Change Everything No 5: Growth versus flourishing sufficiency
The dead-eyed despair of the trapped, as seen from the streets of Paris
Decades of growing misery
Merry Christmas! In the Pompidou Centre, Gilles Aillaud’s overfed, despondent hippopotamus stares blankly at the iron gateway before it. Opened by an invisible human hand via greased pulleys, it allows the beast from one empty, arid concrete pen into another. As it has for 43 years. As it will for eternity.
Across the Boulevarde de Sebastopol is the “Flying Tiger, Copenhagen” shop, that surely would have caught Aillaud’s eye, although it was only just opening in Basingstoke in 2005, the year the artist (who specialised in animal portraits) died, and got to Paris in 2017. The name comes, however, not from wildlife but Danish slang for 10 kroner (roughly a pound, the price of the original stock). Some 1,000 replica stores are now to be found from London to Riyadh to Seoul.
Inside, I catch the eye of a plump, greying French bulldog, shuffling with its owner in a slow-moving, room-long queue. The shop window proclaims “Celebrons la magie de Noel ensemble” (Celebrate the magic of Christmas together). But the dog’s look matches that of the hippopotamus.
On the shelves there is the white box which says “Dumpap! Pinhead!” in large letters, the title of a game enclosed involving a man in a multicoloured plastic hat which is tied under his chin. The hat is dotted with velcro strips, at which foam balls are to be thrown. The look in the man’s eye matches that of the hippotamus and the dog.
Nearby are a stack of boxes of foil balloons, counting in 2024. The term is translated, in case of doubt, in 23 languages, including Catalan “globus metal-lizants” and Flemish “Folioilmapallot”. A diagram explains each number inflates to 53 cm in height. It does not say “single use only”. That is a given.
Next is a chocolate fondue set the size of a big coffee mug is to be powered by a tealight (not included). Soon to be seen in a charity shop near you. If they bother to put it on the shelf. (Charity shops in many areas of the UK report that 30 to 50 per cent of the donations they receive are unsaleable. This would surely be on the “maybe” list.)
In the UK in June household consumption amounted to 63 per cent of Gross Domestic Production. In France in 2022 it was only 53 per cent of GDP. That’s a lot of Flying Tiger stock. Despite the Covid pandemic, despite the climate emergency and nature crisis, our oceans being turned into a plastic soup and our soils trashed, the amount of “stuff” churning through Global North nations only keeps growing. There’s much talk now of “dematerialising” the economy, of the impact of Artificial Intelligence (although that of course is a massive user of energy, materials and water), but the volume of “stuff” is now three times what it was in the 1970s; the plastic industry planning for a doubling by 2050. Already it is producing 390 million metric tonnes a year.
Setting out the alternative: properous sufficiency
Dumpap! did not get a mention In May, in the grand, clean lines of the European parliament chamber, where the Beyond Growth conference, steered by the experienced hand of Green MEP Phillippe Lamberts, was gathered, with the backing, and to variable degrees participation, of five European political families. Only the Far Right European Conservatives and Reformists were absent.
But Dumpap! makes a case study for the argument that chasing gross domestic product (GDP) in the Global North as the be-all and end-all of government policy and media judgement has reached a state of absurdity. More Dumpap! in the world is only decreasing the state of human happiness, not to mention the plastic contributing to the smashing through the planetary boundary for “Novel Entities” (for short plastics, pharmaceuticals and pesticides) as part of our broader destruction of the environment on which our economy is completely reliant. That is true of almost every item in Flying Tiger, and most of the other stores around it.
The descent into destructive absurdity of our current late neoliberal capitalist system embodied in those stores was at the heart of the Beyond Growth conference, billed as “a turning point in the battle of ideas around post-growth”. In the main chamber of the parliament, as well as in the fancy committee rooms, with their multiple translator booths mostly peering blankly down. (This was a conference conducted overwhelming in fluent English, and occasionally economist-speak.)
It certainly felt like a breakthrough moment. I would wager at least one future Nobel prize for economics winner graced and enthused the parliament chamber, and/or one thinker destined to be called the Keynes of the 21st century. It is not hard to imagine in that role Timothee Parrique (favourite line - Most of us after the age of 20 or so are keen to stop growing; we have reached mature size and seek to improve our skills and knowledge, not get bigger.) Or Kate Raworth, of doughnut economics fame. It is rare now for me to find an audience that doesn’t immediately recognise that term. As a mainstream economics professor huffily complained to me: “all my first years have all read that book”. Or Jason Hickell, key explainer of the way in which the rich of the Global North are still feeding off “imperialist appropriation” of the Global South, and proponent of modern monetary theory to transition to a “post-growth, post-capitalist” economy. Or Julia K Steinberger, who gave a masterclass of the concept of social provisioning in Brussels.
This is a movement that tries to stay away from the rock star approach to politics, yet all of those speakers got thunderous support from the chamber floor, as did foremothers ecofeminist Vandan Shiva and and pioneering economist Ann Pettifor, and one of the global standout champions for the most oppressed, Olivia DeSchutter, UN Special Reporteur on Poverty and Human Rights. (Much hated by the Tory government for his reports on the state of the UK, that it is “in violation of international law” with its poverty levels.)
Popping up regularly was the broadly underlying frame of heterodox economics, “social provisioning” - the economy as a constructed system for meeting human needs within the limits of our biophysical framework, with wellbeing the desired goal and outcome. It choses, as Tae-Hee Jo puts it, reality over rigour, the understanding that at “all the economic activities are occurring in a social context - cultural values, class/power relations, norms, ideologies, and ecological system”. It is a sophisticated oil painting, where mainstream economics offer the mathematically proportioned stick figure of Homo economicus.
There was little sign – outside the Green Party politicians – that mainstream politics has really caught on to post-growth, however. It still seems stuck in 20th-century, and older, paradigms. And few of the speakers have senior positions in mainstream economics departments in top-ranked universities: the economic pluralism that so many students were calling for after the 2007-2008 crash has not developed outside a few small pockets. The original thinker Steve Keen – who I invited to Green Party conference back in 2017 because he at least was trying to grapple with how to deal with the unpayable levels of debt burdening the world – is one who has given up on the academic world altogether to use the crowd support of Patreon.
Unexpected green shoots
I dared to see some sign of a turnaround in December in a graph in that organ of 19th-century laissez-faire philosophy The Economist, produces. It ranks countries by GDP per person at market exchange rates, then by GDP per person adjusted for cost difference, than finally reaches the measure of “per working hour”. That sees the US slide down the ratings; Germany, Belgium and other European states leap upwards. They are just starting to get it. No one lies on their death bed and groans: “I wish I had spent more time in the office.”
And as the year wound down, that conclusion was only strengthened by small but significant media moments. A comment article in Nature, headed by Jason Hickel, “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help,” became that respected publication’s most read over the festive season, helped, as Hickel noted, by “a lot of tech bros and economists getting Very Upset”.
Joining the engagement, Foreign Policy ran an end-of-year article “The Relentless Growth of Degrowth Economics”. The subheading, “Europe’s push to abandon capitalism is motivated by optimism about politics—and pessimism about everything else” distanced the mainstream US journal from this strange “foreign” thinking, but identified an important aspect of the debate. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the Francis Fukuyama’s wildly discredited but scarcely replaced “end of history” thesis, there is another politics in town aside from “just manage the decline of late neoliberal capitalism”.
Steinberger reflected as the year ended:
“It was one of the most surprising things for me when I left physics for economics: you mean you guys didn't build non-growing economic models? None? Not just for fun or scientific curiosity? And you call yourselves a science?”
Longterm survival on the edge
Some of the Beyond Growth academic speakers, and a few of the participants, were also together in Zagreb in August, for a conference with a very different feel: the 9th International Degrowth Conference. In the Socialist-basic south of the city, whose centre (fast being restored with European money so it will soon look like Vienna), this was in a nut-and-bolts basic conference centre, the workshop partition walls decorated with colourful patchwork rugs made by a local collective. The grassroots movement that started as descroissance in France was also showing advances, although still not entirely sure if it wanted to be radical mainstream - Dark Matter Labs trying to design a degrowth city, and Hungarian ecological economist Alexandra Koves trying mapping out the “systems thinking” with which a bacteria makes a decision – or old counterculture.
In December, some of the cast from May gathered again in Brussels, for a recap and assessment evening, in a mood not exactly pessimistic, but certainly less buoyant that in the sunny skies of May. Economic orthodoxy still has an iron grip. Eloi Laurent, senior economist at the OFCE, speaks of the fight to embed postgrowth in European institutions, of “austerity versus sufficiency”, of the outbreak of anti-ecological populism. And asserts: “Poverty issues don’t come the cost of the ecological system, but from the cost of non-transition.” The struggle to create a EU Commission for future generations continues.
Philippe Lamberts: Political systems are some of the most conservative systems we have
The next day at a national level roundtable, I hear about Spain, where the Verdes Equo had not talked about growth in the election campaign, rather wellbeing and prosperity. And had done well. But then went into coalition with the Socialists. At which point “green growth” returned.
Of course there are many questions – technical, political and social – about the nature of a postgrowth economy. Marek Hudson, co-president of the Belgian High Committee for a Just Transition. asks “what is the social-ecological state’s economic system?” But I reflect as he speaks that the neoliberals did not set out their model, of how we would get to a late zombie neoliberal capitalism in which, as the Canadian academic Jennifer Clapp sets out so clearly in her work on the food system, the Big Six in each economic sector is gradually being merged and whittled down to Five, or Four. They applied their religion, “The Market” as God, “Trade” as the invocation, and we got what we have today, certainly not what was advertised on the tin in the British election of 1979.
And yet to triumph everywhere. Heading for the night train after the Zagreb conference, I stumbled across what I started to call a “farmers’ market”, until I realised it was just a market. Women, most middle-aged, stood behind trestle tables with produce they had patently grown themselves. I have a soft spot for figs; possibly the first piece of genuine fresh produce I ate in my life, aged about five, was one grown on my grandmother’s quarter acre block. I still remember the taste as amazing, but these in Zagreb were on another scale, luscious, sweet but richly flavourful, enormous.
There is a choice of future. Dumpap! – and the multinational-fueled, supermarket-supplied, plastic-wrapped foodlike substances of the current British diet – or more time (with the campaign for the four-day week as standard with no loss of pay fast gaining ground), more taste, more health, more life on a livable planet. The growth economy has trashed this fragile, special planet. The one certainty about the future is that economic and social life cannot continue as it is now, and change will come. Business as usual with added technology is not an option. Postgrowth offers a positive way forward, and it is long past time that the “ideologically driven hegemony” of growth (Steinberger’s term) faced serious challenge, in academe, in business, in government.
Yet I listen over the holiday season to podcast after podcast of “2024 in preview”, and they talk about the the rise of the Far Right as a likely year’s trend. As was said in Brussels in December, we are losing to the Far Right not because they have better policies, but better slogans – or at least more widely propagated ones. The Postgrowth movement is talking about “Politics in the hands of the people”, how instead of “Full Work” let’s think about “Full Health”. But there is still a long way to go to get that into mainstream discourse. Yet as American suffragette Susan B Anthony asserted, “failure is not an option”. Because you do not get to a postgrowth economy, one with, as Australian social entrepreneur Erin Remblance put it, “a planned and democratic reduction in production and consumption in overconsuming nations with the intent of respecting the planetary boundaries while improving societal wellbeing and global justice”, by crashing a growth system.
Almost the end
This is rather longer than the earlier Change Everythings. I won’t promise (or threaten) that they’ll all be this length! And I’m planning a special bonus midweek issue, centred around reading another brilliant tome from David Kynaston A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65. So many problems then that we have failed to solve, and new ones (like Beeching cuts) created by decisions made then. I’ll save my regular reading and listening recommendations until then.
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Is that a hippo? Or a rhino? In the painting