‘Farewell to Growth’, Serge Latouche (2007)

Politicians and the media obsess about ‘economic growth’; but what if that ‘glorious thirty years’ of economic expansion from the 1960s has ended? This landmark text of the degrowth movement explores why growth’s ‘end is nigh’, and why this should be welcomed.

To suggest that further economic growth has become near impossible is a ‘secular heresy’; one so great it automatically excludes that person from a leading role in politics or the media. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that research into degrowth gets such little attention.

The degrowth movement exists to advance these difficult arguments – to take the large body of evidence as to why the current economic process is failing, and propose a range of alternatives which might avert the catastrophic failure of this system. Ignoring the arguments from the degrowth movement will not make these realities go away. Instead the inexorable decline of well-being across Western states will continue, preceding an ever-more inevitable collapse as each year passes without action to address the causes of this decline.