Degrowth

Based on Wikipedia: Degrowth

What if everything we've been told about economic progress is wrong? What if the relentless pursuit of more—more production, more consumption, more stuff—isn't the path to human flourishing but rather a highway toward ecological collapse?

This is the central provocation of degrowth, a movement that asks us to consider something almost heretical in modern economics: perhaps we should intentionally shrink our economies.

The Impossible Equation

Here's a simple mathematical problem. The Earth has finite resources. A finite amount of oil, copper, lithium, fresh water, arable land. Meanwhile, the dominant global economic model demands infinite growth. Every quarter, every year, the economy must expand. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the total value of goods and services produced—must go up.

Infinite growth. Finite resources.

Something doesn't add up.

Degrowth advocates argue this isn't just bad math—it's civilizational suicide. They point to what scientists call the planetary boundaries, a set of nine Earth system processes that, if pushed too far, could trigger catastrophic and irreversible environmental changes. We've already crossed several of these boundaries. Climate change is the most famous, but there's also biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and deforestation.

The Holocene—the geological epoch that began roughly 11,700 years ago and nurtured the rise of human civilization—may be ending. Some scientists argue we've entered a new era called the Anthropocene, defined by humanity's overwhelming impact on Earth's systems. The evidence surrounds us: rising temperatures, mass extinctions, plastic in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest mountain peaks.

What Degrowth Actually Proposes

Degrowth isn't simply about shrinking the economy and accepting poverty. That's a common misconception. Instead, it proposes a fundamental reimagining of what we measure and what we value.

Consider GDP for a moment. This single number has become the primary way we judge whether a country is doing well or poorly. But GDP measures some strange things. It counts the money spent cleaning up an oil spill as economic activity. It counts the healthcare costs of treating lung cancer from air pollution. It counts the construction of prisons. All of these increase GDP.

What GDP doesn't count is equally revealing. The unpaid labor of parents raising children? Not included. Volunteer work in communities? Invisible. The value of a functioning ecosystem, clean air, drinkable water? Zero, according to GDP.

Degrowth advocates argue we should abandon GDP as our north star and instead focus on measures that actually capture human well-being: life expectancy, health outcomes, educational attainment, housing quality, ecological sustainability, time for leisure and relationships. Many of these can improve even as GDP declines—perhaps especially as GDP declines.

The Promise of Decoupling (And Why Degrowth Doesn't Buy It)

Before we go further, we need to address the most powerful counterargument to degrowth: the idea of decoupling.

Decoupling is the hope that we can separate economic growth from environmental damage. In other words, that we can keep getting richer while using fewer resources and emitting less carbon. This is the vision behind "green growth"—the idea that sustainability and capitalism can happily coexist.

There are two types of decoupling. Relative decoupling means the economy grows faster than resource use or emissions—so both go up, but GDP goes up faster. Absolute decoupling is the real prize: GDP goes up while resource use and emissions actually go down.

Degrowth theorists are deeply skeptical that absolute decoupling is possible at the scale and speed needed. In 2021, the European Environmental Bureau, a federation of environmental organizations, reviewed the evidence and concluded there is "no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown." Cases of decoupling they found were either relative rather than absolute, temporary, or limited to specific locations.

This last point is crucial. A wealthy country might appear to be decoupling if it simply offshores its dirty manufacturing to poorer nations. The pollution doesn't disappear—it just moves somewhere else.

Economists Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis have argued that even under optimistic policy conditions, high-income nations cannot cut emissions fast enough to stay within safe climate limits while pursuing historical rates of GDP growth. Their calculations suggest limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius might require high-income countries to shrink their economies by more than 90 percent.

Not everyone agrees with this pessimism. Environmental scientist Rikard Warlenius has countered that Hickel's assumptions are too conservative, noting that rates of decoupling above 4 percent annually have already been achieved in some places. With aggressive enough policies, he argues, even faster decoupling might be possible. And here's an interesting twist: Warlenius suggests that economic growth might actually be better positioned than degrowth to fund the massive, expensive transitions needed to address climate change.

The Jevons Paradox: When Efficiency Backfires

There's another wrinkle that makes degrowth advocates suspicious of technological solutions: the rebound effect, also known as the Jevons paradox.

William Stanley Jevons was a 19th-century English economist who noticed something counterintuitive about coal. When steam engines became more efficient—using less coal to produce the same amount of work—coal consumption didn't fall. It rose. Why? Because greater efficiency made coal-powered machines more economical to use, so people used them more. The efficiency gains were eaten up by increased usage.

This pattern repeats throughout modern life. Cars become more fuel-efficient, so people drive more and buy larger vehicles. LED lightbulbs use a fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs, so we install more lights and leave them on longer. Homes become better insulated, so we heat them to higher temperatures.

Degrowth proponents argue this means technological fixes are doomed to fail without a fundamental shift in values and economic structure. Even if we invent miraculous clean technologies, the growth imperative will push us to consume more of them, potentially offsetting any gains. The only real solution, they contend, is to reject the growth paradigm entirely.

What a Degrowth Society Might Look Like

So what would a degrowth world actually look like? This is where things get both interesting and contested.

Degrowth isn't just an environmental program—it's a vision for a fundamentally different society. Advocates describe it as combining critiques of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, productivism, and utilitarianism into a vision of societies that are "more caring, just, convivial, happy, and democratic."

That's a lot of isms to unpack.

Let's start with productivism—the belief that economic productivity and growth should be the primary goals of human organization. Degrowth rejects this utterly. It asks: productivity for what? If producing more stuff requires destroying the ecosystems we depend on for survival, perhaps we're being productive toward our own extinction.

One concrete proposal comes from feminist philosopher Frigga Haug: the "4-in-1 perspective." She envisions a world where people work only four hours a day for wages, freeing up time for four hours of care work (looking after children, the elderly, and each other), four hours of political participation in direct democracy, and four hours of personal development and learning.

This connects to degrowth's deep engagement with feminist economics. Traditional GDP measurements, feminist economists like Marilyn Waring have pointed out, ignore the enormous amount of unpaid work—primarily done by women—that keeps societies functioning. Childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, emotional labor. None of this counts as economic activity, yet without it, nothing else would work.

Degrowth proposes centering the economy around care rather than production. Care work would be organized as a commons—a shared resource managed collectively rather than bought and sold in markets.

Open Localism: Neither Globalization Nor Isolation

Degrowth advocates often talk about "open localism"—a concept that sounds paradoxical but captures something important.

They're critical of globalization, particularly the way it allows wealthy nations in the Global North to consume resources extracted from poorer nations in the Global South. This isn't new; it's a continuation of colonial patterns. But they're not proposing sealed-off, self-sufficient communities either.

Open localism envisions local production and economic activity that remains open and connected to the wider world. It emphasizes diversity, different types of knowledge, and cooperation. Local communities would produce much of what they need locally, reducing the resource-intensive global supply chains that ship goods thousands of miles. But they wouldn't become fortresses. Ideas, culture, and people would still flow freely.

This shares some DNA with ideas about the commons—resources and systems managed collectively by communities rather than owned privately or controlled by governments. Think of a community garden, an open-source software project, or a traditional fishing ground managed by local fishers according to shared rules. But open localism resists imposing strict rules and boundaries, favoring a more cosmopolitan, flexible approach.

The Critics Aren't Wrong About Everything

Degrowth faces substantial criticism, and honestly, some of it lands.

Critics point out that it's easy to advocate for consuming less when you're already comfortable. What about the billions of people in poverty who need their economies to grow so they can afford food, shelter, healthcare, and education? Even many environmentalists support continued economic growth in the Global South, arguing that wealthy countries should bear the burden of reduction.

Degrowth advocates respond that they're not talking about immiserating the poor. They argue for redistribution—both within and between countries. The Global North, they say, has consumed far more than its fair share of the planet's resources, often through colonial exploitation. Wealth should flow from rich to poor, not just in charity but as a form of reparation for centuries of extraction.

A more damaging criticism is that degrowth remains vague about how it would actually work. Systematic reviews of degrowth research have found that most proposals lack "precision, depth, and concrete policy design." The literature is heavy on normative opinions—what should happen—and light on empirical analysis of what would happen. Quantitative modeling and real-world data are scarce.

There's also the political feasibility problem. How do you convince people to vote for less? How do you restructure an economy that depends on growth without causing mass unemployment and suffering? There's no historical precedent for the poorest segments of a society benefiting when that society's economy contracts. Recessions hurt the vulnerable most.

Some researchers project that far-reaching degrowth scenarios would actually increase extreme poverty. This is a serious objection that deserves serious engagement.

The Climate Modeling Gap

Here's something curious: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's leading authority on climate science, has largely ignored degrowth in its modeling.

The IPCC produces scenarios—possible futures showing different paths for emissions and their consequences. These scenarios heavily feature technological solutions like carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, and renewable energy. They also assume continued economic growth.

Scientists have pointed out that degrowth scenarios—where economic output declines or is measured differently—have been neglected. When researchers have modeled such scenarios, they've found intriguing results: degrowth pathways "minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven pathways."

In other words, betting everything on technologies that don't yet exist at scale might be riskier than figuring out how to organize society differently. Of course, the political and social challenges of degrowth are themselves a form of feasibility problem.

The Alternatives

Degrowth isn't the only game in town. It exists on a spectrum of responses to the growth-versus-sustainability tension.

At one end is green growth, the mainstream position. Green growth says we can have it all: economic expansion and environmental sustainability through technological innovation, renewable energy, and smart policy. Electric vehicles, solar panels, carbon taxes—these tools will decouple growth from damage.

Degrowth thinks this is dangerous wishful thinking.

In the middle is something called agrowth—a more agnostic position. Agrowth says: let's stop obsessing about GDP either way. Focus on reducing environmental harm through whatever instruments work—taxes, regulations, markets, innovation. If the economy grows while we do this, fine. If it shrinks, also fine. The growth rate is just a side effect, not the goal.

Degrowth is also closely associated with eco-socialism (combining ecological sustainability with socialist economics) and eco-anarchism (emphasizing decentralized, non-hierarchical organization). These movements share degrowth's critique of capitalism but emphasize different aspects of the alternative vision.

Public Services: A Clue to the Future

One study offers a hint at how a degrowth-aligned future might work. Researchers found that public services—government-provided healthcare, education, transportation, housing—are associated with higher satisfaction of human needs while requiring less energy than private alternatives.

Think about it: a public bus system moves people around using far less energy per person than everyone driving individual cars. A public healthcare system doesn't need to spend money on marketing or generate profits for shareholders. Public education provides knowledge without requiring families to purchase it in a market.

This suggests a path forward: expand public services, reduce private consumption, and potentially improve well-being while shrinking the economy's resource footprint. The contemporary economic system, the researchers concluded, is "fundamentally misaligned with the twin goals of meeting human needs and ensuring ecological sustainability."

A Great Transformation, One Way or Another

Some researchers believe we're heading toward what they call a Great Transformation. The only question is whether it happens by design or by disaster.

If we continue on our current path, the transformation will be imposed on us: climate catastrophe, ecosystem collapse, resource wars, mass migration, societal breakdown. This is not alarmism—these are the conclusions of sober scientific assessments.

Degrowth offers a different path: intentional transformation. Deliberately reshaping our economies and societies before nature forces our hand. It's asking us to choose a smaller economy with better lives over a larger economy that destroys its own foundations.

A 2022 paper by researcher Mark Diesendorf concluded that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees with no overshoot would require reducing energy consumption, describing degrowth toward a steady-state economy—one that neither grows nor shrinks but remains in equilibrium with ecological limits—as "possible and probably positive." The study ended with a plea: "The case for a transition to a steady-state economy with low throughput and low emissions, initially in the high-income economies and then in rapidly growing economies, needs more serious attention and international cooperation."

Whether degrowth is the answer, or even part of the answer, remains genuinely uncertain. Its critics raise valid concerns about vagueness, feasibility, and effects on the poor. Its advocates highlight real problems with infinite growth on a finite planet.

What seems clear is that business as usual is not an option. The question is what comes next—and whether we choose it or have it chosen for us.