, but over the next few critical decades the fact is that most of us will be living within the poorly designed urban infrastructure that already exists. We are hardly going to knock it all down and start again. Instead, we must ‘retrofit the suburbs’, as leading permaculturalist David Holmgren argues. This would involve doing everything we can to make our homes more energy-efficient, more productive, and probably more densely inhabited.

This is not the eco-future that we are shown in glossy design magazines featuring million-dollar “green homes” that are prohibitively expensive.

Degrowth offers a more humble – and I would say more realistic – vision of a sustainable future.

Making the change

A degrowth transition to a steady-state economy could happen in a variety of ways. But the nature of this alternative vision suggests that the changes will need to be driven from the “bottom up”, rather than imposed from the “top down”.

What I have written above highlights a few of the personal and household aspects of a degrowth society based on sufficiency (for much more detail, see here and here). Meanwhile, the ‘transition towns’ movement shows how whole communities can engage with the idea.

But it is critical to acknowledge the social and structural constraints that currently make it much more difficult than it needs to be to adopt a lifestyle of sustainable consumption. For example, it is hard to drive less in the absence of safe bike lanes and good public transport; it is hard find a work-life balance if access to basic housing burdens us with excessive debt; and it is hard to re-imagine the good life if we are constantly bombarded with advertisements insisting that “nice stuff” is the key to happiness.

Actions at the personal and household levels will never be enough, on their own, to achieve a steady-state economy. We need to create new, post-capitalist structures and systems that promote, rather than inhibit, the simpler way of life. These wider changes will never emerge, however, until we have a culture that demands them. So first and foremost, the revolution that is needed is a revolution in consciousness.

I do not present these ideas under the illusion that they will be readily accepted. The ideology of growth clearly has a firm grip on our society and beyond. Rather, I hold up degrowth up as the most coherent framework for understanding the global predicament and signifying the only desirable way out of it.

The alternative is to consume ourselves to death under the false banner of “green growth”, which would not be smart economics.

The Conversation

Samuel Alexander does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Comments

12 responses to “Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it”

  1. Nigel Dique Avatar
    Nigel Dique

    It sounds great in theory but would be very difficult to implement in practice. I think a better solution is to limit population growth. In some countries, e.g. Japan, it is already happening. China’s population is also expected to decline during the course of this century. Australia’s population would be static if it were not for immigration. A coherent population policy backed by an educational campaign would reduce pressure on our natural environment, while ensuring living standards are maintained.

    1. Truthful Jones Avatar
      Truthful Jones

      Nigel, Australia’s population is *not* static apart from immigration.. the natural annual increase is in the range of 170,000 to 240,000. Immigration roughly doubles that number. That means that cynical political bribes like the Baby Bonus are just that.. bribes. There is so much misinformation out there because it suits the greed/profit motives of the big corporations to foster the myth of endless growth.

      1. Nigel Dique Avatar
        Nigel Dique

        Thanks Truthful Jones for putting me straight on those figures. I note that the net increase in natural population growth and immigration are slowing marginally. I agree with you about the myth of endless economic growth but also believe that we can’t have endless population growth and destruction of native habitat either.

        1. Alberto Avatar
          Alberto

          I thought that most developed nations have minimal or even negative population growth, and even some middle income countries like China have also zero population growth (in this particular case as a result of a very severe government restriction). Most (population) growth is in the poorest regions of the world.

          It seems that as people get richer, the average number of children drops until population stabilises or even shrink. This apparent paradox can be explained, among other reasons, because children are a source of income for the poor (the poor they were called in the 1800s the “proletariat” for some reason). As people get out of poverty, this aberrant situation ends and people have children mainly because they want to form a family, not because they want an extra source of income.

          I don’t remember the data of Australia however. Australia is a rich country. What is the population growth rate there?

          1. Nigel Dique Avatar
            Nigel Dique

            Hi Alberto, this link will give you population stats and growth rates: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/3101.0

          2. Miles Harding Avatar
            Miles Harding

            So, 1.7% (exponential) population growth, or a doubling period of 41 years.

            The question is what is the country’s carrying capacity?
            This helps: http://dashboard.carryingcapacity.com.au/
            (from QUT)

            The results are in line with expectations:
            assuming nothing changes from present, about 40M.
            In a post-oil world, say 2060 or beyond, about 10M!!

          3. Ronald Brakels Avatar
            Ronald Brakels

            Fertility rates in most developed countries are below replacement rates, but there is lag between the fertility rate falling below the replacement rate and population growth from births stopping. For example, China’s fertility rate is below replacement rate at about 1.76 but its population is still growing at about 0.48% a year. China’s total population is expected to peak around 2030 and then decline. However, Japan, Germany and some other countries are already experiencing population decrease as the direct result of a low birth rate.

      2. Ronald Brakels Avatar
        Ronald Brakels

        First generation immigrants tend to have more children than second or higher generations Australians, so Nigel may have been correct to say Australia’s population growth would be static if not for immigration if their effect on increasing birthrates is removed. However, I am too lazy to check this myself. Maybe you know whether or not this is the case, T.J.?

  2. Christopher Nagle Avatar

    Sam, this is a good start to the beginning of conversation about totally rethinking what we are presently doing. We live in an economy that can no longer tell the difference between obesity, cancerous over-replication and healthy tissue. There are vast rent seeking constituencies built into the status quo. The corporatocracy that runs the show is becoming a privatized totalitarianism. Unlike the autocracies of the past, it does not need 100% control. It can newscorp enough of the population to retain control until the lemmings march over the collective ecological cliff. By the time it starts to dawn on mainstream democratic constituencies just how much trouble we are all in, it will likely be too late. If we are to stand even a vague chance of getting to grips with what you are flagging, it is very possible that war will be the only way to break the pattern of rapid decline into a post-modern maelstrom.

  3. Chatteris Avatar
    Chatteris

    Our leaders are too craven to face this and to face the wrath of those whose business interests bankroll them. They won’t face it until not facing it becomes a vote-loser. Unfortunately I doubt if not discussing degrowth is a vote-loser yet. On the contrary, I think most voters would find it terrifying. The idea of perpetual growth is taken for granted. It’s the central orthodoxy of modern economics.

    It has taken us quite a long time to get to the point where denying climate change is a vote-loser. To persuade a critical mass of Western people that a more frugal, less consumerist lifestyle is a good thing will surely take longer. However, I’m encouraged that this conversation is being held at all.

  4. Macabre Avatar
    Macabre

    This article is written mainly from the perspective of consumption, and I pretty much agree with it. Over-consumption does not make people happy – in fact consumerism depends on the notion (lie) that people are unhappy and therefore need more stuff to make them happy. It is possible to live very happily with much much less. Most retirees makes this change.

    But there is a huge issue here – namely that as consumption falls, the economy shrinks and all those reliant on growth in the economy for income (pensioners, investors, governments, corporate executives, employees) end up worse off. The more you make currently, the less comparatively you will make in a low consuming society. This represents a huge redistribution of wealth. These vested interests, led by the corporates that make the biggest profits, will fight to the grim death to avoid going down this path.

    I think the way forward is for a movement of people who (a) commit to massively reduced personal consumption, and (b) who arrange their affairs not to be reliant on income from corporate profits (i.e. corporate growth). An example of (b) would be owning fruit trees and selling the surplus produce.

  5. Miles Harding Avatar
    Miles Harding

    This is really hitting the fundamental issues on the head!
    Also, really impressive reader comments below.

    I started my side-reading on this via the ‘limits to growth’ link at UMelb: http://www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/files/mssi/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf

    The LTG W3 model can be seen as collecting all of the other components of this narrative. That model indicates that it may already be too late for controlled de-growth and more likely a slippery slope awaits.

    The above paper paints a much more concerning path when BAU resource extraction is considered. Page 14 describes a ‘Seneca cliff’, which occurs as a result of increased efforts to access the remaining resources. In this environment, rapid de-growth (crash) is forced upon society by the exhaustion of resources. It would seem to me that this is well underway at present and due in 10 or 15 years.

    This makes the limits to growth a much more pressing issue that climate change. A huge problem being that our wool-headed economists are pushing the levers in exactly the wrong direction and are exacerbating the problems.

    I very much agree with Chatteris’ summary, below. Not much hope for politics on this one.

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