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The growth question earns a place among the top ten shifts for After Capitalism. Let’s start with the bad news. Growth is practically sacrosanct. We are taking on a fundamental myth-metaphor of human existence. Myth-metaphors don’t change easily and only with great difficulty. To challenge a myth-metaphor is to invite scorn, questioning looks, and whispers about one’s intelligence or sanity.
The growth argument goes something like:
The growth story falls down in two major ways:
- Research shows that after a relatively low level of income, more money does not lead to more happiness.
- The narrative does not account for growth’s consequences: climate change, resource overshoot, and gross inequality (inherent to capitalism).
Now for the good news. There is an opening here. A small one that we are going to need to do some work on. In short, degrowth! Since I started this research it has come from the far fringes to the edges, but is still a long way from the mainstream. Just last month we talked about post-growth finance. I’m working on reviews of two best-sellers on Degrowth: Jason Hickel’s Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. I started the research agnostic on growth. The journey looked something like this:
- Perhaps sustainable growth could work? Well, no, let go of that one pretty quick.
- Surely, steady-state would be okay? I held on to that one longer, but eventually came to the conclusion it’s not enough.
- Finally, I got to degrowth as necessary to preserve the planet and getting us away from the pernicious consumption lifestyle that is leaving us increasingly empty.
A second piece of good news is that stated rates of growth are often used to prop up the current system and are very likely lower than suggested. In other words, degrowth is already happening and may not be as big an adjustment as we might first think.
The Imagining After Capitalism analysis found that degrowth is the most sensible path forward. It is not going to be easy, but it is not impossible. – Andy Hines
these two issues do not integrate well…
1. Research shows that after a relatively low level of income, more money does not lead to more happiness
2. It does not account for the consequences of growth: climate change, resource overshoot, and gross inequality (inherent to capitalism)
………………………….
the first is a micro observation and relates to individuals. and income is not the same as wealth. wasn’t this finding related to “motivation”? did it get twisted into “happiness”?
the second is a macro correlation made up by environmentalists and leftists.
> climate change is impacted by a lot of forces. co2 driven by humans is just one factor, and scientists are still discovering major flaws in their models…
> gross inequality has occurred in every economic system including communism, socialism, fascism, and capitalism. capitalism is the system that has done the most good for civilization – by far. why are you falling for the marxist tripe? why you hating on capitalism?
> why is wealth disparity “gross”? that really does sound marxist. if human lifestyle is better than in any generation prior, why does the disparity matter? are you falling for the “rich” controlling governing tripe? how is that new? isn’t what monarchs did for millennia? isn’t that what stalin, mao, and castro did?
> is lifestyle for humanity better than any generation prior to ours? you tell me:
– women are more educated than ever
– poverty is the lowest level ever
– starvation is the lowest level ever
– travel is unprecedented
– mass information is more available than ever
– health care is better than ever and more accessible than ever
– women have more influence in leadership than ever
– women have more rights than ever
– homosexuals have more rights than ever
– racism is the least pervasive in decades, maybe ever
– democratic style government is more prevalent than ever
yeah, capitalism is sure gross… NOT