The Growth Fantasy
The BBC’s Newsnight Editor tell us that the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves entered the room for the PLP meeting clapping her hands saying: “growth, growth, growth”.
The obsession with growth as a solution to everything is hard-wired into our worldview, but endless growth does none of the things we are told it does. It does not distribute wealth. It does not improve happiness or quality of life. Yet it is, we are told the ‘bedrock for the entire Starmer plan’.
Going for growth: Pic of CX/PM w biz leaders this am. Message: they’ll roll back regulation holding economy back. Now to cabinet with message to ministers growth #1 focus. Grim economic data giving CX impetus to go ‘further & faster’. Growth bedrock for entire Starmer plan… pic.twitter.com/aqDxU1T1UC
— Beth Rigby (@BethRigby) January 28, 2025
The language of “rolling back regulation” is relentlessly, ideologically neoliberal and reactionary. Far from a fresh start, or a new direction, Reeves growth obsession is an echo of Liz Truss who promised to boost growth by ripping down planning controls and creating “investment zones” in our national parks.
But as Katherine Trebeck has written: “Calling for “growth, growth, growth” is a bit like receiving an instruction to “move move move”. A bit pointless without stipulating why, in what way, when, and so on. It is a mantra from a previous time, yet ostensibly many politicians seem unable to break away from it.”
This growth obsession assumes any growth is good, forever and makes no distinction between what we are growing, or why. More cars, cigarettes, booze, flights, private jets, all great! More plastic, SUVs, petrochemicals, big pharma, mass tourism, all great too.
More of anything is better, forever.
Growth as cognitive frame has only recently been contested. For many, probably most people, it remains synonymous with improvement, development, even civilization itself. But these are fantasies.
Wellbeing and post-growth economics (which stand on the shoulders of decades of research and practice) offer the possibility of an economic system geared up to deliver what people and planet most need, directly. They are not about waiting for the crumbs to fall from the table of the wealthy while crossing our fingers that the planet can handle the pressure we’re putting on her. Such an economy is about investing in the new zero-carbon future, creating sustainable cities with improved air quality, reduced emissions and new thinking about the type and distribution of work.
As the economist anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it: “As the Arctic burns under a record heatwave, economists are lining up to call for more growth. The discipline is increasingly unhinged from reality. The key lesson for post-covid economics is that you do not need growth to solve a crisis of unemployment. Shorten the working week, distribute income and wealth more fairly, and introduce a Green New Deal job guarantee.”
This is unpalatable and incomprehensible to the phalanx of writers and columnists who can’t abide any new economic thinking that breaks from their often sheltered, privileged life experience.
But if the commentariat treat the world as unchanged since their childhood, the real-world is transforming at a mesmerising pace, from the wildly erratic weather patterns we are all experiencing, to the burnt-out husk of LA, to food systems in collapse, to the election of deranged climate denialists and their infantilist demand to “drill baby drill”.
But something important has changed. The last two IPCC reports are significant in that they have identified the economy as the problem, not the solution. Faced with this harsh truth the ruling elites, supported by a pliant and cooperative media have engaged in a total backlash, attacking not just anyone who suggests an alternative economics, but the idea of Net Zero itself. Even the most moderate and liberal ideas, such as a ‘wellbeing economy’ are now viewed as a dire threat. The penny has dropped. The battleground is no longer about climate denialism but capital denialism. Given the choice between changing from a system that accrues them enormous wealth and power, or changing course to ensure ecological viability, the powerful have chosen to protect their interests.
As climate reality dawns the collision between our economy and our society becomes more intense. Faced with the fact that perpetual growth on a finite planet is an ecological catastrophe, elites and their scribes are now doubling-down and protecting their economic belief-system against invasive reality.
Defenders of the climate-wrecking economic system we live under herald it as the mechanism for equality and prosperity, but this is increasingly impossible to defend. Clung to and heralded by its champions, a growth economy is characterised by disfiguring poverty and obscene inequality, spiraling mental health problems, and an inability to meet the most basic human needs in terms of access to housing and healthy food. Indeed our current system is defined by stress and breakdown at every level.
While the fantasy of eternal growth is championed by politicians it is increasingly abandoned by realists and unsupported by the evidence. Now, science and ecology are converging on some hard truths, that a growth economy is incompatible with human habitation of our world.
“The latest IPCC report to limit global warming to 1.5° presents four scenarios. Three of them strongly depend on negative emission technologies, which are highly controversial as they have not been proven to work at the required scale and represent an “unjust and high-stakes gamble”. The IPCC also provides a fourth scenario that does not rely on negative emissions, but which notably requires that “global material production and consumption declines significantly”.
In a post-fact world these are unpalatable truths.
The era in which ‘climate breakdown’ is something in the future is long past, and now the very social consequences in western societies are in plain and brutal view. The extractivist economy does not just destroy nature and plunder natural resources, it is a crucial part of the imperial mindset. Ecological destruction and colonisation are intertwined.
Today we are playing catch-up with the stories we are told, and once again we are faced with a catastrophic failure of political leadership. “Growth, growth, growth” is more of an incantation than a political programme, and that it represents the ‘bedrock for the entire Starmer plan’ is a terrifying insight into where we are and who leads us.
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I agree about the lack of need for growth.
Net zero, however, can away an’ shite; it’s just paying someone else to plant trees and carry the can for our profligacy.
Purely as a factual observation, I have planted quite a few trees in my lifetime and no one has ever paid me a penny to do it. I do it out of love for – shall we say? – the universe.
Yeah, its possible : )
And can we remember that trees will happily plant themselves. For free.
All we have to do is cut back on the numbers of deer and sheep who are eating the trees. No “Carbon Credit” schemes needed.
Yes. Deer management requires land reform.
@Wul. True in part. Trees will regenerate naturally if the necessary seeds are lying fallow. But they may not be, and regeneration may be slow. Carrifran wildwood is a good example of what can be achieved by a mixture of natural regeneration and careful human intervention.
I completely agree about the need for more and faster deer culling. I have a soft spot for lynx, but the recent events at Killiehuntly have not exactly helped that argument.
Part of the problem is that we are dealing with a destroyed ecosystem. Woodland is self sustaining in the sense that the roots aid the hydrology, the falling leaves build soil structure and fertility and the shelter trees provide help prevent soil erosion and create a microclimate for the shrubs plants and animals underneath. Biodiversity includes space for pollinating insects and seed distributing birds. And so on. Leaving a desert alone will not necessarily make it change. It could take hundreds of years to rebuild the necessary biodiversity, and meanwhile the land stays exposed and inhospitable.
And part is also the fact that try as we might we cannot separate people from nature. We constantly affect every part of the planet with our satellites, aircraft, military and global commerce infrastructures. Nature has nowhere to hide because we are part of nature – and inseparable from it. Musk’s dreams of escaping to Mars are fantasy.
We need surely to work towards landscapes that enable as wide a variety of different species as possible to work together.
Net Zero has very little to do with planting trees,. There’s plenty of good reasons to plant trees and restore carbon sinks in general, but climate mitigation is the least of them. They certainly won’t do any harm, and won’t make the climate crisis any worse, but the rate at which lignins (woody material) can store carbon is vanishingly trivial compared to how much CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere.
We have to stop burning fossil fuels, and take many other steps that get us a lot closer to Net Zero, before woodlands and wetlands will have an appreciable impact on the carbon cycle.
Aye.. planned degrowth to a post growth future is the only way but I can’t understand Jason Hickel’s seemingly less than critical enthusiasm for China… see Martin Arboleda ‘ Planetary Mine’ .. extraction in the Resilience article is the thing … be good to talk about ways in which using less energy is the only ‘ green ‘ energy.Case in point .. China invited by MAS to extract lithium in Bolivia ( maybes marginally better at extraction but I am not qualified to know this ) … Indigenous communities in the Lithium Triangle have been shouting about ruined aquifers, fishing , heritage… is anybody listening loud enough to?
Hi Anne – you raise a massive issue – I think Jason has been amazingly articulate about degrowth but no one thinker has all the answers or is without blindspots.
For anyone interested this is the book Ann refers to: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/813-planetary-mine
What the cheerleaders for “growth-growth-growth” don’t acknowledge is that de-growth can actually be enjoyable and health-giving.
I worked out, about 20 years ago, that reducing my need for money (and stuff) was; A) The same as a massive pay-rise B) Liberating and stress-reducing.
We sold one of our two cars, both went job-share (paid for by the one less car and the reduction in childcare fees), moved to a smaller home not heated by kerosene, threw all our savings at getting rid of debt, lived more simply etc.
Result; more time for kids, more walks (cheap), more time for hobbies/music etc, less stress. Less “status” to be sure, but who GAF about that.
Not so easy to do when your life is already pared down to the bone, but for people in that position three things would be life-changing; land ownership, cheap public housing, cheap renewable energy. All easily within the gift of an independent country.
The argument for economic shrink is valid, but it runs into a brick wall if you ask people to take a pay-cut in the spirit of post-growth economics.
And some ‘economic anthropolist’ (mathematics and social science? Wow, that’s dangerous), is going to tell people they don’t need mobile phones because we were happy without them 25 years ago?
What’s an anthropolist?
A typo?
It’s very possible. Where?
It’s all very well saying we need to bake a bigger cake by growing the economy but if all it results in is the fat kid (the rich) getting more to eat while the rest of us don’t get any bigger portions it just makes us more unhappy.
Good for Sadiq Khan, who is opposing Heathrow expansion. Hard to think of a less appropriate development.
It’s an addiction. The wealthier you are, the more you have invested yourself in the idea that wealth = power and that the two are their own reward, the more you have to lose and the more terrified you become when you see that you are going nowhere. It’s facing the loss of everything that you have believed in.
But however desperately you shout ‘growth, growth, growth’, everyone can now see that it is a mirage, it cannot deliver any future for people or planet – including the billionaires who have told themselves they can save themselves. When a philosophy just causes destruction and death it is obsolete. The fact that those who have benefitted from it cannot imagine anything else is not surprising but it’s a waste of everyone’s time and money.
Neoliberalism is just a euphemism for corruption and rue by violence, and because it has failed us completely it is collapsing. Politicians who are bought and sold by billionaires are actually irrelevant. As are the billionaires themselves. They have nothing at all to offer that is worth having.
Their wealth and power are merely concepts that depend entirely on our consent. And we can withdraw that consent at any time.
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” always was nonsense. We, and the earth we inhabit, ‘belong’ to no-one but ourselves.
We don’t have to fight anyone, we can just stop buying what they sell.
Rachel Reeves has panicked because the economy has flatlined in first 6 months under Labour and business is unhappy. She has gone to business in SE England asking them what they want and followed their wishes. In doing so she and cabinet members have done a 180 degree turn on various issues including 3rd runway at Heathrow.
The outcome of this plan, rushed through to try and get better headlines, has concentrated therefore on SE England to virtual exclusion of other parts of England and the other countries of UK.
It is particularly galling to see the only big infrastructure spending project outside SE England being in a project with Man Utd whose chairman Jim Ratcliffe is also the head of INEOS who are closing Grangemouth oil refinery. Perhaps the money was given to Man Utd because a large section of their support comes from SE England?