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Is it okay yet to talk about degrowth in polite society or mixed company? Alas, I think it is quite okay in postmodern and integral circles (think “blue” in US) and not-so-much in modern and traditional ones (think red in US) [or see values types]. But if you don’t know a group, it’s a risk to talk about degrowth. The concept emerged in France in the 1970s with the proper term being décroissance, but it took in 20002 and has spread a around Europe (not in common use there, either) and to a smaller extent in the US. (See Kallis, Demaria, and D’Alisa’s nice overview)
The basic assumption is that we simply cannot continue to growth the economy on a planet with finite resources. The “edge” to it is a reaction against the idea of sustainable development, noting that this concept can be viewed as an oxymoron – basically, development is at odds with sustainability.
The goal: abolishment of economic growth as a social objective. It touches on many of the topics we’ve been exploring with After Capitalism: ‘sharing’, ‘simplicity’, ‘conviviality’, ‘care’, the ‘commons,’ universal basic income, etc.
The most common argument against any notion of slowing down, never mind reversing, growth is technology. The Limits to Growth folks addressed this in response to the many critics of their work: “The authors have repeatedly addressed and rejected the suggestion that technology will be the magic bullet that solves the growth challenge. Technology can help for sure, but “technology market responses are themselves delayed and imperfect. They take time, they demand capital, they require materials and energy flow….” “Even with the most effective technologies and the greatest economic resilience…if those are the only changes, the model tends to generate scenarios of collapse.”
A challenge with degrowth is a lack of agreement on how to bring it about and replace the current institutions of capitalism. Yes indeed, no easy answers there! – Andy Hines
I was going through my “notes to self” and found this one that fits with this post: “by monetizing everything, we have made the “economy” bigger than it should be; thus shrinking it is less crazy than it seems”
My first thought is that the no-growth folks are still limited by Modernist/Materialist mental models of the world. I can envision a balanced resource society that still experiences nin-material growth via expansion of knowledge, communications, and increasing refinement of control over & structure of matter. My second thought is that we have not yet truly leveraged the vast energy and material resources of our solar system. I think material growth could still theoretically be sustained if we develop the necessary technologies to unburden Earth from our resource needs, at least for a few centuries. My third thought is that as we Cognify the world, it will be far easier to make the Virtual be our realm of growth, while demands on the Real are lessened. My fourth is that I think that tech always solves the growth problem in the short term by creating new ways to get at resources. Unfortunately this tends to promote demographic growth until their is strain again. That cycle has taken us to the point of spending too many of Earth’s resources based on projections into the future. Getting close to the limits usually prompts both values shifts and pursuit of yet more tech to fix the issues. Extrapolated long enough, this starts to look like Kelly’s Technium merging into the Biosphere creating a new hybrid bio+tech ecology. Any sufficiently complicated ecology tends to self-regulate to stability. If that holds true, then Earth and our civilization are in for some really interesting adaptive swings until that tech-ology develops