Why the Degrowth Movement Is Having a Moment

Tracy Alloway (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:14)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

Joe, what would you say the most fundamental tenet of economics is? Yeah, sorry, I started with the big question.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

I don't know, it's not fair. What do you say it is?

Tracy Alloway (0:27)

Well, it has to be growth, right? Like the whole point is to generate economic growth.

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

Yeah, I mean, if you were saying like, okay, like what ultimately you can fight about how best to measure growth, and there's like no one statistic that will ever like give you the answer of like, is this economy doing well or not? You can never reduce it that much. But on some level, it does seem like the gauge of a successful policy, right? Is how much the economy grows.

Tracy Alloway (0:53)

Absolutely, and I know there have been, you kind of alluded to it just then, there have been various attempts in time to gauge economic well-being in slightly different ways. So I remember it didn't, it was Bhutan, I think.

Joe Weisenthal (1:07)

Yeah, what happened to the Bhutan Happiness Index? You never hear about that.

Tracy Alloway (1:10)

Is that not on the terminal? We need to look, we need to get it on there if it's not.

But there is this fundamental question over what should be the goal of economics and ultimately the economy, and is it simply economic growth, or could we be asking for something a little bit more?

Joe Weisenthal (1:25)

Right, and we're always fighting about this implicitly, which is, okay, should we trade growth for greater equality? Should we sacrifice some growth for more environmental sustainability, perhaps? There are all these like, should we trade growth for better job quality or whatever?

But if fundamentally growth itself is always taken for granted as being per se a good thing.

Tracy Alloway (1:48)

Absolutely, and I'm glad you mentioned the climate just then, because of course, when you think of economic growth, so much of it is tied into consumption.

And if consumption is becoming a problem from an environmental perspective, then obviously you would want to reduce that, which would presumably be a hit to economic growth. So, all of this is a way of saying that today, we are going to explore something that's very, very different to traditional thinking around economics. We're going to be looking into something called the degrowth movement.

Joe Weisenthal (2:17)

So does that mean GDP, like the goal is to shrink it?

Tracy Alloway (2:19)

Yeah, negative GDP.

Joe Weisenthal (2:20)

All right, let's learn more about it.

Tracy Alloway (2:22)

And we really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Noel King. She is of course the host of Vox's daily news podcast, Today Explained, and she's releasing a four part series called Blame Capitalism. And one of the episodes is all about this thing called the degrowth movement. So let's check in with her. Noel, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Noel King (2:45)

I'm a big fan, you guys. Thanks for having me.

Tracy Alloway (2:47)

Noel, maybe just to begin with, I sort of teased that we are going to be talking about the degrowth movement, but what is this exactly?

Noel King (2:54)

I will tell you what degrowth is, but first I want to tell you that I have a good friend who just got back from vacation in Bhutan. And the first thing I asked her was, is everyone super happy?

And she's an economic supporter, so she got it immediately. And she said, I didn't see a lot of homelessness, I didn't see a lot of poverty, people did seem happy, but I did see a lot of small farmers, like people who look like they are farming for a living and not going to do much better than that. So anyway, the happiness index is something I too am really obsessed with. When it comes to degrowth, if you ask economists who believe in degrowth, who ascribe to it, what they're going to tell you is, it's not a very well-defined thing. And we really want to avoid terminology that scares people and degrowth is a word that scares people. But I did come across a very good definition. It's from the economic anthropologist, Jason Hickel. He wrote a book in 2020 called Less Is More that I've seen described as like the Bible of degrowth.

And here's what Jason Hickel says. He calls degrowth, quote, a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.