To Grow or Not to Grow: That Isn’t the Question

Recent articles in major newspapers—including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal—explore the possibility that deliberately shrinking our economy could forestall environmental catastrophe while still delivering the necessities of life to a populace currently hooked on perpetual industrial expansion. Why is degrowth increasingly in the news?

At the heart of the degrowth argument is a simple observation: continual growth in the use of materials and energy would lead fairly quickly to absurdly high numbers that could never be sustained in the real world. For example, in the last couple of centuries, humanity’s usage of energy grew at about 3 percent per year. If that rate of growth were to continue, regardless what energy sources we used, the planet’s surface would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years—not due to the greenhouse effect, but to the simple thermodynamic impacts of so much energy being transferred.

Kenneth Boulding was one of the first economists to acknowledge the contradiction between humanity’s desire for continued expansion, on one hand, and Earth’s limits on the other. In his influential 1966 essay “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” he argued that the economy must fit itself to the ecosystem’s limited pools of resources. A few other public intellectuals agreed, and in 1972 philosopher André Gorz described the ideal economic goal as décroissance, a term that, in 2006, was translated into English as degrowth. (In a separate article I’ll explore the state of degrowth discourse—including the main thinkers and their ideas.)

Mainstream economists generally disregarded Boulding (he failed to convince most of his colleagues, and later said, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”). In the past few decades, global economic growth has continued (with two pauses, one after the 2008 financial crash, the other during the COVID-19 pandemic), and we now see evidence of the costs of growth all around us: Earth’s climate is perilously changing, wild creatures are disappearing, industrial toxins are spreading throughout the environment, nature’s resources are becoming scarcer, and all four of these trends are accelerating. Abundant evidence shows that, to be sustainable, the human presence on the planet must not just stop growing, but must actually shrink.

Today, while degrowth advocates have not yet prevailed, their argument is at last being taken seriously. In this article, we will review the growth-versus-degrowth debate and explore why and where the degrowth alternative is taking root. We’ll explore the wide range of degrowth objectives and strategies. And finally, we’ll see why it’s only a matter of time before involuntary degrowth commences, and why advocating for voluntary degrowth makes sense now, even if nature-imposed contraction will come first.