I welcome thoughtful critiques of degrowth, and I often learn from them. But this piece by Kelsey Piper is so wildly off the mark that it's hard to know where to start. Here are a few responses, in the thread below. vox.com/future-perfect…
1. Piper says degrowth is "most compelling as a personal ethos, a lens on your consumption habits". In fact degrowth literature explicitly *rejects* this approach in favour of a system-level critique. It's the economic system that's the problem.
2. Piper cites a paper saying that decoupling of GDP from emissions is happening in some rich countries. Yes, of course it is! Renewable energy! The problem is that it is not feasible to decarbonize fast enough for 1.5C if high-income nations continue to pursue growth.
3. We make this argument here, and it has been demonstrated several times in the scientific literature since. I shared this piece with Piper, but she is apparently uninterested in the empirics. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
4. Here's the problem: more growth means more energy demand, which makes it harder to decarbonize. Rich nations need to be cutting emissions by 12% per year - they are *nowhere near* that. The solution: scale down energy use so decarbonization can be accomplished faster.
5. Also, we have to keep in mind that emissions are not the only problem we face. Ecological breakdown is being driven also by resource use, which is tightly coupled to growth - and there is no evidence this relationship can be broken even with aggressive efficiency measures.
6. But here is where things get strange. Piper says that degrowth, which focuses on rich countries, would do nothing about the emissions coming from poor countries. Hello - renewable energy transition?
7. Piper seems to assume that degrowth's *only* climate proposal is to scale down production. This is false. We support the Green New Deal, and rapid renewable energy transition; but we argue that this can only succeed if rich nations abandon growthism. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
8. The road to zero emissions requires a renewable transition. But to accomplish this in the short time we have left, rich nations need to dramatically reduce energy use by scaling down unnecessary production. The policies I lay out in Less is More illustrate how we can do this.
9. Piper claims degrowth in rich nations would harm poor nations. But in fact scholars argue it would liberate the South from extractivism, and allow them to mobilize their labour and resources to meet human needs rather than to service Northern growth. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
11. Piper says reducing excess production (e.g., planned obsolescence) and shortening the working week would cut wages. But we argue for a living wage policy and radical redistribution of income to ensure strong livelihoods for all, with higher welfare purchasing power.
12. Next, Piper says "there’s an extremely strong association between GDP growth and welfare outcomes of every kind." For evidence, she plots child mortality vs GDP per capita, *but uses a logarithmic scale* that creates the impression of a one-to-one relationship:
13. This is a favorite trick of the folks over at OWID. But it is deeply misleading. Put these charts on a normal linear axis and the reality becomes apparent: it's a saturation curve.
14. This Preston-Curve pattern has been understood for nearly half a century. Past a certain point, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes breaks down or becomes irrelevant. After that, what matters is distribution and access to public services.
15. This is what explains the fact that Spain, for instance, can so dramatically outperform the USA on social indicators, including a life expectancy that's *five years longer* with less than half of the GDP per capita.
16. Plotting GDP alongside social indicators and calling it a relationship is not science. We need to analyse the actual causal drivers of social outcomes. This yields a very different story indeed: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
17. This is not new. For thirty-five years, from Amartya Sen on, scholars have critiqued the notion that GDP has a direct causal relationship with social outcomes. Ignoring this literature is not an acceptable approach.
18. Also, I should mention that Roser's claim here that GDP is just good stuff that people need is Pollyannaish in the extreme. Sure, there's good stuff represented in GDP, but there is also a *tremendous* amount of production that is totally irrelevant to well-being.
19. Overall, in my conversation with Piper it became clear to me that she had not read the literature on degrowth and ecological economics. This is not responsible journalism. We must do better when it comes to representing science.
20. It seems that Piper decided her conclusion before she even started this piece. I understand, degrowth is a challenging idea. But at minimum the argument should be represented fairly and objectively, so that people can make up their own minds.
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New paper: "How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?"
Is it possible to realise this vision without exacerbating ecological breakdown? Yes! But it requires a totally different approach to the question of growth and development. 🧵 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Some narratives hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the GDP/cap of high-income countries. But this would have severe ecological consequences. It forces a brutal dilemma between poverty reduction and ecological stability.
Convergence along these lines is also not possible given the imperialist structure of the world economy. High consumption in the core of the world-system depends on massive net-appropriation from the periphery. This model cannot be universalized.
As usual, middle-income countries that have strong public provisioning systems tend to perform best. This model allows countries to deliver relatively high levels of human welfare with relatively low levels of resource use.
Latin America boasts eight of the ten best-performing countries.
Most high-income countries continue to decline. Norway and Iceland— often mistakenly regarded as sustainability leaders — have declined nearly to the level of the United States. aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/…
People would better understand North Korea’s disposition toward the US if they remembered that US forces perpetrated an industrial-scale bombing campaign that destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, civilian infrastructure, and 85% of all buildings.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians were incinerated. The US dropped more bombs on North Korea in the early 1950s than they did in the entire Pacific theatre during WW2, making North Korea one of the most bombed countries in the world. You don’t easily forget such a thing.
All of these are war crimes today under Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.
“After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_o…
We have *extraordinary* productive capacities. We can do virtually anything. Renewable energy? Integrated public transit? Regenerative farming? High-quality affordable housing for all? DONE. But we are prevented from doing these things because they are not profitable to capital.
Medicines to end preventable diseases. Universal public healthcare. Insulated buildings. High-efficiency appliances in every household...
We live in a *shadow* of the society we could have because we do not have democratic control over finance and production.
We face mass deprivation, human misery and ecological crisis all around us. All of it totally unnecessary. And we are told to believe that this is somehow natural and "normal". It's wild.
Major investors like BlackRock and JPMorgan have pulled out of Climate Action commitments because they can achieve higher profits doing fossil fuels and emissions. A clear reminder that capitalism cannot achieve green transition with the necessary speed. ft.com/content/ab26da…
Renewables are cheap. Rapid decarbonization can be achieved. But affordability and feasibility are not what matters to capital. What matters is profits. They will invest in whatever is most profitable, and all of us are hostage to their insane logic.
It is critical to understand: finance represents power over our collective productive capacities - *our* labour and resources. With these capacities we can easily solve social & ecological problems. But we are prevented from doing so because capital directs our efforts elsewhere.
Did capitalist reforms reduce extreme poverty in China? New empirical data suggests the opposite. In the 1980s, socialist China had some of the lowest rates of extreme poverty in the periphery, while the capitalist reforms caused poverty to increase. theconversation.com/chinas-capital…
Scholars have long argued that the World Bank's $1.90 method suffers from a significant limitation, as it does not tell us whether people can actually afford essential goods (food, shelter, clothing, fuel), whose prices may move differently to the rest of the economy.
To overcome this limitation, we need to measure incomes against the cost of basic needs. This is a more robust approach.
With this method, we see that China's public provisioning systems ensured that even low-income people could access essential goods.