There’s long been one mantra in mainstream economics: Growth is good.
Gross domestic product — the monetary value of a country’s goods and services — is used to measure the economic health of a country or region, and a line that slants upward and to the right is typically what national leaders want to see.
But recently, an alternative term has begun taking root in popular culture and policy: “degrowth.”
Degrowth challenges the capitalist pursuit of growth at all costs and “focuses on what is necessary to fulfill everyone’s basic needs,” said Kohei Saito, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and author of “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” The idea, he noted, applies mostly to the Global North, where production and consumption have come to exceed basic needs in ways that harm the environment. Societies should be striving to create “a different kind of abundance,” he says, offering free education, medical care and transportation instead of continuously making more goods for consumption.
How it’s pronounced
/dĭ-grōth/
If it sounds sort of Marxist that’s because it is. But Mr. Saito’s book was a hit in Japan after its release in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic and seasons of extreme weather seemed to lend credence to the professor’s points. And the English translation of his book, released this year, has been widely reviewed (if not always favorably). In recent years, “degrowth” has come up in science, environmental, law and economics journals and in a slew of mainstream publications, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC and the Guardian. And there are numerous degrowth websites, books, documentaries, chat forums, conferences and journals.
Mr. Saito believes part of the reason degrowth has had increasing appeal is because “younger generations are not enjoying the fruits of economic growth” and are suffering from stagnating wages, unstable employment, rising rents and climate change.
The idea is not entirely new. The first documented use of degrowth in the economic and ecological context was in 1972, when the French social philosopher André Gorz asked whether production should be scaled back for environmental balance. He used the French term, “décroissance.”
It took off only in the new millennium, shifting from academic circles to the mainstream as people became more concerned about consumption’s toll on the environment, said Tilman Hartley, a researcher at the University of Cologne who studies how societies deal with resource constraints. He noted that some people now talk about “post-growth,” and last year, members of the European Parliament held a conference called “Beyond Growth.”
Whatever the name, the underlying concept is likely to gain acceptance, degrowth proponents say. “It’s almost certain that growth will come to an end in the future,” Mr. Hartley said. “The idea is to plan for it.”
But the movement has its critics. Christopher Lingle and Emile Phaneuf III, economics researchers at the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian nonprofit, argued in December that degrowth “will necessarily involve a reduction in human liberty and a diminution of human flourishing” (the italics are theirs).
The argument for degrowth, they say, ignores a resource that is infinite and has driven prosperity for ages: human ingenuity.
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