Yes to Degrowth Stories. No to Despair
The present is sad and scary. We need a vision of a better future to look forward to, and a story that defines that vision. With the old world gone and a new one not yet born, people need goals and values they can plausibly project onto the future that are different from those of the past — the ones which destroyed their present.
Today is too hot, mostly too dry, at times too wet. We are threatened by war, untenable economic conditions, health fears, and a shortage of cheerful children. At least we should be able to imagine a better future. Otherwise, it’s despair.
Degrowth, or simplification — or whatever we might call a less consumptive, Earth- and ordinary-people-friendlier social design — is becoming the obvious candidate for that role of a better future to many, myself included. A place where we can feel happy and secure. Where we don’t feel at war with the Earth and, potentially, each other.
How to get there? It’s been hard to see the way. But recently, I’ve come to feel that some remote feeder paths for a possible road to degrowth are becoming visible. It’s a story worth trying to tell.
The Story
What might such a future-defining story sound like?
The simple tale — and not bad for being simple — is of a world in which people spend more time doing things they like and less doing what someone will pay them for. What those things will be is entirely different for different people. The common thread is that they will be fulfilling for the individuals involved and not harmful to others.
There is less new stuff in total in this world. The cuts came mainly from those who had more than enough already that was perfectly usable or could be repaired. People who enjoy building or fixing things help by participating in repair cafes, or 3-D printing shops that make spare parts, or otherwise recycle old stuff rather than building anew.
This may sound bad to many who enjoy today’s consumerist culture, but in the absence of pervasive advertising and fashion-related social pressure, most have found preferable ways to fill their time. And for those who still enjoy shopping, there are swap shops, consignment stores, and garage or street sales. New stuff is available, but as a last resort, not the preferred option.
People are healthier because they aren’t surrounded by toxic air and self-imposed poisons. Food is mostly grown with love and attention by the people who eat it or others who live nearby, even in cities. People walk and ride bikes more and aren’t in a hurry. Community sports and exercise are all around. Art is all around.
The weather is a constraint as climate change unfolds, but the change won’t be as catastrophic as foreseen under today’s “business-as-usual” scenario. Dougald Hine in At Work in the Ruins describes “the background roar of loss” and the mourning that will pervade a massively altered world. But balanced against this is people’s greater ability in this future to share the joy of life more fully with non-humans.
The Path
So how does the world get from its dying neoliberal, globalized, consumerist self to this more egalitarian, cleaner, localized ideal?
Not, we hope, through revolution or war, but through ground-up community building by people who figure out better ways to live with each other and with what we now call nature. It will happen in different ways in different places.
Today’s over-developed world must learn, through invention or rediscovery, to live largely on what is grown or mined nearby — not the exploitation by their giant corporations of poorer places for their energy, “raw materials,” and people. Peoples of the Global South will surely define and create their own modes of living once free of neoliberal/colonial-era pressure. Some long-distance trading is likely to continue, but much less and for better reasons than fat profits for corporations.
There are, even now, some real-world pointers to such a path to degrowth, simplification, and localization — early indications of greater acceptance of values at odds with growth-for-growth’s-sake, and with high profits for the few and hard work at low pay for the many:
* The global economy is splintering. Globalization is a critical axiom of neoliberalism. It’s the division-of-labor principle that Adam Smith laid out in Part 1, Chapter 1 of Wealth of Nations writ large. It’s the cheapest way to make the most stuff at the highest profits for giant corporations, with no accounting for “externalities,” those things appropriated by the economic system without paying for them, from rivers and forests, to fertile soil, unpaid work, and more — including a livable climate.
But since the system meltdown of 2008–09 and then Covid, this globalization axiom is being questioned, not only by leftists and eco-oriented types, but by the Davos crowd, Wall Street mavens, and both the last two leaders of the prime keeper of capitalism. Both US Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have slapped tariffs and outright bans on goods from China (and occasionally others), and increasingly under Biden, on high-tech exports of US components and ideas to China. The US should make more of its own stuff, especially microchips and EV batteries, the US government now says.
This is not bottom-up and it’s not in the degrowth style, but it has done much to destroy the old, even if it has yet to define the new.
* Trade between the US and China is diminishing. Decoupling is real. US officials say they want to “derisk” not “decouple,” but they’re getting ever more decoupling. China’s exports to the US fell 12% year-on-year in the first-half of 2023. That’s all the more startling in that a year ago was Zero-Covid time, so China’s base for the fall was already stunted. The trend is accelerating: Exports from China to all countries rose by 4% in the first half, with growth to Russia and other Asian nations making up for the US drop. But in June alone, China’s worldwide exports fell by 12.4%.
Should this continue, the dislocation implied is huge. A major fall in US-China trade could easily pull both into long-expected recession and halt growth in oil demand for all time — a desperately needed dose of good news for the climate.
* Most things will be more expensive if they are made outside China, since the Chinese are the biggest and best manufacturers at this point in history. This probably means that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get US inflation back down to the sub-2% levels where it has been for decades. The Federal Reserve Board (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) have set 2% as their target inflation rate, and leaders of those central banks have stated repeatedly that they will continue to push up interest rates until inflation falls.
This is further bad news for GDP growth and oil demand, and more expensive stuff equates to less stuff.
* In the West, employment and wage growth at the bottom of the scale are holding up unexpectedly well against the onslaught of Fed and other central bank inflation slayers. Since the Fed first decided it had endangered its reputation for monetary purity by not stomping on the first post-Covid price increases, it has been dishing out large, rapid increases in interest rates with the expectation that layoffs by employers and worker acceptance of low-to-no wage increases would result.
This approach is brutal and runs counter to a central tenant of the degrowth movement: That it should be the wealthy who consume less, not poorer people who can barely afford the basics as it is. The fact that the typical pattern isn’t holding — what with major strikes in Hollywood and at UPS in the US, and industrial action in numerous sectors across Europe, the UK, and several Asian economies over the last year — is evidence workers feel empowered.
* Many people appear interested in a less work-intensive life since the pandemic. They seem less willing to work that extra hour, or put off retirement for another year, or keep a job they don’t like, in order to get a bit more money to buy more stuff. The data are confused, as data about so much is these days, but the persistence of work-from-home, the ferociousness of French protests at retirement-age extension, Chinese “lying flat,” American “quiet quitting” all suggest a change in attitude.
Such a shift in the value placed on work relative to other aspects of life is a vital prerequisite for degrowth.
* The poorer countries of the world are also doing better than many economists expected, with some admitted exceptions, such as Sri Lanka and Kenya. India’s economy is growing especially rapidly, as are several Southeast Asian countries.
This aligns to a point with degrowth principles, although over time, it works only if colonial-era definitions of growth based on GDP are set aside.
The Plausibility
It’s too early to know whether these trends will morph into meaningful social change. But they do provide hints that degrowth might develop into a plausible story about what the future could bring.
They also offer avenues for activists and ordinary folk alike to pursue in trying to help the degrowth story come true — or in creating their own, different stories of an Earth- and people-friendlier world. We need reasons not to despair. Stories are a start.
