Degrowth: A Defence

Overview

About twenty pages, published in New Left Review in 2019, an essay by the political economists Michael Burton and Peter Somerville responding directly to criticism of degrowth economics from other writers on the political left, criticism that argued degrowth, the proposal that wealthy economies should deliberately reduce their physical throughput of energy and materials rather than continue pursuing GDP growth, amounted to a comfortable, largely aesthetic preference held by relatively privileged people in rich countries, one that, if actually implemented as policy, would mean imposing austerity and reduced material welfare on people, both within rich countries and in the developing world, who already have far too little.

The essay belongs to a broader and increasingly consequential debate within environmental and economic thought, between advocates of green growth, the position that economies can continue growing while sufficiently reducing their environmental impact through efficiency gains, renewable energy and technological innovation, and advocates of degrowth, who argue that continued growth in physical throughput is simply incompatible with remaining within planetary ecological limits, regardless of how efficiently that throughput is used, and that deliberate, planned contraction is therefore necessary rather than optional.

The argument

Answering the austerity charge directly. Burton and Somerville do not dismiss the criticism that degrowth risks becoming a program for austerity; they take it as the central challenge the essay needs to answer. Their response turns on a sharp distinction between degrowth, as they propose it, and recession, the kind of unplanned, disorderly economic contraction that occurs when an economy still organized around continuous growth suddenly fails to grow, throwing people out of work, collapsing tax revenue, and stripping away welfare provision precisely when people need it most, since the whole system’s institutions, employment, social insurance, public services, are built on the assumption of continued expansion and cope badly when that assumption fails.

Degrowth, by contrast, is presented as a deliberate, planned reduction in the material and energy throughput of already wealthy economies, one that would require restructuring, in advance and by design, how work, provision and welfare actually function, so that a shrinking material footprint does not automatically mean shrinking welfare for those who already have the least. The authors argue explicitly that a substantial portion of what a planned contraction would target is the excess consumption of the already affluent, luxury consumption, high-carbon lifestyles, resource-intensive production for markets that do not meet genuine human need, rather than the modest consumption of the poor, and that redistribution, not uniform reduction applied indiscriminately across every income level, is the actual mechanism they propose.

The weak evidence for decoupling. A significant portion of the essay’s argumentative weight rests on an empirical claim about green growth, the mainstream alternative to degrowth that has been adopted, in one form or another, by most governments and international institutions as the preferred path to addressing climate change while preserving continued economic growth. Green growth depends on what economists call decoupling, growing GDP while simultaneously reducing the material and energy throughput, and associated emissions, that production requires, achieved through efficiency improvements, renewable energy, and a shift toward less resource-intensive forms of economic activity.

Burton and Somerville review the available evidence for decoupling at the pace and scale that climate targets actually require, absolute decoupling, in which total material and energy use falls even as the economy grows, rather than merely relative decoupling, in which material use grows more slowly than GDP but continues rising in absolute terms, and argue that the evidence for the former, at anything close to the required speed, is thin to nonexistent. If this assessment is correct, green growth is not simply one option among several but may not actually be available as a genuine path to meeting climate targets at all, which sharpens considerably the stakes of the broader debate the essay is engaging in.

What a planned contraction would require. The essay sketches, in necessarily compressed form given its length, what a deliberate reduction in material and energy throughput would mean for the actual organization of work, provision and welfare: shorter working hours distributed more broadly across the population rather than concentrated unemployment for some and overwork for others, a shift toward providing genuine welfare and wellbeing through public services and collective provision rather than through ever-increasing private consumption, and political mechanisms for redistributing existing wealth so that reduced aggregate material throughput does not simply translate into reduced material welfare for those with the least to begin with.

Compatibility with rising living standards for the poorest. The essay’s central positive claim, and its direct answer to the charge that degrowth means austerity, is that a planned reduction in rich economies’ material throughput is not merely compatible with but could actively improve living standards for the poorest, both within wealthy countries and internationally, since a significant share of current material and energy throughput in rich economies serves the excess consumption of the already affluent rather than meeting genuine unmet need, and redistributing that capacity, rather than simply shrinking everyone’s consumption proportionally, is what the authors’ version of degrowth actually proposes.

How to read it

Read the essay as one contribution to an active, ongoing and genuinely unresolved debate rather than as a settled conclusion; the empirical questions it raises, above all whether meaningful absolute decoupling is achievable at the pace climate science requires, remain actively contested among economists and are worth checking against more recent data and analysis, since the essay itself is now several years old and empirical debates of this kind continue to develop.

Pay particular attention to the distinction between degrowth and recession, since this is the essay’s central conceptual move and the one most likely to be missed or elided by casual critics who treat any proposal for reduced material throughput as functionally equivalent to an economic downturn.

Notice how much the essay’s persuasiveness depends on the specific empirical claim about decoupling. If absolute decoupling at sufficient pace and scale turns out to be achievable after all, contrary to the authors’ assessment, much of the argument for degrowth as necessary, rather than merely one possible approach among others, would need to be reconsidered.

Consider the essay’s own political framing, addressed specifically to critics on the left who worry about degrowth’s implications for the poor, rather than to defenders of continued growth as such. This framing shapes what the essay spends its limited length arguing for and against, and reading it with that specific rhetorical target in mind clarifies some of its emphases.

Read this essay alongside broader debates in political economy about growth, distribution and planetary limits, including earlier critiques of growth-centered economics going back to the 1970s Limits to Growth debate, to see how the specific arguments here fit into a considerably longer history of dispute over whether continued economic expansion is compatible with ecological sustainability.

Questions it raises

• Is the distinction between planned degrowth and unplanned recession as clean in practice as the essay presents it, or would attempting to implement deliberate contraction risk producing effects similar to recession regardless of how carefully it is planned?
• How strong is the current empirical evidence for or against absolute decoupling at the pace and scale required by climate targets, and has that evidence shifted meaningfully since this essay was published?
• Is redistributing existing wealth and consumption capacity, rather than uniformly reducing throughput across all income levels, a politically achievable strategy, given how difficult redistribution has historically proven even without an accompanying demand for reduced aggregate material consumption?
• Does the essay adequately address the position of developing economies and poorer countries internationally, whose own material throughput may need to grow considerably to meet basic needs, even as rich economies are asked to contract?
• What political mechanisms would actually be capable of implementing the kind of deliberate, planned restructuring of work, provision and welfare the essay describes, given how difficult it has proven to coordinate far less ambitious economic policy changes?
• If green growth’s empirical prospects turn out to be better than the authors assess, does the political and economic case for degrowth specifically weaken, or does it rest on other grounds, ecological limits, questions of justice and distribution, that would remain regardless of decoupling’s technical feasibility?