Thread by @jasonhickel

There is an extraordinary paradox at the heart of capitalist growth in rich economies, which is important to understand. Here's how it works:🧵

First, capital seeks to privatize and enclose key goods that we need in order to live - healthcare, housing, energy, transport, etc - making these things increasingly expensive for us to access. This is done *explicitly* in the name of growth.

Remember, GDP only measures things with market prices. When you push a public good into the market, GDP goes up. So privatizing healthcare systems, privatizing public housing stock, all of this is great for "growth"...

But who benefits from that growth? The people who own the privatized goods. Their income goes up. For the rest of us, we're stuck with a rising cost to access these essentials. In other words, we're poorer, even if our income is unchanged, and even as GDP per capita is rising.

Then they tell us the solution to this is... more growth. "We need more growth to meet people's basic needs!" So we all have to produce *more stuff* in sectors that we don't necessarily need to expand just in order to access things that we clearly *do* need to survive.

Indeed, this is the engine of growthism. The privatizers and austerity-mongers know this. They seek to induce an artificial scarcity in order to compel people to constantly increase their production for capital, which is of course the primary beneficiary of this treadmill.

But we could just as easily do the opposite. De-enclose and de-commodify key social goods in order to make them universally accessible to all. This would allow people to live well without needing constant growth in order to do so.

This would liberate us from the growth imperative and free us to think more rationally about the economy. What sectors do we want to improve? And what sectors are clearly destructive and should be scaled down? In other words, growth of what, for what end, and for whom?

Needless to say, in addition to improving social outcomes this approach is extremely powerful when it comes to climate mitigation, as we describe in this Nature Energy piece, and could keep 1.5 degrees within reach. jasonhickel.org/s/Hickel-et-al…

For those asking about public services in GDP, they appear only as costs in the expenditure approach (unless they are sold at market prices, in which case they are categorized in the market sector). If the final price of the good is zero, they produce zero value according to GDP.

Mazzucato discusses this problem in her book 'The value of everything', in Chapter 8: 'Undervaluing the public sector'. In sum: "Nothing the government does is considered to fall within the production boundary".

Even if we look at expenditures, we see that when public services are more efficient than private ones, they are apparently worth less according to GDP, even if they deliver superior social outcomes. Here's the NHS vs the US healthcare system:

John Smith also engages this question in his book "Imperialism in the 21st century". He highlights the need to avoid confusing the expenditure and production approaches to measuring GDP (a confusion that people routinely commit):

So, if a public good or service that is available to people for free at the point of use is privatized and given a final price, then yes GDP goes up. Even if the final value available to people decreases and social outcomes decline.

Further discussion about this here, along with excerpts from relevant texts:

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1505851982329876482