Is Degrowth Compatible With Progress?
The narrative of progress is central to most of the human histories we are told. Sure, there are wars, famines and droughts along the way, but overall, humanity’s lot has improved. This is evidenced by the growth in our numbers, and the reduction in deaths from hunger and communicable diseases. Our innovative technologies have, in the grand scheme of things, granted us more years of life and reduced the toll of hard physical labour for humanity. We have devices that provide instant entertainment, and aeroplanes that allow us – and the goods we desire – to travel to almost anywhere in the world. Our potential for choice and personal fulfilment is greater than it has ever been. At the dawn of humanity, every community had to meet all their own needs, meaning that every person was obliged to join in the tiring and repetitive work of securing food, water and shelter. Even just a few hundred years ago, one’s life and work (whether paid or not) was largely determined by the situation you were born into. These days, we can decide what we want to learn, what jobs we’d like to do, which people to form relationships with, where to live and what food to eat.
This is surely progress!
As an aside, it’s worth remembering that all this progress has been made possible in large part thanks to the incremental replacement of human labour by mechanised forms of production, fuelled by coal, oil and gas, and, more recently, by digital technologies.
And yet, despite all this progress, choice and technology, we are more anxious, more depressed, and more prone to non-communicable diseases. The world around us is a far more dangerous place, with species-level existential threats from climate change, biodiversity loss and nuclear weapons to name but a few.
The choices we have in how we live our lives are rather hollow on closer inspection. We have to get a job to pay the bills. Either that or we risk homelessness and hunger. We can’t opt out of the economic system we’ve been socialised into. Most of the jobs we can choose between do not bring us meaning or fulfilment. Rather, they make us feel like cogs in a machine. For a large proportion of humanity, life does not feel like it is getting better, and the future is frightening. The gap between the very richest and the very poorest continues to grow.
We are told by our politicians that what we need to resolve all this is more economic growth. That is how we will get back onto the path of progress. And yet it is precisely economic growth that got us here. As Henry Ford noted, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model gives us a better way forward. Instead of seeing growth as an end in and of itself, Raworth makes it clear that we need to think about the purpose of the economy, which is to meet everyone’s needs with the resources of the planet, whilst also stewarding the planet to ensure that future people’s needs can be met. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not an appropriate tool to measure progress towards the doughnut goal.
Raworth says we should be growth agnostic. I would go further. I feel we have to degrow overall if we are to reduce our demands on planet earth and steward it for the future. We have not yet managed to decouple market economy activity from environmental damage. Our efforts to decarbonise are still failing, with fossil fuel use still increasing year on year despite the development of renewable energy technologies. Even if we imagine the carbon problem being solved, the extraction of minerals from the earth and the pollution from ‘forever’ chemicals are still damaging the planet for future generations.
The real question is, how can we achieve degrowth? Can we realistically expect powerful business leaders to suddenly not want to increase their market share and profits? Of course not. Could the United Nations insist on global cooperation and the redistribution of goods and resources from richer nations to poorer ones? No. The USA and most other developed nations are, on the contrary, fixated on protecting their resources and increasing their share of the global pie. The predominant political messaging is based on scarcity, fear and othering those who are not part of our tribe.
Meanwhile, even if we got the big multinational corporates to opt out of growth, and convinced governments that they should stop trying to increase GDP, it is a fact that the current market system does not function properly without growth. In this economic system, degrowth basically means recession, and recession means fewer jobs and increased poverty. It means less money from taxation to fund schools and hospitals. In short, degrowth within a market economy makes Raworth’s doughnut goal unachievable.
To summarise, we need to reduce our demands on planet earth and become better at meeting everyone’s needs equitably. We need to address the spiritual damage resulting from our industrialised economy and encourage people to aspire to a different sort of progress – progress towards a doughnut economy, not just an endless supply of new gadgets and luxuries. And importantly, we can’t expect corporates or governments to lead the way.
The economic results we see around us – the deforestation, the rising carbon dioxide levels, the microplastics in our air and water – are the emergent result of all of our day-to-day choices as pawns in the current economic system. The only way to degrow the economy is for us all to change our economic behaviour. We need to start the degrowth at a personal level, and meet as many of our needs as possible outside of the market economy.
What might this mean for us as individuals? It might mean lots of things, depending on where we are starting from. It might mean cooking our own food from local raw ingredients, and relying less on manufactured food. It might mean mending our clothes and equipment, to reduce the need to purchase new things, and buying second hand whenever possible. It might mean sharing our skills and equipment with friends and neighbours. It might mean collaborating to meet the needs of our younger and older relatives within our families and communities. It might mean taking holidays closer to home instead of being tempted by a long-haul flight to somewhere exotic. It might mean giving up some subscriptions to the media platforms that we rely on to distract us (and that normalise our current economic system, encouraging us to not challenge the status quo).
If we can reduce our reliance on money, we can in turn reduce our need to earn it, and this is especially important if we find ourselves doing jobs that just add to GDP without furthering the goal of a doughnut economy.
At a community level, we need to experiment with non-market ways of delivering local services. “The Dawn of Everything” (by David Graeber and David Wengrow) provides numerous examples of different socio-economic systems that humanity has created in the course of our history. We need to experiment, to develop small projects based on cooperation, collaboration and commoning, avoiding the competitive and extractive imperatives of the market approach. These projects can then serve as stepping stones towards a better economic system, creating alternative solutions that more people can move towards. This work is already happening in many communities, such as Stroud and Frome.
Ultimately, this bottom-up approach can help us to develop a new form of governance for planet earth, namely one that is not based on powerful (i.e. financially wealthy) people deciding what resources to use and what things to make, with no responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.
This is the difficult path of transformative adaptation, starting from the reality of where we are, individually, and charting a new course from today. This is the important work we all need to be doing now in any ways that we can. There is no utopian solution that ‘the powers that be’ will provide, no matter how much we vote, demonstrate or sign petitions. There is just the sum total of our collective action, which, if we are brave and careful, might just result in the emergence of real progress.
Diana Finch, January 2025
Author of Value Beyond Money, An Exploration of The Bristol Pound and The Building Blocks for An Alternative Economic System.
About the Author:
Diana’s background is in charity leadership and financial management. In 2018 she joined the Bristol Pound as managing director. Whilst the currency itself was already in decline at that point, Diana spent the next four years in post designing economic interventions that chart a course for the future of alternative currencies. Her book, Value Beyond Money, seeks to bring alternative economic thinking to a mainstream audience.
