Degrowth Is A Nonstarter And Won't Work. Here's What Will Instead. (Re-Post)

From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles.  However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual).  It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem.  In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks.  And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.

And that's before we get into the sort of extremely high and confiscatory tax rates (on both income and wealth) that would be required on not only the rich, but also on the middle class and working class, and even the working poor of the Global North.  Which the oligarchs would so artfully dodge with ease of course, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.  Though to be fair, not all degrowthers necessarily agree with that idea, and many prefer Pigouvian taxes on pollution and resource depletion (most notably carbon taxes), and perhaps also taxing advertising revenue as well, instead of income and wealth.

(For a flavor of a possible worst-case scenario, see Susan Cooper's dystopian novel Mandrake.  Then add hell AND high water to the mix.  Just lovely!)

Some excellent articles casting doubt on degrowth can be found here and here, truly food for thought indeed.

Of course, we clearly need to end our inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell (as Edward Abbey famously said) which ultimately kills its host.  We need an economy that is no longer dependent on growth and can still provide prosperity for all with or without growth.  We need to stop obsessing over the fundamentally flawed metric of GDP, which really ultimately stands for God Damn Profits nowadays.  Rent-seeking, usury, artificial scarcity, cronyism, speculation, and other forms of parasitism and economic manipulation from the top down are the ultimate reasons why our current economic system is so hooked on growth for the sake of growth.

As the futurist Walter Ignatius Baltzley noted back in 2015, the only way to end this system of cannibalism (sorry, "capitalism") is to give it the ONE thing that it absolutely cannot survive:  ABUNDANCE.  That's right, capitalism needs scarcity to function, which is why it has to create so much artificial scarcity nowadays to prop itself up.  Capitalism will thus fatally overdose on capital, in other words.  Abundance is of course the polar opposite of the sort of eco-austerity of degrowth.  With enough abundance, we can humanely euthanize this dreadfully toxic system for good, and easily transition to post-capitalism, and ultimately a post-growth and post-carbon economy. 

For example, Baltzley in another article applies this idea directly to Big Oil.  How do you win a tug-of-war against a much stronger opponent?  By simply letting go of the rope, and letting them fall on their butt.  Thus, as crazy as it sounds, get out of the way and simply give the fossil fuel fat cats what they say they want so much.  Yes, you read that right.  Let 'em "drill, baby, drill", and "frack, baby, frack"!  The government can even buy their oil (and natural gas) at a premium and then turn around and re-sell it at a loss.  The resulting massive surplus of cheap energy would flood the market, bringing down the cost of living in general, and by doing so....will also bring down the cost of renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar that will ultimately replace fossil fuels, while oil and natural gas become less profitable over time.  In the very short run, it would be quite a boon for Big Oil, but in the long run it would be giving them the very rope with which to hang themselves.  (Fortunately for us, Big Oil is extremely shortsighted.)

Yes, it's quite the Hail Mary pass indeed.  But when both Plan A and Plan B have been ruled out as impractical and/or politically impossible, and time is running out, that ultimately leaves us with Plan C.

So what are we waiting for?  Prime that pump, and prime it good!  Let Big Oil and the oligarchs enjoy their utterly foolish pride before the fall.  Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Oh, by the way, wanna hear a joke?  Peak Oil.  That's the joke.  Yes, oil production will inevitably peak at some point.  Duh!  And hopefully demand will peak before supply does.  But we still have more than enough to deep-fry the planet many times over.

Quite frankly, the biggest supply constraint of all right now is NOT geology, but rather geopolitics, as Europe is currently learning the hard way with Russia weaponizing its natural gas against them. And the aforementioned plan would solve that as well.  Canada alone could supply more than enough (liquefied) natural gas to Europe to be free from Russian energy dominance, but they won't, because they never developed the export facilities to do so in time.  That leaves the USA to fill in the gap, of course.

So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like mutualism or a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a "steady-state economy" of course. While a pure gift economy may not necessarily work at scale, a hybrid gift/exchange economy could be better.  Whatever it is, it has to develop organically.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  (Or at least when the borrower is a natural person, as opposed to an organization or institution.)  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, 10% APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is eventually reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the "financialization" of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  So let's make it history.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.

FINAL THOUGHT:  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, the TSAP's ultimate goals for post-capitalism at least seem to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth as well to one degree or another.

See here as well.