This autumn, Green House will be publishing its first book, on ‘The post-growth project’. This article is designed to explain why.
Introduction
Everyone agrees that we are in the midst of a massive financial and political-economic crisis. We have suffered the biggest ‘crash’ since the 1930s, and, far from it having clipped the wings of the financial elites who caused it, it has, incredibly, enriched them even further, at the cost of the rest of us.
How should this on-going crisis be understood and resolved? In the mainstream view, we have vast government deficits, and stagnant economies. We need economic growth – and we also need, according to neoliberals of all stripes, ‘austerity’, bringing with it massive cuts in public services. … But what if this diagnosis is all wrong? What if the crisis that we are currently experiencing is one which casts into doubt the entire edifice of capitalist economics, including growth as the primary objective of all policy? What if the fight between those who say that without austerity first there can be no growth and those who say that we must invest and borrow more now in order to resume growth is a false dichotomy (because both sides are assuming ‘growthism’ as an unquestioned dogma)? What if the vast government debt-mountains are in any case actually not as vast as we have been told they are, once (for instance) we establish which parts of them are ‘odious’ (as countries of the global South have found) and thus should not need to be repaid? What if there is a way of coping with these deficits without having to ‘grow’ the economy more? What if metaphors such as calling an economy whose size is not growing relative to the ecosystem ‘stagnant’ are part of the problem rather than of the solution? What if the hegemonic assumption that we need to return the economy to a state of growth is wrong? What if further growth that is economic (as opposed to uneconomic) is impossible, or undesirable, or both?
What is growth for, now, anyway? Do we really still need it? (N.B. the “we” here is in the first instance people in countries like the UK. Our post-growth project is primarily oriented toward Britain and countries in broadly similar positions. Our project allows for – would in fact make more room (in terms of ‘emissions space’, etc.) for – material progress in the lives of poor people in ‘developing’ countries.) Is economic growth now anything other than the production of more tat that we don’t need and don’t even really want, through overly hard work, and at the cost of despoiling our shared planetary home beyond repair? Is ever more economic activity a good thing at all, in a world where what is scarce, increasingly, is nature, and time, and peace and quiet?
These ‘what-if’s already tacitly indicate what we believe. Green House’s post-growth project is designed to show that an alternative to the false dichotomy, the false objectives of growth and austerity, is necessary, possible and desirable.
Why a Post-Growth project?
Our first task is to show that it is necessary for ours to become a post-growth economy. This task comes first, seemingly paradoxically, before even showing that it is possible, because there are still too many people (especially in positions of economic and political influence) who don’t understand why there is a need in the first place to seek for such a new economy. The simple answer is that we are hitting planetary boundaries, and hitting them fast – and that it is economic growth that is the chief driver of this process. Unless we change course very soon, it will probably be too late to prevent our planetary ecosystem from going into irreversible decline. And that would certainly mean irreversible decline for the human race. See here for more details.
Under this first head, Green House’s main task (building on what has already been accomplished, by the Club of Rome (Meadows, Randers and Meadows, 2005) by the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment (MEA, 2005) and others) is to rehearse the link between economic growth and ecological impact, and to point up the absurdity of the rhetorical appeal for ‘green growth’. We are also concerned to show how, when we take the energy and resource demands of infrastructure and design seriously, there is in any case no quick ‘green industrial’ route to a genuine sustainability. And that the terrible risk of on-going growth-mania is that everything from the green belt and our forests to speed-limits and the ability of our very climate to provide an environment in which we can survive and flourish will be sacrificed on the altar of increasing the size of the economy (and concomitantly decreasing the size of our remaining intact ecosystems). This means ripping up our world, in order to feed it ever faster into the growth-machine.
Our second task is to show that it is possible to have an economy that one does not seek perpetually to ‘grow’, at the present time, in our world and in this country. This kind of ‘existence proof’ for a ‘steady-state’ economy is already partly available, in the great work of Herman Daly (1996), Tim Jackson (2011), and Peter Victor (2008). But there is some further work to be done. Work in economics, to show in more detail how it is possible (including in terms of what changes to our financial and industrial systems and our working lives will be necessary, if a ‘steady state’ economy is to be stably possible). There is work to be done to apply the macroeconomic framework that no-growth implies to the reality of UK macroeconomics in 2014. There is work to be done to show how you can provide public services that keep us safe and cared for, and keep control of the public debt, without economic growth. There is work (in ‘cultural politics’) to be done to show how a steady-state economy need not result in a society in a kind of stasis or in permanent retreat from values such as innovation, vibrancy, dynamism and pluralism. There is work to be done in the area of social psychology, to explore and transcend the link between identity and consumption. And there is work to be done in philosophy and linguistic psychology to start to affect a challenge to the intellectual hegemony of ‘growthism’, the creation of a new ‘post-growthist’ common sense.
This last piece of work demands a comprehensible, communicable sense of what a post-growth economy would be like. Our view is that this sense can begin with the term “a dynamically stable economy”, which makes clear that a so-called ‘steady state economy’ could and should and would be a positive, inspiring place, in which we could return the human race to the path towards a ‘good life’, and (in particular) in which the economy is continually in flux, with some sectors growing as others shrink. Natural systems are typified by dynamic change rather than the “steady state” which was the first suggestion for a new model for a sustainable economy. So we are seeking a dynamic, mutable economy, while respecting the crucial constraint that material throughput does not increase, and indeed, was designed rather to be deliberately built down over time to a long-term ‘sustainable’ level: one-planet living.
Our third task is to show that it is desirable to accept, embrace, plan for, and realise an end to growth as the primary objective, now. This is perhaps the central ambition of our project. For under this head, what we need to do is to make clear to people what it would actually be like to live in a post-growth, ecologically-sane Britain – and that it could, should and would involve a better life than we have at present. Not ‘progress’ in the debased sense that has equated it with more and more industrialism, less and less nature, less and less security, more and more things, degraded human relationships; but, rather, real progress. This third task builds on the second task by creating a vision of a post-growth society that is actually appealing, in terms of health, vibrant local communities, and continued long-distance communications (but within a context of putting into reverse the hyper-mobility of our time). This part of our work involves creating a sense of purpose in our taking care collectively of the future, a future which involves stronger relationships with each other, with the species we share the planet with, and with the natural world. What we are aiming for ultimately is nothing less than the revitalisation of human society, through enhanced relationships with each other and with the natural world, and a substitution of moral or spiritual values for the material obsessions of our time.
These tasks, we have sought to accomplish in our forthcoming book.
Changing the way we think about the economy
Overall, we are involved in a ‘deep reframing’ of the issues facing us as a people (and as a species). This deep reframing, this new visioning, aims to expel the growthist paradigm, by showing that it is neither possible nor desirable for us to continue to seek to inhabit it. To put the point more romantically: it shows how we can build a New Jerusalem together, in a greener and more pleasant land, a land that will last – so long as we give up the destructive delusion of a return to economic growth, the delusion of salvation via a crude materialism.
One of the deep re-definitions that will be accomplished, then, will be of ‘wealth’. We do not see a growthist society — which is obsessed with increasing flows of ‘goods’ (sic) rather than with maintaining stocks of what is genuinely good — as generating wealth, in its true sense, at all. We agree rather with Ruskin when he wrote in the fourth essay of his Unto This Last (Ruskin 1862/1985), “there is no wealth but life” and with his suggestion that industrial societies in fact produce more ‘illth’ than ‘wealth’. For this reason, we will be raising a question-mark even over the ideal of ‘sustainable development’ itself. Insofar as ‘sustainable development’ seeks to increase stocks of ‘man-made’ capital, which then need to be serviced, it is unclear that it helps maintain what we most need now: healthy, functioning ecosystems; and economic systems that to the maximum extent possible respect as well as genuinely mimic such ecosystems.
Moreover, ‘development’ all too often leads to increasing inequalities between people in society. This is not sustainable, in an era in which inequality has run out of control and is now posing a crucial question for democracy: who rules, the 99% or the 1%? One of the deepest harms done by the ideology of economic growth is its endless deferral of the quest for a more equal society. ‘A bigger pie for everyone’ has prevented us from thinking clearly about sharing a pie that can be sustainably produced, a pie of a fixed size, a pie that doesn’t mean less pie for future people. As Herman Daly (2011) has put it, “is not the solution to poverty to be found in sharing now, rather than in the empty promise of growth in the future?”
Summing up
Here is the simplest way to sum all of this up. The question is really one of quality versus quantity. The growthist status quo maintains that economic growth is always desirable, that those numbers need to keep going up. It assumes that more stuff, more economic activity, etc., is what we need. By contrast, we think that what matters is quality, not quantity. We want to show people the prospect of a better life. A life that is based on having fewer material possessions and less formal economic activity, but more well-being, more community, more security, and much more of what Ivan Illich (2001) rightly called ‘conviviality’. More real wealth.
So: we need to change the media/political culture, the commonsense that assumes that it is ‘bad news’ when the economy doesn’t grow, and to analyse what it is about the structure of our economic system that means growth must always be prioritised. We need to set out an attractive, attainable vision of what one country (and by extension our one world) would look like, once we deliberately give up growth-mania – and of how to get there. And we need to find ways of communicating this to people that make sense, and that motivate change.
These tasks we have set ourselves. This is our post-growth project. We invite you to join us in helping to make it happen. The prize could hardly be bigger: the possibility of undertaking a journey to a dynamically-stable economy where we feel at ease with each other and live in balance with our planet, an economy that will at last be compatible with nature, and productive at last of true human flourishing. An economy centred not around the vague and dangerous mirage of growth, but around generating real wealth, real progress.
If Compass is about the pluralistic creation of a genuine alternative to the defunct paradigms that have landed us in the current crisis, in these ‘New Times’, then our hope would be that Compass members and supporters will take seriously our post-growth project.