effort to save global capitalism from its own excesses. Millions of workers lost their jobs as companies cut costs.
In total nearly $16 trillion in public funds (mostly interest-free loans) were used to prop up the international financial system. The intervention helped to stave off immediate financial disaster in the shape of a severe global depression. Credit gradually started to move again, trade slowly resumed, corporations and banks once again became profitable. But it was a grudging kind of recovery.
Unemployment remains unacceptably high in most Western nations, with grievous social fallout. Poverty is increasing as the gap between rich and poor widens. Food banks are doing a booming business. Governments face massive budget deficits, mainly because of the billions in debt they took on to underwrite the economic recovery. Meanwhile, the corporate sector points to public debt as the source of our economic troubles. The irony is that the debt was first contracted to bail out those same banks and corporations. Instead the cry is for ‘balanced budgets’ to restore ‘market confidence’.
This is the medicine we supposedly must take to nurse the economy back to health: cuts in government services, sale of public assets, reduced pensions, redundancies, stagnant wages and tax breaks for the wealthy. Nearly half a decade after the crash, we’re back where we started. We wait for growth to save us while ordinary people take the hit.
The assumption has always been that growth will make things better. In fact you could say that growth is the escape valve for modern capitalism. Without it, the poor would have good reason to grumble. With it, tomorrow will always be brighter. If we just keep ramping up the GDP, things will improve. Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies summed up this view when he said that ‘economic growth is necessary to keep the promise… that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is the American Dream.’
The measuring stick for growth is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is basically a laundry list of all the things we produce, usually divided by population to give us GDP per capita. As a measurement of human progress, this is a very rough-and-ready metric. How can it not be when it mixes up ‘bads’ and ‘goods’? Anything that has a dollar sign attached to it contributes to GDP. Oil spills, suburban sprawl, war and crime are lumped together with steel production, medical consulting fees and the value of this year’s wheat crop.
But the indication now is that the price we pay for growth exceeds the benefits. The balance has tilted to the increasingly worrying downside – what the writer Herman Daly calls ‘uneconomic growth’.
Only this time there’s a difference. There’s a growing recognition that the global economic system is rigged in favor of the wealthy, the top 1% who run the show.
In September 2011, a few thousand folks pitched tents in a corporate-owned park in the heart of lower Manhattan. ‘We are the 99%,’ was their slogan. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ (OWS) movement was a mix of jobless college graduates, single moms, social activists, union members, clergy, concerned citizens and others. The message was clear, even if the alternatives weren’t. The protest was against the corporate takeover of the international economy, against economic inequality, against the continuing destruction of the environment and called for social justice and a different vision for the world.
The OWS movement was initially overlooked by the corporate media, but it soon spread via the internet and social media until it could no longer be ignored. Other ‘Occupy’ movements popped up in dozens of cities around the globe – from Toronto, Montreal and San Francisco to Sydney, London and Paris – in an effort to spread the message of dissatisfaction with the global economy. Growth was not specifically the target of the protests. But it was certainly the subtext.
The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement is the most recent sign of a more extensive global phenomenon. There has been a wave of social and political turmoil and instability since the world lurched into economic chaos. The ‘Arab Spring’ caught the attention of the world, igniting political change across North Africa and the Middle East while causing dictators elsewhere to be on alert. There were riots in London. In Spain, Italy and Greece, citizens faced with painful austerity measures staged mass public demonstrations. Chilean students took to the streets to bring attention to economic inequality and rising tuition fees while Israel experienced its largest demonstrations in decades when hundreds of thousands of middle-class citizens protested high housing prices and falling living standards. Even in the two economic powerhouses of the developing world there were signs of dissatisfaction. There is growing impatience and disgust with corruption in India and mounting unhappiness with inequality and environmental damage in China.
Finding a better path
There has to be a better way and that’s what this book is all about. Sustainability and degrowth are, in many ways, very old ideas rooted in traditional spiritual and humanist notions of husbandry, stewardship and community. But they are also two very loaded terms.
In this No-Nonsense Guide I’ve attempted to unpick those concepts and to think about what it means to live in a world where growth reigns supreme. With each passing day it’s increasingly evident that the prevailing model is leading us down a dangerous and ever-narrowing path. We need what used to be called a ‘paradigm shift’.
A decade ago, a global opposition movement provoked by the ravages of economic globalization declared that ‘another world is possible’. If anything, that alternative vision is even more urgent today as we face a future of life after growth. We need to redefine what we mean by prosperity but, more critically, we need to ask fundamental questions about the end goals of our frenzied economic activity. What is an economy for? Do we want an ever-growing GDP and ‘sustainable growth’? Or do we want to reshape our economic project to sustain people, communities and the natural world? With a sense of common purpose we can avoid environmental collapse and pave the way for a more convivial future. Without this great transformation, we risk lurching from crisis to crisis, compromising the fate of the generations who will follow us.
As Kenneth Boulding warned: ‘There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity, and which loses its positive image of the future, loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.’
Wayne Ellwood
Toronto, 2013
The unquestioning devotion to the idea of constant economic growth is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history. But it has taken firm hold despite the numerous great thinkers who have pointed out what should be clear to all – that in a world of finite resources, exponential growth is not only unsustainable but also extremely dangerous.
‘The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.’
John Maynard Keynes
The eminent British biologist Charles Darwin was a careful scientist – meticulous, patient and rigorous. He spent five years at sea on a research ship, The Beagle, collecting data, then nearly 20 years sifting his research, honing his analysis and polishing his prose, before publishing On the Origin of Species, his groundbreaking work, in November 1859.1
Darwin’s slim volume was what we would call a ‘game changer’; a revolutionary work that irrevocably and fundamentally altered the way human beings see themselves and the natural world. Today, most of us are familiar
