Degrowth Won’t Be Easy
But it is oh so necessary
Lately, I have been encountering writers as well as acquaintances who are concerned about an emerging demographic crisis: In developed nations, populations are aging and birth rates have fallen below “replacement” levels. The concern is that economic enterprise will stagnate as pools of skilled labor and consumers shrink and there won’t be enough young, working people to take care of the needs of the growing numbers of the elderly — either with hands-on care or public benefits like Social Security.
My state of Vermont has one of the highest median ages in the U.S. and population growth is negligible. What we are starting to experience here is a preview of what seems to be in store for many nations. A recent article in our local newspaper describes how elders are finding it increasingly difficult to receive the attention, care, or specialized housing they need; people are starting to fall through the cracks.
In addition, the article explains, population decline is hollowing out local schools and the communities they serve, and local businesses struggle to find employees. A faltering economy will in turn “put the squeeze on state finances” just when people need more public services — a good example of a positive feedback loop with highly negative consequences for society.
A shorthand term for the reduction of population and economic activity is “degrowth.” It is a frightening prospect to those who hold to our dominant worldview of endless progress, development and economic growth; it negates their most tightly held expectations about the future. As the recent articles I’ve been reading are warning, degrowth could completely upend our way of life and lead to the suffering of many vulnerable people.
There are ways to forestall this crisis, such as encouraging immigration. As some observers have pointed out, the xenophobic fear of immigration is counterproductive because immigrants supply the manpower, fresh initiative and expanding markets that a declining and aging population is losing. Consider how many of the people providing elder care and health care today are immigrants; without them, the vulnerable would be in much deeper trouble than they already are.
There is also widespread confidence that modern society is more than capable of solving, or at least indefinitely deflecting, the challenges of demographic decline. The worldview of progress and growth assures us that technology, innovation and efficiency can overcome the threats lurking on the horizon. The answer to degrowth is more robust growth — if not in population then in sophistication. A former city councilor in my town has just published an op-ed entitled “Want world-class education? Grow the economy.” QED.
But many of us are losing faith in this worldview, and these solutions ring false. As Paul Abela puts it, “Technological optimism in the face of ecological overshoot appears to be a blind delusion, yet there is an unquestioned belief that efficiencies will save the day.” It is this blindness, this unquestioning belief, that I want to address here.
If a looming demographic shift is inexorably leading us into a state of degrowth, we need to be smarter, more alert, and more creative in facing it. We need to think outside the box of our present worldview, rather than freak out or downplay or deny the challenges ahead. We need to ask whether a different sort of economy than the one in which we’re currently immersed might better address the emerging crisis.
Another Medium writer, “B,” urges us to recognize and accept that “the economic processes driven by centuries of relentless population and material growth will soon go into reverse,” and that we will need to “actively plan for degrowth… to survive what is coming.” This will require us to uproot our deeply ingrained assumptions about progress and growth.
For many environmentalists, degrowth is not so much a problem to overcome as an absolutely necessary response to ecological overshoot, and for years they have called for a deliberate, voluntary reduction in economic and demographic expansion. The plain fact is that on a finite planet, we cannot keep growing — either in numbers or in economic activity. We have known since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972 that the modern economy is on a collision course with ecological ruin.
If we do not make the bold leap of revising our worldview, if we don’t rein in our mad rush for more of everything, we face catastrophic system collapse. We can either choose degrowth and manage it consciously, or fall into it kicking and screaming, with severe consequences. In the wry words of culture observer John Michael Greer, the most sensible way to prepare for the inevitable decline of modernity is to “collapse now and avoid the rush.”
We must start by questioning our dominant worldview. Communities and economies that are structured around an infinitely expanding workforce and unlimited consumption will need to radically rethink their basic assumptions. Conventional economics will need to yield to new approaches such as steady-state theory and ecological economics.
Approaches such as these not only explain the necessity for questioning our blind faith in growth, they make strategies of degrowth thinkable. What is now an economic and political heresy, derided as dangerous nonsense, would begin to emerge as the only rational and effective way to pull ourselves back from the brink of ecological collapse.
Still, as the recent spate of articles and expressions of concern about degrowth make clear, even if we learn to wrap our minds around the cessation of growth, its actual occurrence will present enormous real-world challenges. Just as it is not a sustainable solution to insist that more growth can save us, it would be naïve to believe that we can easily interrupt the momentum of a massive interlocked economic/political/social system that has been solidifying for four hundred years.
A system that commodifies human relationships does not have adequate means for providing care to the elderly and sick when the economics of doing so no longer yield profit. A system that sucks resources from local places and traditional cultures in order to feed the ravenous appetite of monstrous corporate entities and absentee owners does not support people thriving in modest, communally rooted lifestyles. (See Helena Norberg-Hodge and Wendell Berry, among many others, on this point.)
The reflexive, fearful reaction to degrowth that we see in mainstream thinking is conditioned by this system. Those who worry that there won’t be enough young people to fill jobs in health care or pay taxes to support Social Security are not willing to conceive of systemic alternatives. And as long as we are stuck in this mindset, degrowth will, in fact, bring about a terrible crisis.
Greer, more fully than many other theorists, has described how a livable post-growth society might emerge once we disentangle ourselves from blind faith in progress. In The Ecotechnic Future, he argues that “the cultural patterns that will rise in industrialism’s wake will have little in common with those that exist now,” and he anticipates in detail what some of those patterns will look like. They will be more attuned to the rhythms and limitations of nature, for example, and more locally focused. Within such a society, degrowth does not present as frightening a prospect as it does to ours.
How do we get from here to there? How does a society deliberately change its worldview?
Well, that’s the hard part, to be sure. There are no shortcuts or formulae. We need to be willing to question our taken-for-granted assumptions about reality, society, economics and human nature. Then we need to encourage others to adopt this open-ended curiosity. (That is why I write.) It takes courage or an uncomfortable sense of alienation to step out of consensus consciousness and try to look at the world in fresh ways.
To “degrow” our own assumptions and lifestyles while the society around us is still engaged in its headlong pursuit of economic expansion can be a lonely path. And in many practical ways, it is difficult to disengage from the entrenched system. But as Greer tells us, collapsing voluntarily now could save us a great deal of angst when the “rush” finally arrives, when the 400-year-old system of capitalist expansion reaches its inevitable denouement.
