Coopreneurs and the post-growth economy
We meet again
All our members live in different places and mostly work remote together, so every time we meet in person it’s an event and it’s always a lot of fun. This time we had the honour to be interviewed about post-growth economy, the role of cooperation and about the Coopreneurs! The interview is part of a feature for NDR Info.
What’s a post-growth economy? 🧐
There are many ways to criticise our growth based economy but next to social-economical, cultural, imperialistic and feministic arguments the most common and widely known critique is the environmental. In the 1972's report “The Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome, the general public started to realise that unconditional growth on a finite planet leads to potential catastrophic environmental and humanitarian effects . More recently the Degrowth conferences, starting in 2008, bring together activists and researchers from all areas to find an answer to the question “How should a future society look like?”
Degrowth means transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.
Degrowth Conferences — source
In the interview we spoke about the many reasons for the growth fetish of our society, the consequences and why we think an economy based on cooperation and commons is a central piece to the answer. It can be dangerous to replace one dogma with another, to replace a focus on growth with an abolishment of growth. Growth is in itself just a manifestation of a dynamic system and there is nothing wrong with dynamic. The important question is Growth of what? and Growth for what?
The underlying assumption of all neoclassical economics is that people are better off, when they have more stuff. Living that way means producing more stuff and making it more affordable will maximise overall well-being and therefore ethically justify growth, because overall it will work out. There will be winners and losers but all in all we’ll be better off.
However, it is widely known in the scientific community that more stuff doesn’t make us more happy. Indeed, there is only a slight positive correlation — other factors influence happiness far stronger than just an income alone. It is also known that losers might be geographically and ethnically concentrated and whole communities get destroyed. But this is a whole other story justifying a blog post by itself.
So if more stuff doesn’t make us more happy, are we measuring the right metric? Clearly not. Growth usually refers to the GDP, which is just a measure of the economic activity in a country. It doesn’t reflect the desirability of an activity. Let’s say a 50% rate of increase in prices for a cancer medicine will increase the GDP. Is this good or desirable? Probably not. So one might be tempted to think that growth is bad. Do we need growth after all?
Why we think growth is necessary
Most opposition of growth might happen out of the right reasons but many social entrepreneurs fail to scale. Growing and talking about growth got undesirable in some communities. But in the case of social entrepreneurship it’s not growing for growth’s sake, it’s growing to increase the positive impact in the world around us and therefore a desirable form of growth. We asked ourselves the question: »How can we increase and expand the positive impact we have throughout our world and — at the same time — don’t fall into the scaling trap of getting disconnected from the local communities we want to serve?«.
First of all, we’re convinced that the Coopreneurship Principles of Collaboration, Participation, Sustainability and Purpose will help us to decide consciously in each step of our journey if and why growth is necessary. Instead of an economy based on competition, burning us out in the end, we’re believing in one of collaboration, improving the lives of us all and making us more happy and fulfilled. We believe in strong ownership. We work better and have greater impact in our lives if we own what we create, together.
Heavily influenced by the open source software community, we think scaling by replication, while keeping the communities small enough for cooperative principles to work best, is the best way to grow the positive impact. Consequently we defined in our statutes the explicit purpose of replication of the Coopreneurship principles anywhere possible. Just like the open source community, we encourage copying of our concept, experimenting with it, adjusting it and sharing the learnings back to the community.
We think that a post-growth economy will still grow. But this time, we need to make sure that we grow the right things, that we measure the right metrics and that we return to the initial purpose of serving the communities we’re living in.
