Their larger point: robust growth seemingly disappeared almost overnight, and no one knows what happened.ĭuflo and Banerjee offer possible explanations, only to dismiss them. The pair are of course being somewhat facetious in tracing the end of growth to a particular day. Referencing Gordon, they single out the day when the OPEC oil embargo began GDP growth in the US and Europe never fully recovered. Gordon held that growth “ended on October 16, 1973, or thereabouts,” write MIT economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize, in Good Economics for Hard Times. But some scholars, notably Robert Gordon, whose 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth triggered much economic soul-searching, are realizing that slow growth might be the new normal, not some blip, for much of the world. There have been exceptions to this economic sluggishness-the US during the late 1990s and early 2000s and developing countries like China as they raced to catch up. One obvious factor shaking their faith is that growth has been lousy for decades. Slow growthĮven some economists outside the degrowth camp, while not entirely rejecting the importance of growth, are questioning our blind devotion to it. Still, the degrowth movement does have a point: faced with climate change and the financial struggles of many workers, capitalism isn’t getting it done. Sorry, but talking about plant intelligence won’t solve our woes it won’t feed hungry people or create well-paying jobs. Though Hickel, an anthropologist, offers a few suggestions (“cut advertising” and “end planned obsolescence”), there’s little about the practical steps that would make a no-growth economy work. We need, Hickel writes, to develop “new theories of being” and rethink our place in the “living world.” (Hickel goes on about intelligent plants and their ability to communicate, which is both controversial botany and confusing economics.) It’s tempting to dismiss it all as being more about social engineering of our lifestyles than about actual economic reforms. That mindless growth, Hickel and his fellow degrowth believers contend, is very bad both for the planet and for our spiritual well-being.
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