Degrowth economics is not optional. It will be forced on humans whether we like it or not. It is not a case of "growth based economics must end for the sake of the planet" but "a society premised on growth based economics cannot be sustained and will eventually collapse". The academics involved in this area are not willing to admit this, for political reasons. Instead, they argue that the transition to degrowth economics must be controlled -- it must be planned and agreed internationally, to preserve the "wellbeing" of the poor.
This paper demonstrates the problem perfectly: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 8718300715
In other words, the authors are saying that we all need to get together -- all 8 billion of us, with our different cultures, religions, systems of government, available resources, position on the planet, etc... -- and agree how to make degrowth fair. In individual countries, the rich and poor need to agree how to do this, and then all the rich countries would need to agree with the poor countries on a way to allow the poor countries to "catch up" while the rich countries slow down.Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing
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In other words, degrowth societies would be societies that are organised according to fundamentally different cultural, social, economic, political and technological principles as the ones that are dominant at the moment, organised around the growth ideology.
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In the last section of the second part of the paper we propose that the establishment of regular deliberative forums that discuss universal needs satisfaction could be one (small and first) step to address this. This could be organised according to a “dual strategy” as proposed by needs theorists (Doyal & Gough, 1991), combining input to consensual decision-making by experts and citizens. We argue that it would be important to add other ‘dual’ elements here to make these deliberative forums fit for debating universal needs satisfaction under degrowth (and for considering the underlying cultural principles on which this will be based): these forums would need to establish a dialogue between people from rich and poor countries, as well as between ‘representatives’ of current and future generations. The dialogue between rich and poor people globally is necessary because of their different relations to degrowth – the incomes and material living standards of groups across the world whose basic needs are not currently being met would need to be allowed to rise in the future until their basic needs are satisfied whilst those of the rich will need to decline rapidly. At a country level, degrowth trajectories will need to vary in rich versus poorer countries....
This is pure, unadulterated fantasy on the scale of the New Seekers' "I'd like to teach the world to sing." It cannot happen. Human societies simply do not work like that -- they never have done, at any time in any place, and they never will do either. We can safely say, with 100% certainty, that the transition from growth-based economic to degrowth economics is not going to happen like that. So there is our answer -- we have made no progress towards degrowth economics because the academics working in this field inhabit a politically-motivated fantasy world. Ultimately it requires the World Economic Forum to start behaving like a Global Communist Party. The probability of this happening is precisely nil.
The truth that they are point blank refusing to admit is this: the actual transition to degrowth economics is going to be neither voluntary nor nice. The reality is going to be chaotic, competitive, and on a global scale there are going to be a lot of losers. That is...there is simply no way that any country (ie sovereign entity) is going to prioritise the wellbeing of people in other countries over the wellbeing of people in their own, especially given that this rebalancing between rich and poor is going to have to take place internally in the rich countries too.
We therefore have a stalemate between a majority who are in denial about the need for degrowth economics at all, and a minority who are in denial about the nature of the transition to degrowth economics. In effect this is two competing visions of the future, both of which are 100% guaranteed to be wrong.
The only way to break the stalemate is to admit both of them are wrong -- that
(1) A transition to degrowth economics is coming whether we like it or not.
and
(2) Nobody is going to like it.
The transition will not begin with a global debate about wellbeing. It will begin with a debate about survival, which will take place primarily at the level of sovereign states, simply because that is where the real power lies. And in each sovereign state it will be different. How it plays out in the US and how it plays out in the EU are likely to be significantly different, at those are two different parts of the western world. In other parts of the world it will be even more differently.
This is not to say that the rich are guaranteed to win. History tells us that though the rich go through long periods of getting things the way the like, at times of crisis they can become the biggest losers. What is guaranteed is that in those places where there is a rebalancing of wealth and power away from the rich and towards a fairer society, the winners in that process (which may well require civil war / revolution of some sort) are not then going to voluntarily give up all their economic gains domestically in order to make the global system fairer. People who fight for their own survival (or to maintain their standards of wellbeing) do not then voluntarily give up those gains in order to help people in other countries. They won't do this even if those other countries are themselves heading in the right direction, and they certainly won't do it if, as seems more likely, those other countries are still heading in the wrong direction. Even if you could convince them of the ethical argument to do so, there's a practical argument against it (ie it is pointless to help those countries, because that just sustains the unsustainable a bit longer).