Degrowth: The Final Solution

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 4, 2024

“Degrowth is about government authoritarianism overriding the natural human impulse to improve. Marcus Feldthus of the Copenhagen Business School needs to reeducate himself about ends and means to at least be able to inform his students about the happy side of life and living.”

No-growth (stagnation) is bad enough. In business, every promotion must be balanced by a demotion or retirement. For one person to buy more, another person must buy less. Charity not, the zero sum game is a recipe for low morale and infighting, just of the opposite of charity through abundance.

Take another step backward to a negative sum game. More losers than winners. The survival of the fittest. Glum is the word as rising expectations is replaced by despair.

Less is not more but less. Less convenience, less leisure, less security, and less philanthropy toward others. And with incentives stymied, the desperadoes look to government to intervene at the expense of others. French economist and classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) wrote in 1848:

… it is a well-established fact that the state cannot procure satisfaction for some without adding to the labor of others…. The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

What needs “degrowth” is government, not the market, a subject for another time.

“Planetary Boundaries”

What is the latest thinking and pitch from the degrowth movement? This social media post from Marcus Feldthus, whose self-described mission is to “build a post growth business in the pursuit of sustainability,” provides an update. His website advertises an online course, “Aligning Business with Planetary Boundaries,” based on four precepts (verbatim):

1. Why green growth fails to deliver results fast enough and sufficiently.
2. How the inequality and ecological crises are connected.
3. Cases of companies that get sustainability right and wrong.
4. How to start implementing post growth thinking in a business.

He urges his students to “start a conversation about the assumptions in your company.”

No-growth, de-growth …. Ouch! Calling Julian Simon!

Feldthus continues on the environmental front (reproduced verbatim):

1. Assuming you can decouple carbon emissions from economic growth sufficiently to live up to the Paris Agreement (no evidence of that happening)
   
2.  Assuming some new technology will magically appear and solve point 1 (techno-optimism ignores that hope is not a strategy)
   
3.  Assuming climate change is the only problem (when there are 8 other planetary boundaries)
   
4.  Assuming stable prices on energy and materials (when energy expenditures are increasing)
   
5.  Assuming that increases in energy efficiencies lead to absolute energy and material reductions in a growth-based system (the money you save, you use to grow the output, to make more money, which cancels out the initial savings – also known as The Rebound Effect)
   
6.  Assuming that you can recycle your way out of the ecological crisis (the 2nd law of thermodynamics explains why that is not possible)
   
7.  Assuming that services have no, or an insignificant, ecological footprint (services cannot entirely replace the material sector)

Marcus Feldthus sees hope and momentum:

Degrowth is breaking into the mainstream. Covered by: UN, Harvard Business Review, NY Times, Ernst & Young, BBC, and Bloomberg Festival. As something to be explored, not ridiculed. Here is a quote from each 👇

Bloomberg Festival: Ted Talk by Gaya Herrington

“Our choice is not whether to keep growing or not. But whether the end of growth is coming by design or disaster. Either we choose limits or have them forced upon us.”

Harvard Business Review: In Defense of Degrowth

“The core of the degrowth argument is the historical fact that economic growth and emissions are inexorably connected (…) To be realistic about the fundamental challenges of growth, we must adjust our cultural assumptions and reconfigure unsustainable business models.”

UN Rapporteur, Olivier De Schutter: Eradicating poverty beyond growth

“The transition to a post-growth development trajectory, focused on the realization of human rights rather than on an increase in the aggregate levels of production and consumption, should be explicitly mentioned in A Pact for the Future”.

New York Times: Shrink the Economy, Save the World?

“Less than two decades ago, an economist like Herman Daly, who argued for a “steady-state economy,” was such an outlier that his fellow economist Benjamin Friedman could declare that “practically nobody opposes economic growth per se.” Yet today there is a burgeoning “post-growth” and “degrowth” movement doing exactly that — in journals, on podcasts, at conferences.”

Ernst & Young: A new economy

“Seemingly organized under many different frameworks (e.g., Doughnut Economics, Beyond GDP, ecological economics, degrowth and regenerative economics), these concepts share the common vision of an economy founded on human and planetary flourishing. We suggest they also point to five guiding principles foundational to accelerating the transition toward this goal.”

BBC: Less is more: Can Degrowth Save The World? by Alvaro Alvarez Ricciardelli

“A group of academics and activists are questioning the possibility of endless economic growth on a finite planet. They instead advocate for a bold solution: degrowth.”

And, if you want to understand what this shift means for businesses, I just launched a beginner’s guide on it. It’s called Post Growth Business 101. 📌 Get it here: https://lnkd.in/ePFW-j5a

Final Comment

Degrowth is the final solution against modernity. It is an anti-human philosophy of stagnation and decline based on the belief that there are too many people. Remember Paul Ehrlich?

Degrowth is a fringe movement within Deep Ecology. It sanctions deindustrialization and thus welcomes high energy prices and energy rationing, even blackouts.

Degrowth is about government authoritarianism overriding the natural human impulse to improve. It lurks in high places and must be exposed for what it is. Marcus Feldthus of the Copenhagen Business School needs to reeducate himself about ends and means to at least be able to inform his students about the happy side of life and living.