One radical approach that entails a shift beyond capitalism is the so-called “degrowth theories”. Degrowth is defined as “an equitable downscaling of throughput (that is, energy and resource flows through an economy, strongly coupled to GDP) with a concomitant securing of well-being” to ultimately lead to a downscaled, socially just and ecologically balanced, steadystate economic system.
It would be an economy structured to balance growth with environmental integrity not only through efficient use of natural resources but also through fair distribution of the wealth generated from use of those resources. In a steady-state economy, success is measured by stability of the GDP rather than by its growth.
Even Adam Smith believed that sooner or later, any national economy has to settle down in a stationary equilibrium state where the GDP may not grow with time. Whereas classical economists did not believe in government intervention to bring in the steady state equilibrium, the American economist Herman Daly, who promoted the concept of steady state economy in the 1970s, recommended immediate governmental action to establish the steady-state economy by imposing permanent government restrictions on all resource use. A steady state economy is not a stagnating economy, but an economy that does not grow and is yet stable.
No nation has as yet achieved this state. Degrowth does not equate ‘development’ with economic expansion, but believes that within the prevailing capitalist system, decoupling between economic growth and social wellbeing is not possible, and the democratic state must play a significant role in this transition in changing economic structures while putting limits on resources and lifestyles of people while reforming institutions to increase social control over economic actions. GDP will automatically reduce as a consequence of these changes which will “imply a shift beyond capitalism by “preventing capital accumulation through dis-economics of scale and collective firm ownership, and thus require radical social change.” While the GDP has increased in almost all countries over the years, the desirability and wisdom of more consumption that drives higher GDP are increasingly being questioned.
As Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist, wrote, “The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we damage the environment. There is no way to both have your cake and eat it here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.”
The problem with all these “alternative strategies” is that none of them offers a convincing strategy of containing the unintended consequences of low growth: “If growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy, democracy too would have to be abandoned”, as the Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman wrote. “The costs of deliberate non-growth, in terms of the political and social transformation that would be required in society, are astronomical.” He argued that a continuous rise in living standards is the key to avoiding social conflict, the absence of which would pit the losers, the poor, against the rich.
The recent rise in political polarisation seen in many Western countries accompanied by slower growth testifies to the validity of his arguments. Indeed, the ability of governments to extend welfare benefits like healthcare, education, etc., is not possible without economic growth and higher tax revenues. It is thanks to economic growth that China and India had lifted millions out of extreme poverty by integrating into the global capitalist economy and supplying low-cost goods and services to the developed countries.
If, as the degrowth theorists demand, major industrialised economies were to cut back on consumption, the developing Asian countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Vietnam, or African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana or Rwanda, which have seen rapid rise in their GDPs in recent years, will inevitably fall back into the poverty trap they had successfully defeated. It is impossible to reconcile these two contradicting positions unless we do something like what Monbiot suggests, “There is a poverty line below which no one should fall, and a wealth line above which no one should rise.
We need wealth taxes, not carbon taxes.” The problem is that so long as we have surplus money, we will only be mega consumers rather than mindful citizens, and we will keep stealing from future generations, just as the colonial empires looted from our past. The evil colonial empire of the British Raj looted from India wealth estimated at $45 trillion at current prices, to “fund industrialisation at home and the colonisation of other nations, whose wealth was then looted in turn”, as Monibot says.
“Such theft from the future is the motor of economic growth.” Without breaking the cycle of wealth, the spiral of accumulation cannot be broken. Further, looters and thieves of the past must bear a much higher responsibility towards the future, and must bear the cost of sustainable growth in poorer countries that they had earlier looted. There has to be a cycle of accountability. The new economic model has to be one “that allows the human population as a whole to thrive without having to rely on ultimately impossible endless increases in consumption”. However, with most governments across the world, just as with all major economic fora like G-7, G20 or BRICS, the word “sustainability” is used more for optics than for real action, because equating social good with no growth isn’t an acceptable proposition. Decoupling still remains an idea whose time has not yet come.
But as the American author Edward Abbey wrote, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. It calls for a painful chemotherapy of low growth or no growth. The chemotherapy requires a change in our collective attitude. As another American author James Kunstler said, people need to stop thinking of themselves as consumers, because consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities or duties to their fellow humans. In that light, advertising for consumer products is akin to intellectual pollution. It was thought that the Fourth Industrial Revolution, brought in through a convergence of cutting-edge technologies, could enable decoupling through exponential efficiency gains.
However, even though technology has been a driver of social transformation, it has so far only led to more inequality while remaining strongly coupled with increasing use of energy and materials. Further, as Quinn Slobodian showed in Crack-Up Capitalism, faster economic growth tends to curtail democratic freedom. Absolute economic freedom often comes by limiting the welfare state that is an imperative of democracy ~ any democratically elected government would be forced to spend on health, education, housing and welfare for the poor, but which a hardcore capitalist would consider a constraint upon economic growth.
As experiences in territories like Hong Kong or Dubai show, capitalism flourished best where the state is almost absent ~ in zones of exception where there are minimal taxes, no regulation or cap on corporate profits, no laws to prevent the exploitation of labour, and where investors are free to do whatever they like with their profits. These rule-free zones ~ the so-called innovation hubs ~ currently number over 5,400 around the world. “Capitalism works by punching holes in the nation-state,” writes Slobodian, so that the “the lineaments of a future society without a state come into definition.” It seems democracy and capitalism no longer go together. We have so far believed that democracy gives people freedom of choice, an essential prerequisite for economic activities to flourish. The question is ~ if this is the true face of neoliberal capitalism, would we want to look at it? Should we not think instead how a possible transition to reduced consumption, reduced production and reduced profit can be made compatible with social security and stability while fulfilling the basic human needs that modern living demands?
Unfortunately, not enough debates have generated yet on these options. Perhaps more time is needed to think through these issues, of which there is a critical shortage due to the overwhelming intrusion of TV and social media in our lives which prompted Clay Shirky to coin the term “cognitive surplus”: 200 billion hours of TV are watched in the US each year and 100 million hours are spent just watching adverts every weekend.
If this wasted time ~ the cognitive surplus ~ can be utilised for thinking creatively rather than consumptively, there could be a “creative awakening” to transform us from being consumers to becoming producers and sharers of knowledge and creative ideas. Rethinking economic growth will thus require redefining our concept of growth itself, bringing in a paradigm shift from the quantity of goods consumed to quality of life experienced.
Quality must be brought into GDP measurement and governments have to replace the current measurement of GDP based on quantity with one based on quality, for which some measures already exist and can be refined through universal consensus. Even Keynes who believed in the power of capitalism to improve human lives through growth but wanted governments to intervene prophesied that once human’s basic economic needs of people were fulfilled, they would naturally gravitate towards non-economic pursuits ~ a prophecy that shows no sign of fulfilment even after a century.
But it is now apparent that this planet cannot afford unlimited growth of consumption by nations, but that need not restrain the growth of human’s existential values that impart a purpose and meaning to human life. There is no limit to the beauty, love, kindness and empathy one can experience and invoke in others ~ without these, human lives would lose their meaning, and none of which can come from consumption. It is not an impossible, Utopian idea. As Pearl Buck had said, “All things are possible until they are proved impossible.”
(The writer is a commentator, author and academic. Opinions expressed are personal)