Alright, making a thread on the history of degrowth in the US. Should not take too many tweets -- we're just getting started.
200 years of manifest destiny was all about growth with maybe a few hiccups or exceptions. Fast forward to the 1970s.
Limits to Growth, the Population Bomb, and the environmental movement were calling growth into question. Kenneth Boulding's Spaceship Earth and Herman Daly's Steady-State Economics were already anticipating the ecological macroeconomics that would influence degrowth.
In a steady-state economy, growth isn't measured/pursued. Instead, market-based policy instruments maintain resource use (and maybe population) at scientifically determined sustainable/optimal levels. So countries whose economies scientists deem unsustainably big would degrow.
Perhaps because of its focus on economic policy designed by experts, the steady-state literature has had little to say about energizing a political movement. Brian Czech proposes building a steady-state political platform through professional society position statements.
Steady-State Economics evolved through the work of Daly, Czech, Farley, Lawn, other men. SSE and degrowth, while not perfectly congruent, are largely compatible in terms of macroeconomic policy (Kerschner 2010).
Scholars of political economy were the first U.S. academics to prominently feature the word ‘degrowth’ (Foster 2011, Klitgaard and Krall 2012, Klitgaard 2013). They applauded the biophysical work of ecological economists but called for a new theory of the economic system.
These political economists, Marxists mostly, argued that economic growth could not be stopped or reversed under capitalist institutions – not without economic crisis, at least. They did not trust neoclassical marginal analysis for thinking about transitions beyond growth.
While U.S. steady-state economists agree that capitalism and the steady state are incompatible (Daly 1974, 2010, Farley 2016), their proposals assume that market institutions can be disentangled from capitalist social relations and perform only their allocative functions.
The political economists doubted this, they see market institutions as part of the capitalist economy and called for humility in thinking about degrowth transitions (Klitgaard and Krall 2012).
These US voices aligned with the more explicitly anti-capitalist degrowth literature emerging from southern Europe (Schneider et al. 2010, @g_kallis et al. 2012), despite that their interventions critiqued degrowth scholars (especially Foster 2011).
Around that time @ErikAssadourian was beginning to write more about degrowth, thinking about how to engineer a degrowth culture. In ‘The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries,’ Assadourian (2012) provided a US-specific plan for degrowth transition and a progress report.
Assadourian outlined public policies and social marketing strategies for engineering a culture that promotes and normalizes the set of actions that comprise degrowth – working, earning, consuming, and traveling less while strengthening community relationships.
He praised multi-generational housing, durable products, Transition Towns, ecovillages, work-sharing policies, ecological taxes, tool-lending libraries, urban gardens, and individual decisions to live simpler, less consumptive lives.
In another essay, David Correia (2012) argued that ‘urban bourgeois primitivism’ and its ‘impact-free’ lifestyles were outcompeting degrowth’s struggle against capital for the hearts and minds of environmentally concerned Americans.
'Bourgeois primitivists' reject growth, but their individualist anti-consumerism ‘ignores the interconnections of race, class, gender, and political ecology, but also reinforces environmentalism in the image of the white, male, urban, middle-class consumer’ (Correia 2012, 110).
Instead of a degrowth movement, Correia (2012) argued, the U.S. had an ‘expression of class concerns around urban aesthetics, luxury, leisure, public safety and individual health as a way to influence the shape of urban spaces so as to reinforce these privileges.'
Then legal scholar Brian Gilmore (2013) was predicting that Black Americans would find degrowth troubling without assurance that its burdens would not fall on them, as the burdens associated with growth often have.
Slavery kickstarted U.S. growth by concentrating economic surpluses in the hands of capitalists, who reinvested some of their profits to expand production. Slavery also provided whites with cheaper goods and higher-wage non-agricultural jobs.
Passed-down wealth from slavery and continued racial inequality benefit white people today: Black Americans have smaller incomes, more poverty, higher unemployment, shorter lives, lower college graduation rates, and far greater incarceration rates than whites (Nat'l Urban League)
Yet Brian Gilmore (2013) acknowledges that Black Americans benefit from ecologically unequal exchange with poorer countries, neo-colonialism, and the exploitation of nature and unpaid domestic workers, mostly women, on which growth relies.
Gilmore concludes that degrowth could be attractive to Black Americans if it were to explicitly call for restorative justice, a form of reconciliation that engages all parties and calls on offenders and beneficiaries to repair harm done to victims and meet their needs.
Since then, degrowth has gained some momentum in the United States. First the U.S. popular press took notice, mostly dismissively (@paulkrugman 2014a, 2014b, Pollin 2015, Porter 2015), but with several approving takes (Villano 2011, @samcbliss 2014, @evgenymorozov 2014).
Then the critical social sciences began to embrace degrowth. Arturo Escobar (2015) located connected degrowth discourses in the Global North to post-development discourses in the Global South. Annual meetings of @theAAG have included sessions on degrowth every year since 2015.
Degrowth philosopher Barbara Muraca took a professorship at Oregon State University in 2016. Susan Paulson (2017) of the University of Florida edited a special issue in the Journal of Political Ecology on ‘Degrowth: culture, power, and change.’
In that special issue, American anthropologists find degrowth values and consumption patterns among North Carolina neo-monastics (Hall 2017) and ecovillagers in Missouri (Lockyer 2017). Some American librarians are pushing for degrowth as well (Civallero and Plaza 2017).
Yet degrowth has not entered the American vernacular. All major environmental non-profits – The @nature_org Conservancy, @SierraClub, @EnvDefenseFund, @NRDC, and more – remain firmly pro-growth.
No political figures have publicly questioned the pursuit of growth.
Apart from one conservative who called degrowth ‘perfectly valid’ (Davis 2018), right-wing media denounce degrowth as an ‘idiotic’ (Rogan 2017) or ‘super boring’ (Pethokoukis 2017) idea of the left that Barack Obama supposedly secretly espouses (Ferrara 2015, Kotkin 2015).
But liberals, progressives, and socialists in the U.S. have in fact hardly engaged with degrowth. Maybe Americans ignore degrowth because it clashes with the country’s culture of optimism, maybe they are in denial about the end of the American dream (McIntyre 2014, Bliss 2016).
This year a group of activists and academics have organized a degrowth gathering in Chicago to spark the conversation, create community, and strategize for the future. We have formed a collective called DegrowUS whose explicit goal is to build a movement. degrowus.org
And that is basically where we're at now. We want to focusing not just on the unsustainability of economic growth, but the human and ecological costs of growth, the exploitation growth entails.
We have to engage not just disenchanted beneficiaries of the growth economy’s surpluses, but also the subjugated groups from whom those surpluses are appropriated. The goal is to gain collective control of those surpluses and decide democratically how to spend (not reinvest) them
this is basically the lit review from a working paper by @samcbliss that you can download here papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
