Growing Idea of Degrowth

It’s really quite straightforward. Right now, the dominant assumption in economics is that all sectors of the economy must grow, all the time, regardless of whether or not we actually need them to. This is an irrational way to manage an economy at the best of times, but during an ecological emergency it is clearly dangerous. Instead, we should deci

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If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can’t just sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit. We must choose to limit growth ourselves. We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth’s life-supporting systems which we depend on for our e

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“Infinite growth in a finite world is an impossibility” goes a popular quote. It is usually rolled out to illustrate that sustainability requires humanity to impose limits. Sometimes people then point to a specific element that they argue we will run out of in relatively short order, for instance phosphorus. I believe that this view is fundamentall... See more

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of be

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