Post-growth Economics and Society

Exploring the Paths of a Social and Ecological Transition

Isabelle Cassiers, Kevin Maréchal, Dominique Méda, Isabelle Cassiers, Kevin Maréchal, Dominique Méda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351382977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

We stand on the threshold of a "post-growth" world – one in which the relentless pursuit of economic growth has ceased to constitute a credible societal project. The symptoms that mark the end of an era are clear and incontrovertible: a return to the regularities of the past is illusory. The pursuit of economic growth no longer constitutes a credible societal project for ecological, social, and geopolitical reasons.

Edited by an impressive array of experts, this book identifies several areas in which we must fundamentally rethink our societal organisation. They ask what it means to abandon the objective of economic growth; how we can encourage the emergence of other visions to guide society; how global visions and local transition initiatives should be connected; which modes of governance should be associated with the required social and technological innovations. Alongside the necessary respect of ecological limits and equity in distribution, the promotion of autonomy (involving all in the building of socio-political norms) could serve for guidance. The topics addressed over the chapters range from the future of work to the de-commodification of economic relations; the search for new indicators of progress to decentralized modes of governance; and from the circular economy to polycentric transitions. Each contribution brings a unique perspective, a piece of a larger puzzle to be assembled.

Post-growth Economics and Society is an important volume to those who study ecological economics, political economy and the environment and society. It invites theorists as much as practitioners to re-explore the roots of our societal goals and play an active role in the systemic shift to come.

1 The economy in a post-growth era

What project and what philosophy?

Isabelle Cassiers and Kevin Maréchal

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.

(John Stuart Mill 1848)

Since the beginning of our discipline, economists have confronted questions about values, goals, the distribution of wealth and the limits imposed by nature. The thoughts of the founding fathers, often steeped in philosophy, were marked by the emergence of the industrial age and by the upheaval it brought to the traditional societies of the time. Everything suggests that we are once more at a major historical turning point. The unprecedented ecological and geopolitical challenges that we face are forcing economists to revisit the seminal questions of their discipline.

Improving the Art of Living without being obsessed by the art of getting on, accepting the idea of reaching a “stationary condition of capital and population” without renouncing human improvement, is there any more current programme or more pertinent question? At the point at which humanity finds itself, exploring the realities and perspectives of economic growth inevitably leads to thinking of post-growth.¹ This claim, which may seem strong, is shared by the authors brought together in this book. Each of them brings a specific point of view, a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that will have to be assembled in the future. Starting from the double meaning of the French word “Economie”, we treat here both the economy as a social system (“the state of a country or region in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money”, Oxford Living Dictionaries) and the particular discipline of economics. Together, and without claiming to have covered the entirety of themes that should ideally be explored, we have unravelled a thread that we will retrace in this introductory chapter.² We proceed in four steps:

1 What should be understood by the term “post-growth”?

2 What are the major problems that arise when one abandons the objective of continuous growth?

3 How can we make the transition to another horizon?

4 What are the models of thought and modes of government most likely to bring about a coherent project?

A post-growth era

The term “post-growth” signifies a beyond, an era that we are entering and yet are unable to define precisely, other than by reference to what we are leaving behind.³ The symbols that signal the end of an epoch are sufficiently numerous and clear that any thought of a return to past norms is an illusion. Yet the unique historical nature and complexity of the situation are such that we can only fumble our way forward.

What we call “post-growth” is not a crisis (a temporary status before a return to normality), nor is it an incurred deceleration of economic activity (a situation that we have been in, de facto, for several decades); it is not even a secular stagnation (the hypothesis mainly discussed by economists these days). By post-growth we mean an era in which the societal project is redefined beyond the pursuit of economic growth.⁴ Breaking from such a pursuit strikes us as essential and urgent for many reasons.

First, considering the situation in Europe, it seems very likely that anaemic growth will persist in the medium term.⁵ Moreover, Maddison (2001) observes that at the secular scale, a rate of economic growth above one per cent is a recent phenomenon and the rates recorded in the West during the post-war decades are an historical exception. In these conditions, remaining besotted with growth is both unproductive and hopeless. Unproductive, because vast reserves of energy are sacrificed to a lost cause. Hopeless, because the promises made to populations – most notably of full employment – are repeatedly broken. This feeds a growing distrust of the political class and can bring populist parties to power, with their simplistic and seductive rhetoric. The socio-political dangers of such a situation alone are a sufficiently compelling reason to abandon the objective of sustained growth, an objective whose realization is, in any case, improbable.

More fundamentally, even if it were possible for our economies to recover such growth, the ensuing disadvantages would undoubtedly outweigh the expected benefits. Numerous studies (we mention, among others, Méda 2008, 2013; Jackson 2009, 2017; Costanza et al. 2012; Cassiers 2015) recall, update and reinforce the now ancient diagnosis about “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al. 1972) and the proposition to “Free the future” (Illich 1971).⁶ The most obvious damaging effects are ecological. On this point, doubt is no longer possible (Steffen et al. 2015). Our generation lives at the cost of those that follow. The ecosystem cannot support the current rate of human activity and it is urgent that we break from this trend; every delay serves only to exacerbate the problem. Of course, one part of the response to this challenge must lie in technological innovation aimed at a radical decoupling of the production of goods and services from their ecological impact (consumption of material resources and pollution). However, betting purely on technology would be irresponsible since nothing guarantees inventions of sufficient magnitude (both in terms of innovation and implementation). The other part of the response must therefore consist in changing our way of life – just as radically. Given the large gap in wealth between the countries in the global North and South, it is clear that the most serious efforts must be made by the wealthier countries, whether for ethical considerations or simply out of geopolitical prudence.

Independent of ecological limits, it should be noted that the main benefits formerly attributed to growth have largely faded over time, at least within wealthy countries. This is particularly the case of reduced inequality and increased welfare of populations. While growth in the post-war boom (1945–1975) led to income and wealth being shared more equitably, that of the following decades (and in particular of the last thirty years) has indeed been accompanied by a dramatic increase in inequality, highlighted by numerous studies, most notably by Wilkinson and Pickett (2009), the OECD (2011) and Piketty (2014). The myth that the enrichment of the wealthiest would “trickle down” to the lower classes of the social pyramid now appears to be dispelled.

The question of the link between growth and well-being deserves careful consideration. There is no denying that material progress has lifted much of mankind out of poverty. But we must also recognize that the values to which an affluent middle-class population attaches the greatest importance (social ties, health, participation in civic society, quality of life, etc.) are not correlated with growth and are often threatened by its adverse side effects (Easterlin 1974; Cassiers and Delain 2006, among others). Moreover, our societies have created a type of addiction to growth with its set of alienating effects (Arnsperger 2005; Jackson 2009, 2017). It is our relation to this “cage” that Olivier De Schutter discusses in his contribution to this book, before examining ways of breaking free from it.

To summarize, our thoughts on post-growth begin with an observation: growth has been thoroughly exhausted as a social project (Laurent 2017). Now, the pressing task is to contribute – even if only by providing markers for general guidance – to the emergence of an alternative project capable of supporting essential human values while also respecting the limits of our planet.

The challenges to overcome

Renouncing the objective of growth is clearly not easy: the social contracts made in the period after the Second World War were explicitly sealed with this common goal, which made it possible to overcome the obstacles arising from the many social conflicts of the time. While regulation has changed profoundly between the post-war boom (1945–1975) and the decades that followed, governments – as well as most other social actors – continue to behave as if programmed for the continued pursuit of growth.

This addiction to growth likely springs from the difficulty of conceiving new ways to respond to core economic questions: the distribution of income while limiting social tensions; the creation of jobs to compensate for those destroyed by structural changes and technological progress; the provision of sufficient public funds to cover the costs of services and social security; the contribution to economic dynamism (innovation, entrepreneurship); the maintaining of a respected position, as a region or as a country, in the world economy, and thus remaining a loud voice in the concert of nations.

Answers to these questions are of two types. First, the work of Demailly et al. (2013), based on current empirical data, shows the increased importance of policy in a low-growth regime: if such regimes are to remain compatible with a reduction of inequality and a high level of social security, they must explicitly place much more importance on questions of distribution. “Ultimately, without a ‘bubble of oxygen’ from growth, we need more reforms, more political action” (Demailly et al. 2013: 66).

Second, and undoubtedly more fundamentally, these questions should be traced back to their roots and compared with overall societal goals. Is it necessary to create jobs, or should we seek, rather, to ensure that every citizen has the possibility to hold a dignified role in society and benefit from a quality of life that is both materially and culturally decent? Must we perpetually aim for productivity gains or should we now focus on gains in quality, as Dominique Méda suggests elsewhere in this volume? Is income the primary route to a good life, or can we break the alienating consumerist spiral and increase our happiness via the many new paths of decommodification, as Bernard Perret suggests? Does the dynamism of the economy necessarily rely on the lure of profit and permanent increases in income, or can we find in the social economy (see the contribution by Thomas Bauwens and Sybille Mertens) the beginnings of another logic that is no less dynamic and capable of spreading more widely? In a time of worldwide ecological crisis, does our place in the concert of nations truly depend on our commercial competitiveness or on our desire to maintain our fundamental values?

The transition towards a post-growth economy inevitably poses a series of fundamental questions that force us to reconsider the very essence of our economic model. Obviously, this may be unsettling. Where and how are we supposed to advance if our final destination and means of getting there are unknown? To attempt to respond to this, we appeal to the chain of thought espoused by André Gorz (1980) and Cornélius Castoriadis (1998) who, from the end of the post-war boom, situated radical change (in its etymological sense of “at the roots”) in our logic of evolution, not in the definition of a coherent political project but rather in the subversion by the imaginary.

The various contributions in this book emphasize the importance of collectively thinking out this subversive imaginary in order for it to become a unifying element. This requires first and foremost the confrontation of inequality. As Gadrey (2014: 7, our translation) says, “the ecological transition will be social or it will not happen at all. Its acceptability depends on its ability to benefit everyone. Otherwise, it will be rejected as an additional factor of injustice”.

The sheer novelty of a new imaginary attitude – the necessary rupture with the status quo – might seem paralysing or impossibly utopian, but Bernard Perret reminds us that a growing number of citizens are already putting this imagination into practice on a daily basis. This transition, the movement towards the beyond, is undoubtedly afoot:

For about ten years, individuals and groups tired of changing only according to technological and economic imperatives have been declarin...