Degrowth

The position that Economic Growth — measured in GDP or resource throughput — should be deliberately reduced to bring human activity within ecological limits, with the goal of reducing consumption, production and waste without lowering quality of life.

The definitional dispute. Noah Smith (in It’s Hard to Express How… (tweet)) criticizes degrowth economist Herman Daly’s 2022 NYT interview: Daly claims GDP growth is unsustainable, but when asked why we can’t have growth that reduces resource use, Daly redefines such growth as “development” rather than “growth” — directly contradicting his own premise and showing confusion about what GDP actually measures. In modern GDP accounting, output can rise while resource use falls, and this has already been happening in rich countries.

Degrowth as an argument for real sharing. Sam Bliss (Grist, 2015) argues in The Sharing Economy Is Bullsh!t. Here’s How We Can Take It Back that the so-called Sharing Economy (Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit) is “share-washing” — rental brokering dressed up in sharing language — while real sharing means people collectively creating something and splitting the results equitably. He defines a real sharing entity as one “driven by sharing resources, knowledge and decisions rather than shareholder profit.” Real sharing is the practical road to degrowth: it lets people consume less without a worse life, and possibly a better one through stronger community ties. He likes the word “degrowth” partly because it is hard for corporations to co-opt — companies are “mostly forced to grow or die.”

Where this appears

• It’s Hard to Express How… (tweet)
• The Sharing Economy Is Bullsh!t. Here’s How We Can Take It Back