Degrowth Is a Dead End

By Andrew Follett

Sunday, June 16, 2024

 

America should destroy its economy and pay climate reparations to other countries in the name of “degrowth,” because that will somehow help the environment. Or at least that is the conclusion of a suspiciously friendly interview between the New York Times and an actual professed eco-Marxist.

 

The article, by New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai, ran with the tagline: “economic growth has been ecologically costly — and so a movement in favor of ‘degrowth’ is growing.”

 

Degrowth means reducing industrial civilization and turning back the clock to an era when humans allegedly affected the environment less. It’s a literal “return to nature” that often intersects with the desire to lower the human population, supposedly to reduce its harm to nature.

 

“Economists like Paul Krugman and data scientists like Hannah Ritchie have maintained that technological advances mean that economic prosperity doesn’t have to lead to ecological degradation,” Szalai writes. But for degrowthers, that’s a cop-out. “We have plundered the planet instead of figuring out more egalitarian ways to live with one another.”

 

Recent research I explored earlier for National Review suggests that economists and “hard” natural or applied scientists are vastly more likely to favor economic growth, while social scientists were the most likely to favor “agrowth” or “degrowth” of the economy in the name of global warming. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the New York Times didn’t have a scientist or economist write its latest ode to degrowth, but rather a “nonfiction book critic.” If degrowth-cheerleading sounds like reheated communist ideological drivel repackaged in environmentalism, there’s a reason for that.

 

“Any attempt to blend degrowth with capitalism is doomed to fail,” Kohei Saito, the Japanese Marxist philosopher who has become the public face of the degrowth movement, told the New York Times. “To demand the cessation of all these things — to demand deceleration — is in fact to demand capitalism’s end.”

 

Saito is the author of books with titles like Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism and, most recently, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. A media darling, Saito has been called “a greener Marx.”

 

Szalai acknowledges that degrowth isn’t “just” demanding “capitalism’s end,” but “degrowth communism” and “a form of [climate] reparations” paid by the West to poorer countries.

 

Because rising living standards and economic growth are near constants today, we often take them for granted. We shouldn’t. We are about 33 times better off now than in the year 1900. Actually enforcing degrowth would require freezing global income at around $17,000 annually, dragging down the West to a standard of living seen in China or Botswana.

 

Instead of asking philosophers of failed ideologies for their thoughts on environmental problems, the New York Times would do better to review how the biggest ecological crisis in the history of its patron city was solved.

 

In the late-19th century, New York City was facing a real environmental crisis. The New York Times of the day panicked as an estimated 20,000 New Yorkers died because they were transported almost entirely by cars pulled by horses, making over 100 million horsecar trips each year, roughly triple what they had a decade earlier. That meant triple the horse manure, which produced a sanitation crisis.

 

The city had more than 150,000 horses plodding its streets, each producing an average of 22 pounds of manure daily, according to the very same New York Times melting down about economic growth today. The resulting 45,000 tons of manure produced each month in the city buried Liberty Street in a pile of excrement seven feet deep. Vacant lots transformed into manure mountains towered 60 feet into the air.

 

The city seemed to be drowning in dung and the problem looked insurmountable. Commentators predicted that by 1930 the tide of horse manure would be three stories deep. But the problem wasn’t limited to New York City: It was international in scope and led to conferences on the problem in search of a globalized solution, much like what degrowthers propose should be done today to counteract global warming.

 

The first of these was in 1898, naturally in New York City itself. The day’s experts met in an attempt to use the power of the government to solve the crisis. Yet they could only conclude that removing the manure likely require more horses. But that would result in even more manure. Thus, urban civilization was probably just doomed.

 

A mere two decades later, however, the last horse cart in New York City ceased operation, according to the New York Times. The vastly more efficient raw horsepower of the automobile replaced it.

 

But today’s New York Times disregards the history of innovation solving New York City’s ecological problems. Instead, its writers now claim, regarding global warming, that “the realization that we hadn’t innovated our way out of our ecological predicament, along with inequalities laid bare by the 2008 financial crisis, fueled a more widespread distrust of the conventional capitalist wisdom.”

 

Despite the sheer historical ignorance of the “degrowth” approach to environmental problems, it is extremely popular in academic and environmentalist circles. Almost three-quarters of self-identified “climate policy researchers” want to stop economic growth in the name of battling global warming or feel neutral about that proposition, according to a recent survey by the scientific journal Nature Sustainability.

 

“Within the broader post-growth framework, degrowth stands as a pronounced stance, critiquing capitalism and advocating for a deliberate and equitable reduction in material consumption and economic activity in high-income countries to achieve more sustainable and socially just societies,” the paper states. “Degrowth scholars underscore the need to shift the focus from GDP to the physical scale of the economy, concurrently emphasizing the important role of equity, environmental justice and democratic decision-making in facilitating a sustainable transition.”

 

Many prominent environmental groups embraced a “degrowth” mindset for decades before they even considered global warming a concern.

 

In 1974, for example, the Sierra Club formally adopted a platform of opposing the construction of any new nuclear reactors because they could lead to “unnecessary economic growth.” It’s rather suspicious that the solution to global warming that environmentalists demand is precisely the same as what they wanted to do long before global warming became a widely held concern.

 

It’s almost as if the “degrowth communism” beloved by self-identifying Marxist professors like Saito and New York Times book critics is a solution in search of a problem. Prosperity, not degrowth, is associated with a cleaner environment. Economic growth greatly improves the lives of human beings and the natural environment alike.

 

We should not permit literal Marxists to use environmental stewardship as an excuse to abandon economic growth with the resulting large-scale decline in living standards and increase in economic suffering. But the degrowth movement does prove that environmentalists are watermelons: green on the outside and red within.