Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? 

As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really, and 2) we can also solve climate change without that, and that will be better for everyone — especially those who are already poor — so we should do that instead.

But this idea has stuck around in the form of the “degrowth” movement, which argues that “economic growth” as an objective inevitably leads to environmental destruction and that we should focus away from economic growth and toward ways to improve quality of life without it.

Degrowth has always been a bit of a moving target. Even mainstream economists will agree that GDP alone doesn’t measure whether a life is meaningful and fulfilling, but they will also point out that as countries get richer, they also get healthier and happier. Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability? 

I think a lot of people find something appealing about the rhetoric of degrowthism: anti-consumerism, a simpler life, local food, etc. But widespread adoption of all of those things would do approximately nothing about climate change or the other environmental issues the movement cares so much about. 

And while degrowth positions itself as a policy platform, it’s political poison. As soon as you start getting into details, it’s hard to come up with anything that polls worse than a steadily shrinking economy and the end of the conveniences of modern life. That makes it a policy agenda without any proposals about how it would become a law, an agenda that would sink any politician who attached themselves to it. (Not that you’re likely to find one.) 

All of this combines to make the degrowth literature — which has by this point become an enormous body of work — frustrating. Degrowthers understandably expect people who want to criticize their movement to engage with its literature. One of the most frequent responses to criticism is that the critics have engaged with only a tiny fraction of the degrowth literature out there. That’s true, but at the same time, no one can seriously engage with hundreds of papers.

But the fact that there’s so much written about degrowth doesn’t mean there’s good answers hidden somewhere in the pile of papers. I’ve increasingly gotten the sense that the movement’s contributors are effectively in an academic echo chamber, publishing papers that only they read and that don’t address any of the reservations of their critics. 

A new fiercely critical review of the degrowth literature, published in the journal Ecological Economics, sums up everything that’s gone wrong. But it also offers the degrowth community the serious critical engagement it will need if it wants to move from idle speculation to a workable policy program.

What’s wrong with the degrowth literature?

The authors analyzed 561 papers about degrowth in an effort to describe where the field is at today. What they uncovered was profoundly discouraging. 

Their major takeaways: Of the 561 studies, “the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis … most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies … Data analysis is often superficial and incomplete … studies tend to not satisfy accepted standards for good research.”

It’s rare to see a critique this stark of an entire field’s academic literature in a respected journal that is itself within that field (Ecological Economics publishes papers on degrowth). And, to be clear, these are some extremely damning critiques. They paint a picture of a field that’s unserious about the actual standards of academic work, one flooded with papers (many of them in reasonably respected journals) but conducted totally without reference to everything we actually know about how climate, development, and policy work. 

Reading this review, one comes away with the impression that the degrowth literature is fundamentally unserious. The authors of the review say, “[O]ne is inclined to infer that degrowth cannot (yet) be considered as a significant field of academic research.”

The review describes paper after paper with meaninglessly tiny sample sizes: sociological interviews with 10 volunteers who make handicrafts for a charity in a town in Germany, 12 interviews with residents of a town near Barcelona about tourism, eight interviews with environmental justice leaders in Croatia. Even a healthy field will have the occasional paper with a tiny sample size or that’s methodologically shaky, but the popularity of these tiny sample-size qualitative interview-based studies is typical of a field in its infancy that hasn’t yet nailed down its core questions or methodologies. 

Degrowthism isn’t ready

All of this is a significant problem. If a policy proposal is intended to solve a problem like climate change, it needs to be put into effect worldwide within the next decade or two. That’s not the stage of policy maturity where you publish lots of interviews with volunteers at NGOs; it’s the stage of policy maturity where you are expected to have (and where the mainstream climate policy literature does have) specific by-country emissions targets, breakdowns of possible routes for that country’s energy demand to be met while those emissions targets are met, and analyses of the trajectory so far. 

You might expect that the field would have these struggles as it was new but would have higher-quality research as it matured. That does not appear to be the case with degrowthism, which has its origins as far back as the 1972 report “The Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome. As the review authors concluded: “There is also no indication that things are improving with time.” Recent work is just as far from meeting scientific standards as older work. 

None of this surprised me as someone who has tried in the past to wade through the degrowth literature for my reporting. But I am glad the review was comprehensively written up and published in a journal that people who believe in degrowth actually read. 

If you think that our world needs degrowth, then the horrendously poor quality of the degrowth literature isn’t just annoying, it’s a serious emergency. 

The more important a problem is, the more important it is to do high-quality, comprehensive, well-justified work on it. If degrowth ideas have something to offer the world, it’s all the more important that they adhere to normal standards about how to do research.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!