Prosperity Without Growth

This book, an explosive and compelling case for the possibility, nay, necessity, of post-growth economic development by Tim Jackson, should be compulsory reading for every Western economic policymaker. Along with this book on de-growth, it was one of my core texts for an incredibly bleak essay I just finished writing yesterday. My last essay of the year, probably the best and also the most depressing thing I've ever written. In light of this, disproportionately to how excellent this book is, this post will be really short (actually, this time).
   Tim argues that global capitalism has been historically given free rein by an economics that's sorely out-of-touch with real life on a physical planet to the extent that our world economy now threatens natural boundaries and limits. Some of these are obvious depletion issues - we're using up non-renewable resources without establishing sustainable replacements for when they run out, and we're exploiting renewable flows of energy and resources at a pace that far outweighs nature's capacity to regenerate them. In short, a crunch is coming, and the best hope we have of meeting this challenge is to abandon our structural enslavement to consumerism, which only perpetuates inequality and injustice and doesn't even substantively improve subjective human wellbeing in these prosperity-by-growth societies. Instead, we must look to localism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, and contentment with a life less dependent on material attainments, as pillars of a new direction for the world's political and economic systems. Obviously this is an enormous shift, but Tim outlines along with the arguments in favour of such a huge redirection various policies that could help accelerate changes toward such a transition being possible.
   Overall - an absolutely superb and essential book, if you're interested in or have even a scrap of influence in the realms of politics, economics, ecology, human society's future stability, and individual wellbeing, (and especially the tight nexus where all these topics overlap at ideas about post-growth development), give this a read.

Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era

This book, a collection of fifty-one short essays (written by fifty-six different people) edited by Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (who as a threesome also wrote a longish introduction and shortish epilogue), is way overdue at the library and I've just finished it in a mad reading-rush and am going to bash out this post as quickly as my conscience will allow before returning it. 'Degrowth' as an idea is a radical response to the fact that our economies have, in the richer nations at least, attained a state of affluence far beyond what is necessary to sustain human wellbeing at an equitable and sustainable and satisfactory level, but persist in pursuing growth, further widening social inequalities, deepening structural problems, and putting enormous strain on the global ecosystem (which fortunately our economy has nothing to do with).* Economic growth, despite the obviousness of its posing a serious range of problems to global human/natural welfare, is simply not questioned by the vast majority of thinkers and policymakers! However, some people do question it, and these ideas are rapidly gaining traction in the left, as the explanatory frameworks employed by 'degrowthers' are nicely congruent with several others on the left, so issues and policy solutions broadly supported in a plethora of progressive groups are represented where they all converge - upon the need for degrowth.

   The essays are split into four chunks, and in lieu of wanting to go through properly summarising themes I'm basically just going to list them.** The first section looks at lines of thought by which arguments for degrowth can be made: anti-utilitarianism, bioeconomics (a.k.a. ecological economics), critiques of development, social-environmental justice, currents of environmentalism, societal metabolism, political ecology, and steady-state economics.

   The second section looks at core concepts needed to be understood widely in a degrown society (or, more pressingly, in order to transition to one): autonomy, capitalism, care, commodification, commodity frontiers, the commons, conviviality, dematerialisation, dépense, depoliticisation, pedagogy of disaster, entropy, emergy, GDP, growth, happiness, decolonisation of the imaginary, Jevons' paradox, neo-Malthusianism, peak oil (etc), social limits to growth, and simplicity.

   The third section looks at grassroots- and policy-level actions (or spheres of action) that may help spur degrowth and hence the transition to a sustainable economy: going back-to-the-land, eco-communities, urban gardening, 'nowtopianism', basic income & maximum income, job guarantees, work-sharing, unions, co-operatives, community currencies, debt audits, the digital commons, public money creation, post-normal science, and civil disobedience (with another chapter specifically looking at how Spanish indignados and the Occupy movement were good in this respect). Also in this section is a frankly disappointingly vague chapter by Tim Jackson about the 'New Economy', but given how specific and well-aimed all the other chapters were, and given that Tim Jackson's book Prosperity Without Growth is a landmark work in this field (which I'm also reading for the same essay for which I devoured this one, so -) it's only fair that his chapter could be a general-summary-kind-of-useless one.

   The fourth section looks at socio-cultural, philosophical and political ideas that have arisen around the world that overlap considerably with the aims of degrowthers: from feminist economics, to South America's buen vivir, to Gandhi-inspired economics of permanence, to the Bantu peoples' traditional worldview of Ubuntu.

   Anyway. I'm dropping this book in the Returns tub and leaving the library. This book is extremely interesting: anyone concerned about economic and/or environmental justice would find a lot of thought-provoking stuff in here, presented in an easily accessible bitesize chapter format, which is actually a really nice way of navigating through a large pile of smaller issues gathered around a holistic polemic.

   Reduce, reuse, recycle! And break neoliberal hegemony's stranglehold on economic institutions and political society, where it is redirecting all social efforts to the maximisation of productivity which in turn perpetuates gross inequalities and injustices and perilous damage to ecological systems - break it, and restructure almost everything about our world in a way that promotes sustainability, equity, community, and human flourishing!***

* Irony. Everything that happens in the global economy is 100% dependent, in so many ways that I couldn't even start listing them because I'm not a scientist but you can probably think of a few yourself, on the biosphere functioning healthily.

** Some of these concepts are extremely interesting, but there are fifty-one of them and no way am I going to try to briefly describe each, so if your curiosity has been piqued... you're a citizen of the internet, you should know what to do.

*** This is the problem with progressivism; the more holistic and system-based your analysis of problems gets, yes, the more you can claim to see the bigger picture and thus you can more accurately propose individual-, community-, and government-level solutions, but past a certain stage it gets very hard to reduce to a catchy mantra. Perhaps the best I've ever heard was at the COP21 protests in Paris last December, where there was a crowd of over fifty Spaniards carrying huge red banners shouting "¡AAA- AH! ANTI! ¡ANTICAPITALISTA!" over & over again, as we marched down the main streets from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower - where a procession of several thousand peaceful protesters formed a Spoon Chain under a giant long red carpetcloth/rope. (Needless sentimental fact - I had this in my jacket pocket at the time).