The Problem with Growth

This essay is based in part on a piece I wrote on growth and the environment in 2022.

Debates about the environment and the economy are usually between whether environmental protection will slow economic growth or whether it will not. However, there is a third perspective: that aiming to grow the economy is itself the problem.

Those who argue that we should not focus on economic growth belong to movements including ‘degrowth’ and ‘doughnut economics.’ Here, I will refer to all these thinkers as ‘growth critics’ except when specifying a particular movement. In this piece, I will present some of their arguments, the counter-arguments by supporters of ‘green growth,’ and even bring in to the conversation two of my economics professors from college.

Most academic papers are published without much notice. However, every once in a while, there is the rare paper whose findings should be considered by just about everyone. One such paper, “Is Green Growth Possible?” by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis (2019), may change the way you think about the economy.

‘Green growth’ is an attempt to sustain economic growth (using the metric of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) at the national and global levels while also ensuring the health of the natural environment. Hickel and Kallis characterize green growth as based “on the assumption that absolute decoupling of GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions is feasible (e.g. Solow 1973), and at a rate sufficient to prevent dangerous climate change and other dimensions of ecological breakdown.”

So what is decoupling? In a 2024 essay for Aeon, researcher and writer Ville Lähde summarizes: “The basic idea is that economic growth can continue and literally decouple, or part ways, with material growth and environmental degradation.” Roughly speaking, if an economy is decoupling ‘relatively’ that means GDP is growing quicker than material use although material use continues to increase; if it is decoupling ‘absolutely’ that means resource use is actually decreasing even as GDP grows.

Hickel and Kallis’ “Is Green Growth Possible?” is a review paper, surveying empirical studies to determine if absolute decoupling is possible and happening quickly enough. Their answer is not encouraging:

extant empirical evidence does not support the theory of green growth. This is clear in two key registers. (1) Green growth requires that we achieve permanent absolute decoupling of resource use from GDP. Empirical projections show no absolute decoupling at