The New Republic
One night in 2009, ecological economist Tim Jackson was walking home
in London when his phone rang. The prime minister, he learned, had gotten wind
of Jackson’s latest report and gone ballistic.
Jackson had spent the last 18 months writing a
report arguing that, on a finite planet, economic growth must also stay
within limits. Instead of accepting endless growth as the standard of human
flourishing, Jackson and his colleagues at the U.K. Sustainable Development
Commission tried to describe what a different sort of world, and different sort
of prosperity, might look like.
Jackson knew upending a foundational creed of modern economics would
upset people. At a public meeting about Jackson and his colleagues’ work, a
Treasury official declared that they wanted to return to living in caves.
But when Jackson picked up the phone that evening, it was just days
before a G20 summit in London on how to rebound from the global
financial crisis. A report questioning growth, Prime Minister Gordon Brown
seemed to feel, could be an embarrassment.
A BBC interview with Jackson scheduled for the next morning was
canceled. The other spots on a planned media blitz also evaporated. Jackson wondered whether the
government had sabotaged the report, and assumed it would sink without a trace.
Yet Prosperity Without Growth? became
the most downloaded report in the SDC’s history. Less than a year later, a
publisher released a book version that sold out its first print run within
weeks. Jackson began to get speaking invitations from around the world. From
asset managers to environmental activists, economists in Indonesia to diplomats
at the United Nations, all sorts of people were intrigued by his work.
These days, when Jackson gets phone calls from aides to national
leaders, the tone is different. Last year, he received an impromptu invitation
for a private meeting with the president of Ireland, who had been influenced by
his writing on the ecological limits to growth. The book has now been
translated into 17 languages.
Jackson’s increasing prominence reflects a growing mainstream interest
in degrowth economics. Japanese author Kohei Saito published a surprise bestseller on degrowth in
2020; the 2023 Beyond Growth Conference at the European
Parliament in Brussels was dubbed the “Woodstock of beyond growth”;
earlier this summer, a professor from the business school at Cambridge
University defended degrowth in the Harvard Business Review.
Such interest has provoked predictable sniping from
publications such as The Economist,
where degrowth is lazily conflated with Soviet-era oppression. “Green growth”
supporters and degrowthers tend to agree that high-affluence lifestyles are
unsustainable given current technologies. But otherwise they largely differ.
Green growthers say degrowthers are politically utopian, accusing them of lacking
a clear policy agenda; degrowthers say green growthers are technologically
utopian, accusing them of having
excessive faith that we will develop radically sustainable technologies fast
enough to stay within the planetary boundaries that scientists say are critical
to Earth’s stability and resilience.
Jackson prefers the term “post growth,” which he finds less polarizing
than degrowth. His 2021 book, Post
Growth: Life After Capitalism, explores the historical and philosophical
sources of our obsession with growth. In a society that matures beyond a growth
obsession, he argues, people will spend less time chasing the buzz of
consumerism and status, and more time in “high-flow, low-impact activities,”
such as sports, creative activity, friendships, relationships, and
contemplative practices.
Rather than constraining human potential, Jackson suggests, a
post-growth society would free us to express it more fully, devoting ourselves
to enduring and meaningful pleasures. This vision has such appeal that its
apparent supporters now include consultants to some of the world’s most
growth-obsessed and polluting companies.
On a recent June afternoon, I walked with Jackson to the gleaming
glass tower housing the London headquarters of the global consulting firm Ernst
& Young. The firm had invited Jackson, who advises its New Economy Unit, to comment on a new exhibit
they had created.
We were ushered into a dark, low-ceilinged room flanked by screens.
The premise of the installation was that people were video calling from the
future. Each screen represented one of four possible futures: Business as
Usual, Collapse, Constrain, and Transform.
Bullet points and bits of data flashed on the screens. In the
“Business as Usual” future, the global population was 9.5 billion and warming
was three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Market-driven adoption of energy transition technologies had
proven inadequate. Food and water crises devastated vulnerable nations,
triggering mass migration. Local conflicts and military coups surged,
international cooperation fragmented, and world war loomed. In an attempt to
give this general hellscape some human specificity, an A.I.-generated image of a
woman spoke in a quivering voice about always needing to run her air
conditioner and purifier, watching her savings dwindle, and feeding her child
vitamins and supplements rather than fresh produce.
The sense that we were watching a budget knockoff of the dystopian
show Black Mirror only deepened with
the “Collapse” scenario. After some text summarizing the accelerating feedback
loops between climate collapse, pandemics, and financial meltdowns, gunshots
sounded in the background as the grainy image of a woman hiding in a basement told
us it was hot and her child was sick. She alluded darkly to “water wars” and
looting.
In the “Constrain” future, humanity limited the temperature rise to
two degrees Celsius, but at a cost: Governments rationed goods, invested heavily in
geo-engineering, and generally sacrificed freedoms to manage scarcity and
prevent collapse. A large surveillance camera hovered in a corner of the
screen, in case we’d missed the authoritarian overtones. A male A.I. face
recounted with quaking voice how he and his wife had lost their jobs at an
energy company after it was nationalized; he mentioned the “blue sky riots,” explaining
that the sky had been white for years after a botched geo-engineering project by
India.
Only one of the four futures was positive. In the “Transform”
scenario, people in the mid-2020s confronted the polycrisis of our time, making
radical changes that kept projected warming by 2100 to 1.5 degrees Celsius. A smiling A.I. face
in Cape Town described the joys of having time to play soccer with his nephew.
However clumsily sketched, the future resembled the “high-flow, low-impact” one
Jackson imagined. The protagonists of this transformation, however, seemed to
be business leaders. “The business world,” the text informed us, had
responded to crisis by “investing heavily in climate mitigation upfront,
collaborating and innovating in new ways.” The word “government” did not
appear.
When the last short video ended, no one spoke for a long moment.
Seeming to mistake embarrassed silence for deep emotion, an Ernst & Young
employee gazed compassionately into our eyes. After some desultory
conversation, people trickled out of the exhibit, and I chatted with Ernst & Young’s Gareth Jenkins, head of “Creative and Proposition.” I asked if the
Constrain scenario had meant to equate any regulation of business with
authoritarianism. “We’re not saying regulation is bad; it’s really important.
But we have to be careful that it’s done democratically,” Jenkins said.
In that case, I wondered, would Ernst & Young support the nationalization
or phased closures of oil companies, so long as these decisions were
democratic? “Are you asking me as Gareth or as an E & Y employee? As
the latter, I can’t say yes, since oil companies are among our clients,”
Jenkins said.
It was not surprising that a corporate futurology exercise would avoid
concrete policy proposals, gesturing instead toward salvation by unspecified
business heroism. Yet behind these predictable elements are notes of
radicalism. Even the “four
futures” framing echoed the title of a
2015 book by a Jacobin editor on life
after capitalism. A recent Ernst & Young report criticizing
financial myopia, short-termism, and overconsumption reads at points like a
post-growth manifesto. “In the pursuit of growth, the global economy has
allowed unacceptable environmental trade-offs, ignored important drivers of
social wellbeing, and fed an ever-widening wealth and power gap,” the authors
write. Degrowth and ecological economics are favorably mentioned. During a
summer in the U.K. when the soon-to-be-elected Labour Party was declaring sustained
economic growth its “first mission,” and the “only route to improving the
prosperity of our country and the living standards of working people,” it made
a surreal juxtaposition.
Over green tea that afternoon, Jackson reflected on what we had seen.
“There are good people inside the beast,” he said of Ernst & Young, noting that
only one of the four future scenarios was positive. While he appreciated this
sober realism, he also noted the slippage between regulation and
authoritarianism. And he saw another issue: the risk of fear-induced paralysis.
“When you invite that kind of existential fear, people sometimes think, ‘I’m
just gonna forget about it. Don’t frighten me when there’s nothing I can do.’”
Jackson thinks there are
many things we can do, though he tends to present particular policy ideas as
partial approximations of deeper necessary shifts. Health care is an instructive
case: He supports investment in better wages for all care providers and
universal, free access to care. Yet without more fundamental changes, he thinks
we’re fighting an unwinnable battle. “Health is being undermined consistently
by the lifestyles that we live, and the vested interests of the people that are
creating those lifestyles are preventing us from living healthy lifestyles,
because they’re profiting from tragedy,” he told me.
In the last few years, this dynamic became personal for Jackson. His
next book makes two basic arguments: Health is a better proxy for flourishing
than wealth, and so provision of care rather than creation of growth is the
basic task of an economy. While writing, he began having unusual aches and
pains, and blood tests indicated type 2 diabetes. “I suddenly found myself an
example of what I was talking about,” he said, noting that the baseline
level of junk sold in restaurants and stores made the default choices a toxic
mix of processed foods and refined sugars.
Ecologists often note the perversity of a system in which both
creating problems and (partially) remedying them count as growth. In the
classic example, one company pollutes a river, another tries to mitigate the
mess. Both boost gross domestic product, but the loss to ecosystems is ignored. In the case of
health, humans are the river: Walk into a supermarket, Jackson said, and
“you’re basically being sold all the things that create the need for an
antacid, and then on a separate shelf, all the antacids that will fix the problem
for you.”
During the recent election campaign in the U.K., a tired retort
confronted any proposals for expanding green energy and improving health care:
How will you pay for it? In Jackson’s view, the question is misleading: Yes,
paying public-sector doctors and nurses decently costs money. But so does the
extraction of public money from the system by private companies. One report found that the
NHS will pay private firms £80 billion for £13 billion of actual investment in new hospital
buildings. Similar dynamics have led to the closure of entire care units at some hospitals. In
America, policy experts, journalists, and regulators have noted how private
equity firms’ focus on generating large returns has eroded the quality of
health care. “You can’t serve two masters,” a physician who worked for the
private equity–owned U.S. Dermatology Partners told Bloomberg. “You
can’t serve patients and investors.”
A standard critique of degrowth is that we can’t afford not to grow: Funding green energy,
expanding childcare and health care, raising the living standards of billions
living in absolute poverty—all of this costs money. But trying to fix issues
like health care or poverty within a system committed to endless growth risks
further private-sector profiteering, and in recent decades has exacerbated
inequality rather than narrowing it. From this vantage, the debate between
growth and degrowth is also misleading. A better question is: In what sectors
and locations do we need more or less growth to satisfy human needs while
remaining within the planetary boundaries?
There’s a basic reason why an economy that expands the provision of
care might tend toward a low- or post-growth state: Different sectors of the
economy have differential potentials for productivity growth, as American
economist William Baumol and others have noted.
Manufacturing cars or writing software is fundamentally different from caring
for children, helping the sick, or playing string quartets. In some sectors,
automation readily drives productivity gains and economic growth. In others,
trying to increase efficiency simply degrades quality. A childcare center can’t
just keep adding toddlers and making teachers spend less time with each. As
Jackson wrote in his first book: “The value of a service is inherently linked
to the time spent by people delivering it. Reducing the labour input to these
services is both difficult and counterproductive.”
Even in cases where new technology can boost productivity, this isn’t
always desirable. Jackson likes the example of leaf blowers, which create noise
and pollution to move debris. Humans with brooms might be slower, but they
create a more pleasing world as well as more jobs. Shifting from a leaf-blower
economy to a broom economy isn’t just a matter of individual choices; it
presupposes a redesign of the institutions and incentives that help shape those
choices. In short, it requires politics.
The current Labour Party seems committed to growth, but the manifesto
of the U.K.’s Green Party, which Jackson supports, proposes policies that reflect
core elements of his vision: a need for massive investment in the care sector
and in green energy. The supposed stumper—“How will you pay for that?”—has a
straightforward answer: reasonable taxation on the wealthy and an end to
private-sector siphoning of public resources. Though still tiny in absolute
terms, the Greens quadrupled their representation in the House of Commons in
the elections this July. Labour now plans to raise some taxes and invest
heavily in care and green energy. In America, many visions of a Green New Deal reflect the same logic: Areas like green energy and care provision need to
grow; the fossil fuel industry does not. Taxes and subsidies are an obvious
mechanism for achieving this goal. Whether such a shift causes GDP to rise
matters much less than whether it provides for basic human needs while
remaining within ecological limits.
The ecological economist Herman Daly once described the degrowth
movement as “a slogan in search of a programme.” This is becoming increasingly
less true. Conceptually, the term is now crisply defined, as in this definition from Timothée
Parrique: “a planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption in
rich countries to lower environmental pressures and inequalities while
improving well-being.” Pragmatically, elements of a policy program are also
clear, whether it’s reforming taxes, adopting new metrics to replace GDP, or
shifting investment toward care and green infrastructure, from urban parks to
rainwater retention systems.
Dramatic decreases in the availability and quality of water, air,
food, and energy are already a reality around the world. In the coming decades,
degrowth or post-growth economies may not be chosen so much as experienced,
though we still have some freedom to shape their structure and fairness.
Economist Kenneth Boulding told Congress in 1973: “Anyone who believes that
exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an
economist.” More than half a century later, many influential madmen and
economists remain, but there are also signs of growing sanity.
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