Giorgos Kallis Profile picture
Political ecologist, Ecological Economist, Loves #Degrowth, #academicwriting.
Sep 3 5 tweets 2 min read
Weird method. Say I want to write a review on the state of economics. I choose all articles with the word 'economics' in the title, and then - surprise surprise - I find most of them are reviews. What an indictment of the state of economics: 'they are only writing reviews'! Ok, maybe 'degrowth studies' (sic) are not the equivalent of economics, but of 'the economy'. So I do a lit review of articles with the word 'economy' in the title, and - surprise surprise - I find that most of them are crappy pieces on the circular or the sustainable 'economy'.
Nov 17, 2023 14 tweets 4 min read
Alert! I am back on twitter for an hour (wait, did its name change?) and before it gets me depressed I want to share the news of our new paper on the perceptions of degrowth among Euro-parliamentarians. /THREAD Image The research was part of @r_mastini's PhD on the Green New Deal and degrowth, and was based on interviews with 41 Members of the European Parliament. Image
Mar 20, 2023 16 tweets 4 min read
The media report these days on a new study that supposedly shows that, after all, not only money buys happiness, but that there is no limit on how much happiness money can buy. But is this so? /Thread. washingtonpost.com/business/2023/… Context: the study is an ‘adversarial collaboration’ between, on the one hand, Kanheman&Deaton, who had found that happiness increases with income but flattens somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000, and on the other, Killingsworth who found a linear relation with no satiation./2
May 25, 2022 21 tweets 6 min read
I am happy to share our new paper with @ANGELOSVARVARO1 and Panos Petridis, published open access @WorldDevJournal. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…. In it we propose a new way to study ‘real-existing degrowth’. THREAD Why ‘real-existing degrowth’? Because ‘one cannot fight for something that one does not know’.
Oct 5, 2021 11 tweets 2 min read
"A discourse analysis of yellow-vest resistance against carbon taxes" - our new paper is available open access! sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Here is a taste of what you will find there: This is one of the first rigorous, and peer-reviewed studies of the Yellow Vests movement and their stance on climate change and carbon taxes. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the Yellow Vests, but few rigorous studies. /2
Aug 4, 2021 13 tweets 3 min read
I read the piece about degrowth on @vox by @KelseyTuoc and it is really disappointing. I thought I was interviewed by a journalist, but I realize I was just there to give a handy citation for an opinion piece. Not nice. /1 I am cited for claiming that degrowth is not about climate change. I said instead that degrowth is about much MORE than just climate change, but cited out of context I fit the wish of the author. Jason points to other flaws in the article here. But.... /2
Feb 24, 2021 24 tweets 6 min read
'Is degrowth against growth in poor countries'? There are many misunderstandings circulating on this issue, so time for a ... THREAD @MaxCRoser @BrankoMilan Those of us who write about degrowth write first and foremost about the part of the world we live in - Europe and North America. We do not see ourselves part of the expertocracy that feels entitled telling Africa or the rest of the world what they should be doing. /2
Feb 21, 2021 12 tweets 4 min read
Friends ask me to comment on @BrankoMilan 's barrage of posts against degrowth. I think the best responses are to be found below Milanovic's own posts and they come from his own audience. I consider myself actually part of his audience /THREAD I have a lot of respect for @BrankoMilan 's work on income inequality. I like also his dry and cynical Balkan humor (I am a Greek you see). And I learned a lot from 'Capitalism Alone', especially the chapter on China, where he provides a sober picture dismissing Western myths /2
Feb 3, 2021 12 tweets 3 min read
Interesting thread, but I don't think ecosocialists or degrowthers are arguing that if German socialists had come to power the world would be green by now. Socialism is not automatically green. Eco-socialism is what it says - a green version of socialism - to be tested /1 The historical counterfactual also in not totally convincing. So let's assume Germany and Europe went socialist. The world economy would have evolved exactly the same way it did? 🤔 I doubt it, this is too deterministic. Examples: /2
Sep 29, 2020 34 tweets 7 min read
On twitter we spend time in silly debates: is degrowth impoverishment, negative GDP, lockdown misery bla bla. But in our normal lives we are producing some pretty k.a. research. Here are 22 papers by researchers from the (broader) degrowth community published just the last year! I give these in no particular order. And they range from the most quantitative to the most ethnographic or the most philosophical (disclaimer: I am in involved in 4). These are papers that I happened to read. I am sure I miss many more - please add at the end of the thread!
Sep 25, 2020 26 tweets 6 min read
One of the seemingly strongest arguments in support of green growth is that an economy can keep growing based on non-material goods and services without using more energy. @Noahpinion distills this into a thought experiment of a Matrix economy. THREAD/1 The Matrix economy is a world where energy/resource input is steady, but GDP keeps growing as we pay more and more for virtual experiences that give us more and more pleasure (paying with virtual work) /2
Jul 22, 2020 29 tweets 5 min read
Last year I published a book on Malthus and Limits. Let me explain what I argued, and how it is relevant to current debates where the name of Malthus and his supposed false prophecy keeps popping up / THREAD Image According to the standard story, Malthus posited that while food production can grow only arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4), population grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8), predicting thus famines. Malthus, the story goes, underestimated the power of technology and was proven wrong. /2
Jul 7, 2020 19 tweets 5 min read
@ii_sambliss wrote an excellent thread fact-checking Shellenberger's ‘Apocalypse never’. . If you want a researched story of the origins and evolution of the ideas behind the book check our 2019 paper @journalofpolit1 journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/JPE/… /THREAD Shellenberger styles himself now in the ‘born-again’ mold that Americans love. He is supposedly an environmentalist who saw the light, and comes out to tell the world the truth about environmentalism /2
Jun 11, 2020 26 tweets 13 min read
One of my side-projects is a website on how to write better papers, mostly for social scientists. howtowriteanacademicpaper.com/index.html Here is a thread with the posts you can find there #writingcommunity #academicwriting #postdoc #PhDthesis #AcademicTwitter #researchpapers #PhDChat /1 My most-viewed post is the one on how to write simply – how to cut the crap, that is. I was inspired by William Zinsser’s ‘On writing well’ (highly recommended!). A workbook accompanies the post with exercises on how to simplify your own text. howtowriteanacademicpaper.com/how-to-write-s… /2
May 8, 2020 24 tweets 7 min read
This is a good point. I have addressed it in my recent book ('Degrowth', 2018, @agendapub) and in my work with @jasonhickel. Let me summarise and hopefully clarify for the sake of a better conversation. THREAD /1 Our claim is NOT that the relationship between GDP and GHGs is immutable, or a law of physics. (If I have used language in my less mature texts that made it seem so, my apologies – but I don’t think I did ☺). /2
May 2, 2020 19 tweets 6 min read
1. @TimHarford wrote a piece in the @FT arguing ‘that the pandemic is giving us a taste of what an end to growth might look like’, proving that 'hitting demanding emissions targets through crude degrowth would be hopeless'. Some thoughts - THREAD ft.com/content/0b1718… 2. To begin, no one that I know is arguing for the crude, undirected type of degrowth ‘of five pandemics in the next decade' that @TimHarford attributes to degrowth advocates. We are scientists, and generally scientists don’t say nonsense like that. Our argument is more nuanced.
May 1, 2020 14 tweets 3 min read
1. There is a weird chart circulating, which supposedly shows that covid-induced ‘degrowth’ (sic) is an order of magnitude more expensive in reducing carbon emissions than clean energies. There are so many things wrong with this analysis, that I don’t know where to begin….THREAD 2. First, as Jason Hickel has argued for the nth time, degrowth is not the same as recession or depression. -
Apr 27, 2020 23 tweets 10 min read
1/ For those new to degrowth and my work, here is a a brief presentation of my 3+1 books on degrowth (the +1 is coming out this September) with a few selected highlights. THREAD (23) 2/ My first book is an edited volume, the Degrowth vocabulary, published by @routledgebooks, coordinated with my good friends and colleagues Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria. Published in 2014, we collected in the book chapters from the top thinkers on degrowth at the time.