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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People often assume that capitalist globalization is closing the wage gap between workers in the global North and global South.
But it's not happening. In fact, the North-South wage gap is *increasing*.
And this is not due to sectoral differences. It is occurring across all sectors, even as the global South's share of industrial manufacturing and high-skilled labour in the world economy has increased dramatically over this very period.
This Bloomberg report is a stark reminder: we cannot rely on capital to achieve green transition. Capital is not investing enough in green energy because it's not as profitable as fossil fuels. The solution? We need a public finance strategy and fast.
Public finance, together with a credit guidance framework. Central banks have the power to force capital to stop making climate-destroying investments and direct investment instead in necessary activities: foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/16/cli…
People assumed that renewable energy development would increase once it became cheaper than fossil fuels. But capital doesn't care about cheapness. It cares about *profits*. Capital won't invest when the outlook is like this. You need to make the necessary investments directly.
I strongly disagree with these remarks. They are empirically incorrect, but also illustrate a terrible reactionary tendency among some environmentalists that must be rejected.
The claim is that ecological collapse will undermine industrial production, so we should not pursue development to meet needs in the South.
For instance, we should not ensure refrigerators for people b/c this would inhibit their ability to migrate away from uninhabitable zones!
Going further, the OP says instead of pursuing human development, we should be preparing for a world where we have no capacity to produce things like refrigerators and phones.
In this new paper we calculate the unequal exchange of labour between the global North and global South. The results are quite staggering. You'll want to look at this... 🧵
First, a crucial point. Workers in the global South contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, and 91% of labour for international trade.
The South provides the majority of the world's labour in all sectors (including 93% of global manufacturing labour).
And a lot of this is high-skill labour.
The South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined.
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/…