You might see trouble when you look at power outages, declining birth rates and exorbitant grocery prices. Certain intellectuals and environmentalists, however, see something so wonderful that they had to create a word for it: Degrowth.
In the 2014 book Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, a collection of European thinkers presented an ideological movement that aimed to overturn the “growth paradigm” and usher in “an economy of common feast for all sober individuals.” The movement relies heavily on arcane and fustian terminology such as “dépense,” “nowtopian,” “dematerialization,” “economic disobedience,” “post-normal science,” and the use of “imaginary” as a noun, while “degrowth” itself comes from the French coinage “décroissance.”
Despite their arcane terminology, the ideas are straightforward. Degrowthers claim that capitalism “requires and perpetuates growth” and that this growth imposes an unsustainable stress on the planet’s finite resources. This mindset must be eliminated, and it can be eliminated because, as the editors gnomically announce, “scarcity is social.”
Degrowth is not just a social, economic, or environmental policy critique. The movement represents a cultural and philosophical challenge to capitalism and free markets. To understand its appeal, we must examine the deeper philosophical roots that sustain its radical vision.
Marxist philosopher André Gorz coined the term “décroissance” in 1972, drawing from the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, which outlined the planet’s purported ecological limits and suggested zeroing out economic growth to stop resource depletion.
Gorz, the Club of Rome (which made headlines in 2016 by calling for a one-child policy in the developed world), and others claimed that global ecological stability was fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.
“Is the earth’s balance,” asked Gorz, “for which no-growth — or even degrowth — of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?” Gorz assumed that his perception of “the earth’s balance” required that growth to end.
Contemporary degrowthers embrace the same fundamental error. First, they (and other green philosophers) stipulate a highly debatable definition of “the earth’s balance.” Second, at its core, capitalism does not have a singular goal of perpetual growth. Instead, capitalism is a social system rooted in the principles of individual freedom, where people can pursue their self-interests and make decisions based on rational judgments.
Capitalism does not have goals or desires of its own; it is not a conscious actor but a framework that facilitates the voluntary exchange of goods and services, innovation, and the creation of value. The growth paradigm criticized by degrowthers is not imposed by a framework of rules. It is the natural outcome of individuals acting freely and rationally to improve their circumstances. Profit is not a result of coercion or an insatiable drive to accumulate wealth but a reflection of one’s ability to provide goods and services that others value.
Degrowth scholars also argue that competition pressures businesses to grow, because a company that chooses to forego higher profits would lose market share and go out of business. They contend that the drive creates a relentless cycle of accumulation, where companies must continuously grow or face decline.
However, this critique fails to recognize that the motivation to compete is not an external force. Instead, business owners have a rational desire to improve their well-being. People compete to innovate, provide better services or products, and enhance their material circumstances. Competition is not a coercive system that demands growth for its own sake. It is a mechanism that rewards those who can meet consumer needs more effectively and efficiently.
The degrowth movement also misunderstands natural resources by making the same flawed ecological assumptions made by neo-Malthusian biologists. They believe the planet has finite resources and that growth must inevitably lead to unsustainable resource depletion.
Natural resources are not fixed amounts of matter. They are defined by their utility to human ends. While a fixed number of atoms produce natural resources, there are limitless ways those atoms can be organized to satisfy human needs. That is the reality that defines a resource. “The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge,” said the late economist Julian Simon. “The brakes are our lack of imagination.”
Understanding the philosophical motivations behind the degrowth movement helps to outline the potential impacts of the movement’s plans. As with the attitudes and policy proposals of the Deep Ecologists and other progressive green movements, degrowth would fundamentally undermine the structure and philosophies that established Western society. By misunderstanding humanity’s role in the natural environment and the essential nature of free market systems, degrowthers also recommend policy solutions that would do far more harm than the problem they claim to solve.
* Craig Orji has worked on energy and environmental policy studies as an intern at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Cato Institute.
Source: Human Progress
