탈성장degrowth이 유일한 책임감 있는 길인 이유

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1.
Why Degrowth is the Only Responsible Way Forward

By Joël Foramitti, Marula Tsagkari, Christos Zografos, originally published by Open Democracy

September 23, 2019



Degrowth marks a different kind of progress

Will natural limits put a limit to freedom and progress? That mainly depends on what is meant by these words. For Phillips, progress refers to the expansion of freedom through the domination of nature through technological advance, allowing “each one of us to become the master of our fate”. This is a notably liberal view, as it imagines freedom as being a full emancipation from any toil, care labor, and suffering. But life must involve work – caring for others, caring for the vulnerable, sharing not only our joys but also our suffering. Marx said: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. This describes a relation between toiling, connected human creatures. He didn’t say “from each to each more and more, with robots doing the work”.
We also need to be careful with the notion of progress as the ultimate, unquestionable project for human freedom. This has often been used to justify action for the higher cause of ‘humanity’ against the opinion of people affected. Prime examples for this are western colonialism or the mass dispossessions and environmental harm in the name of development.
The strive for human flourishing should include all people, and it cannot be thought of apart from nature. That doesn’t reduce the human capacity to be free. But freedom here does not mean freedom from any and every limit, but freedom to choose our limits and care for one another and for non-human beings. This simply confirm‎‎s that humans are not alone in our march to freedom, and that its pursuit has effects upon others and our environment. It also won’t stop innovation, but rather channel it into a direction that is actually useful (unlike this). That does not always need to be high-end technology. Progress could also come in the form of social innovations that adapt society’s institutions to the challenges of abrupt environmental changes, such as the Native American ‘seasonal round’.
Phillips’s claim that there can be no progress without economic growth and no good life without high wages shows a failure of imagination. If we free our imagination from the liberal idea that well-being is best measured by the amount of stuff that we consume, we may discover that a good life could also be materially light. This is the idea of voluntary sufficiency. If we manage to decide collectively and democratically what is necessary and enough for a good life, then we could have plenty.
In that sense, degrowth has also been called a theory of radical abundance, not scarcity. Scarcity represents the problem of limited resources in the face of unlimited ends, and is the driving force of capitalism. Degrowth, in contrast, talks about a conscious and democratic limitation of ends, making resources abundant in turn. This is the critical difference between the ideas of degrowth and Malthus, who essentially was a proponent of growth. This is not about ‘Thatcherite’ limits forced upon people from the top, but about a social choice of self-limitation.
But what if it is not enough? What if what we want is not ecologically feasible to produce? In that case, the desires that capitalism has convinced us that we have are simply not compatible with the planet that we live on. The objective should then be to focus on what we actually need – to find more sustainable ways of reaching for a good life. If we cannot be happy without weekend trips to Thailand, than we might as well reflect about what actual desires are fulfilled by such a trip and try to satisfy them with other kinds of activities.
But what if it is the most basic needs that we cannot cover? A recent study has found that this might be a possibility. In that case, Phillips is right that the dilemma in front of us is difficult. However, this alone does not make the technological innovation at the scale he imagines possible, even if it would be necessary. Degrowth proponents believe that there is a lot of potential for social innovation that could improve our wellbeing and sustainability at the same time. Many people in rich countries currently live with unnecessary excess (while many of them lack basic needs at the same time). There is a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, so to say, before we can declare that there is not enough to satisfy everyone’s basic needs with a sustainable amount of energy and resources.
Let us illustrate that with Phillips’s example of fridges. He claims that forbidding more fridges holds back the global south from vital access to fresh food and the global north from access to better nutrition and reduced food waste. Under a degrowth scenario, fridges would not be forbidden where they are needed (remember that degrowth calls for democracy and autonomy). But consider the global North: in Britain, people consume and throw away more food than half a century ago when just two per cent of households owned a fridge. Supermarkets have removed doors from fridges to boost sales of frozen food that often travels across the planet and replaces local agriculture. Most energy that wealthy countries put into refrigeration is unnecessarily wasted. Even less energy would be needed if we consider communal use like the solidarity fridges in Spain and communal fridges in Berlin.
The same goes with health, transport, diets – you name it. We don’t need an abundance of unnecessary waste. In contrast to Phillips’s claim, degrowth does not impose what has social value or not. It rather calls for more reflection on, and more democratic ways of deciding, what is important to produce and how, and then to focus production on that. This is a much more promising conception of freedom for a socialist project than that of Phillips. In this sense, degrowth both supports and entitles many alternative proposals and sustainable practices with a potential to increase human well-being. Among them are the ideas of shared ownership, not-for-profit cooperatives, cohousing, community gardens, open software, repair cafés, community-supported agriculture, and solidarity economy networks.
A decline in economic activity would further give us back what might be one of the most important ingredients of a good life: time. By having to work less, we could focus our energy on conviviality and care, ending the age of loneliness. We could have more freedom to pursue our personal ambitions. And the time that we spend at work, as well, could be more fulfilling if we know that it actually serves a meaningful purpose.
Degrowth, in this sense, is about the opportunity to improve our lives without increasing our use of resources. It therefore represents a feasible way of expanding human freedom within current technological and ecological means. This is not so different from Phillips’s own description of socialist growth: an “increase in the creation of new value that does not undermine the ecosystem services upon which human flourishing depends”. What is important, though, is to disentangle the idea of social value from that of economic growth.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-09-23/why-degrowth-is-the-only-responsible-way-forward/


2.
Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance

By Jason Hickel

October 27, 2018

The fictionally high prices of housing in London require that people work unnecessarily long hours to earn unnecessary money simply in order to access decent shelter – which they were previously able to access with a fraction of the income. The consequence of this imperative is that everyone is forced to contribute unnecessarily to expanding the juggernaut of production, the output of which must in turn find an outlet in the form of ever-increasing consumption.
This is a problem that’s as old as capitalism itself. And it has a name: enclosure.
Ellen Wood argues that the origins of capitalism lay in the enclosure movement in England, during which wealthy elites walled off the commons and systematically forced peasants off the land in a violent, centuries-long campaign of dispossession. This period saw the abolition of the ancient “right to habitation”, once enshrined in the Charter of the Forest, which guaranteed that ordinary people should have access to the resources necessary for survival.
Suddenly, England’s peasants found themselves subject to a new regime: in order to survive they had to compete with each other for leases on the newly privatized land. And the leases were allocated on the basis of productivity. So in order to retain their access to leases, farmers had to find ways to extract more and more from the earth, and from labour, even if it was vastly in surplus to need. If they didn’t, and if they lost their leases, they could face starvation. And of course this same force, the imperative of ever-increasing productivity, was at work also in the industrial sector.



In other words, the birth of capitalism required the creation of scarcity. The constant creation of scarcity is the engine of the juggernaut.
The same process unfolded around the world during European colonization. In South Africa, colonizers faced what they called “The Labour Question”: How do we get Africans to work in our mines and on our plantations for paltry wages? At the time, Africans were quite content with their subsistence lifestyles, where they had all the land and the water and the livestock they needed to thrive, and showed no inclination to do back-breaking work in European mines. The solution? Force them off their land, or make them pay taxes in European currency, which can only be acquired in exchange for labour. And if they don’t pay, punish them.
Scarcity is the engine of capitalist expansion.
And, crucially, the scarcity was artificially created. Created by elite accumulation, backed up by state violence. In both England and South Africa, there was no actual scarcity. The same land and forests and resources remained, just as they had always been. But they were locked up. Enclosed. In order to regain access to the means of survival, people had no choice but to participate in the juggernaut.
Today, we feel the force of scarcity in the constant threat of unemployment. We must be ever-more productive at work or else lose our jobs to someone who will be more productive than we are. But there is a paradox: as productivity rises, less labour is needed. So workers get laid off and find themselves with no means of survival. Victims of artificial scarcity. And the state, desperate to reduce unemployment, must then find ways to grow the economy in order to create new jobs, just so that people can survive.
And all of us workers join in the choir: Give us growth! We need jobs!
Scarcity creates recruits to the ideology of growth.
Even people who are concerned about ecological breakdown, which is most of us, are forced to submit to this logic: if you care about human lives, then you must call for growth. We can deal with the environment later.
But there will be no later, because the problem of scarcity is never solved. Whenever scarcity is about to be solved, it is always quickly produced anew. Think about it: for 150 years, economists have predicted that “In the very near future our economy will be so productive and replete that we will all have to work no more than a few hours a day.” But the prediction never comes true. Because capitalism transforms even the most spectacular productivity gains not into abundance and human freedom, but into scarcity.
It’s strange, isn’t it? The ideology of capitalism is that it is a system that generates immense abundance (so much stuff!). But in reality it is a system that relies on the constant production of scarcity.
This conundrum was first noticed back in 1804, and became known as the Lauderdale Paradox. Lauderdale pointed out that the only way to increase “private riches” (basically, GDP) was to reduce what he called “public wealth”, or the commons. To enclose things that were once free so that people have to pay in order to access them. To illustrate, he noted that colonialists would often even burn down trees that produced nuts and fruits so that local inhabitants wouldn’t be able to live off of the natural abundance of the earth, but would be forced to work for wages in order to feed themselves.
We see this happening today in the endless waves of privatization that have been unleashed all over the world. Education? Healthcare? Parks? Swimming pools? Social Security? Water? All social goods must be privatized – they must be made scarce. People must be made to pay in order to access them. And in order to pay, they will of course have to work, competing with each other in the labour market to be ever-more productive.
This logic reaches its apogee in the contemporary vision of austerity. What is austerity, really? It is a desperate attempt to re-start the engines of growth by slashing public investment in social goods and social protections, chopping away at what remains of the commons so that people are cast once again at the mercy of starvation, forced to increase their productivity if they want to survive. The point of austerity is to create scarcity. Suffering - indeed, poverty - must be induced for the sake of more growth.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can call a halt to the madness – throw a wrench in the juggernaut. By de-enclosing social goods and restoring the commons, we can ensure that people are able to access the things that they need to live a good life without having to generate piles of income in order to do so, and without feeding the never-ending growth machine. “Private riches” may shrink, as Lauderdale pointed out, but public wealth will increase.
In this sense, degrowth is the very opposite of austerity. While austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate growth, degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary.
Degrowth, at its core, is a demand for radical abundance.

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/10/27/degrowth-a-call-for-radical-abundance


3.


What we mean when we talk about ‘degrowth’

Degrowth is a contested idea. However, it is not the same as recession (negative GDP growth) and imposed austerity, as are experienced when the capitalist growth machine stalls. Because ‘degrowth’ can evoke misleading images of decay and regression, some thinkers and advocates for a radical reimagining and reshaping of the economic system speak instead of ‘post-growth’ models. Yes there needs to be radical reduction in demand for forms of consumption and production that cannot be sustained ecologically. But this must come from a reorientation of economic purpose from away from maximisation of market value.
Degrowth and post-growth advocates contend that we need to focus on the ends of human wellbeing and ecological health. Economic tools and policies are a means to those ends. The growth economy as we know it is fixated on growth as an end, not just as a means. Its defenders, like Leigh Phillips, fail to ask the fundamental questions posed by degrowth and post-growth advocates. When we speak of economic growth in a world of limits, we have to ask always, growth of what, where, for whom, with what impacts, and for how long?
There is no reason to see boundless economic growth, even if it could be achieved, as essential to progress in wellbeing. The evidence is clear that beyond a certain level of income, diminishing returns set in for wellbeing as growth goes up. This especially true for the poor and has even been true for large sections of middle classes worldwide over the past three to four decades. The gains from growth have been skewed to the rich, and remain so. And there are other ways in which growth fails to benefit the worse-off, and to undermine wellbeing for all. As environmental problems mount up, and as social divisions and public services worsen for many, so an increasing proportion of GDP growth is taken up by ‘defensive spending’ on problems generated by the economic machine and its political priorities.
Post-growth visions of the economy are founded on profound reorientation of economic policy and social priorities. Post-growth and degrowth advocates are intensely concerned with injustice and inequalities and with ensuring fair transitions and redistribution within a reformed economy, as is clear from the literature. The goal is to enable and enhance wellbeing.
To grow our collective wellbeing, some parts of the economy need to contract and some need to expand. For example, we need radical reduction, indeed probably the elimination, of fossil fuel inputs. But this is coupled to need for a great expansion in renewable energy systems. It is also plain that up to a point economic growth is correlated with material progress and gains in wellbeing for the poor. We in the rich global North need to allow the ecological ‘space’ or ‘headroom’ for substantial economic growth in much of the global South, on grounds of social justice and equity. That means a programme of demand reduction, redistribution and reorientation of social goals in the rich world to enable this.
In a post-growth economy, innovation will continue. But it will be a different kind of innovation. Instead of innovation that aims to deliver yet another new iPhone, we need social and institutional innovation that enables us to live better, happier lives. Post-growth economies and societies will not be static; they will be developing still, but within planetary limits, and they will not be betting their futures on the assumption of endless material growth that can always achieve absolute decoupling from bad side-effects.
In other words, the potential winnings from the degrowth bet is a society focused on providing things that make life worth living, beyond new consumer goods. More time with your family, more creative work, a more equitable distribution of income. And it aims to provide these without undermining the ecological systems that enable us to live in the first place. None of this means abandonment of technological innovation or of wellbeing. Rather, it means focusing on more meaningful types of innovation and wellbeing than can be provided by the expansion of consumer goods alone.


https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-09-26/growing-pain-the-delusion-of-boundless-economic-growth/



4.

The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less
By Shayla Love

May 30 2019, 2:28am



published The Limits to Growth, a report that predicted what would happen to human civilization as the economy and population continued to grow. What their computer simulation found was pretty straightforward: On a planet of finite resources, infinite exponential growth isn’t possible. Eventually, non-renewable resources, like oil, would run out.
Historically, we have considered growth a positive thing, synonymous with job security and prosperity. Since World War II, the gross domestic product (GDP) measure has been used as “the ultimate measure of a country’s overall welfare.” One of John F. Kennedy’s staff economists, Arthur Okun, theorized that for every 3-point rise in GDP, unemployment would fall a percentage point—one reason why presidential campaigns fixate on the measure.

But growth has led to other problems, such as the warming of the planet due to carbon emissions, and the extreme weather and loss of biodiversityand agriculture that comes along with that. Consequently some activists, researchers, and policy makers are questioning the dogma of growth as good. This skepticism has led to the degrowth movement, which says the growth of the economy is inextricably tied to an increase in carbon emissions. It calls for a dramatic reduction in energy and material use, which would inevitably shrink GDP.
The Green New Deal, popularized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seeks to decrease carbon by growing the renewable energy industry. But the degrowth movement believes we need to take this further, by designing a social upheaval that disentangles the idea of progress and economic growth once and for all. This new accounting of economic success would instead focus on access to public services, a shorter work week, and an increase in leisure time. Their approach, they say, will not only combat climate change, but free us from a workaholic culture in which so many struggle to make ends meet.
Activists, researchers, and policy makers are questioning the dogma of growth as good.
Today's degrowth movement has its roots in France: In the early 2000s, University of Paris-Sud professor of economic anthropology Serge Latouche began to write passionately about décroissance in Le Monde Diplomatique. While it paid homage to the Limits to Growth report, décroissance expanded on the concept. The question was no longer if there was a limit to growth. The new question was much bigger: How can we self-impose a limit to growth when our entire economic and political structure is based on it? How do we organize a society that delivers high levels of human well-being in the context of a shrinking economy?

Degrowth is now a buzz word in left-leaning and academic circles around the world; its proponents are economists, environmentalists, democratic socialists, and activists, young and old. They see a post-growth world as a way to fundamentally change how we measure success and well-being, thereby addressing our growing financial and social inequalities while also saving the planet.
This appealing vision of the future is gaining ground. The first international conference about degrowth was in Paris in 2008 and attracted around 140people, and there have been five more conferences since then. The 2018 post-growth conference grew to more than 700 people. The number of academic articles and books on degrowth has risen as well, and in 2018, 238 academics signed a letter published in the Guardian calling for a post-growth future to be taken seriously.
But since our economy has been based on growth for so long, it’s not enough to merely pull the emergency brakes, said Giorgos Kallis, an environmental scientist and political ecologist at The Autonomous University of Barcelona, and author of the book Degrowth. In order to slow the economy down and not wreak havoc, he said, we have to reconfigure our ideas about the entire economic system.
This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.

Degrowth would ultimately mean we'd have less stuff: not as many people working and producing materials, so not as many brands at the grocery store, less fast fashion, and fewer cheap and disposable goods. Families would perhaps have one car instead of three, you'd take a train instead of a plane on your vacation, and free time wouldn't be filled with shopping trips but with non-money-spending activities with loved ones.
Practically, this would also require an increase in free public services; people won’t have to make as much money if they don’t have to spend on healthcare, housing, education, and transportation. Some degrowthers also call for a universal income to compensate for a shorter work week.

People can try to live a degrowth-esque lifestyle today by buying fewer things, but ultimately it's challenging to commit to degrowth without those public services that are built into the model. Right now, our work, play, and general quality of life is dictated through the terms of consumption. Working less, making less money, and reducing material use likely will negatively impact most people's quality of life unless society comes in to meet those needs.
Since there are so few real-world examples of degrowth, Kallis has used a fictional utopia to explain the concept in a 2015 paper. He referenced the planet Anarres, from the book The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin—a society that has modest resources, but through its egalitarian structure is a fair and meaningful place to make a life, compared to the more capitalist near-by planet, Urras.
“It’s how we imagine the good life,” Kallis said. “A life that is simpler, not a life where we keep producing more and more running faster and faster, and having more and more products to choose from.”
Degrowth critics say that this is more of an ideology than a practical way forward—that shrinking the entire economy wouldn't successfully get carbon levels down to zero, and that given the unequal income distribution that exists already, constricting the economy could rob those who need it the most of essentials like energy and food.
"It's how we imagine the good life."

Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the political economy research institute there, said that while he shares many of the degrowth movement’s sentiments, he fundamentally disagrees that such a system could work, at least in the time we need it to.
Pollin said it's true that reducing GDP would lower emissions, but not by much. Contracting the economy by 10 percent would reduce emissions by about 10 percent. Economically, that’s over two times worse than what happened during the Great Recession—in other words, high potential social risks for only a 10 percent CO2 reduction.
To get emissions to zero, it will involve a kind of “degrowth,” but one targeted specifically at fossil-fuel consumption. “That doesn’t mean we have to degrow everything,” Pollin said. “We really need to degrow the fossil fuel industry to zero, but massively expand the clean energy systems, the investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.” This is essentially the Green New Deal: a push to increase renewable energy while eliminating fossil fuels, and including an effort to create a just transition for the people who have jobs in that sector.
To Pollin, even this would be a radical improvement. A plan to get to zero carbon emissions in 30 years would mean shutting down one of the world’s most powerful industries. He thinks that that is ambitious enough without trying to implement other broad societal changes.

“If we take the climate science seriously, we only have a few decades to make huge progress," Pollin said. "And whether I like it or not, we’re not going to overthrow capitalism in that time.”
Degrowth may reflect more than just an urge for minimalism.
Could America come around to degrowth? The most recent Yale Climate Survey found that more than half of Americans, including those in red states, agreed with the statement that environmental protection was more important than economic growth.
Sam Bliss, a Ph.D. student in natural resources at the University of Vermont and member of the collective DegrowUS, said that culturally speaking, the popularity of figures like Marie Kondo—the Netflix star who encourages people to rid themselves of objects that don't spark joy—reveal a growing sentiment that we’ve become too materialistic.
And a pull toward degrowth may reflect more than just an urge for minimalism, but also fatigue in a system where growth hasn't produced big wins for many people. Outside of access to more plentiful, cheaper goods, people intrinsically understand that the benefits of growth are not evenly distributed. In 1965 CEOs made 20 times what typical workers made, but as of 2013, they made 296 times that amount. From 1973 to 2013, hourly wages rose only 9 percent, but productivity increased 74 percent. “This means that workers have been producing far more than they receive in their paychecks and benefit packages from their employers,” wrote the Economic Policy Institute, an economics think tank.

Even during periods of overall growth, millennials were dubbed the "burnout generation." Many struggle to find and keep jobs, are unable to find affordable homes, pay for healthcare, and are still finding that their wages aren't enough to cover the costs of living.
In the midst of this, degrowth offers a world in which the noise of commoditization quiets down, where self-worth isn't rooted in monetary value, and where you don't have to work to utter exhaustion to access basic necessities.
That doesn't mean degrowth is necessarily the most effective strategy to curtail our carbon emissions by a strict deadline, but the movement itself raises important issues about how we measure our success as a society and country.
“To put it colloquially, more stuff doesn’t automatically equate to more well-being or, to put it even more colloquially, more happiness," David Pilling, the author of The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations, said in an interview with The Washington Post. He offered the example of the healthcare system in the United States. It contributed 17 percent to the GDP, which is much more than what other countries spend—even though many would argue other healthcare systems are better.
Our GDP also ignores invisible labor where money isn’t exchanged, like caretakers—jobs that are often performed by women and marginalized people. “It is funny that, if I steal your car and sell it, that counts toward growth, but if I look after an aged relative or bring up three well-adjusted children, that does not,” Pilling said in the interview.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from degrowth that has more to do with the fundamental ways we live than politics. As Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has written, degrowth calls for “human flourishing." We’ve associated growth with being able to solve social problems like eradicating poverty, improving livelihoods, and ensuring jobs for all, Hickel said, but it's not working.
"Why is it that when it comes to the economic system, we’re convinced this is the only way it can be?" he said. "It’s ludicrous actually. I think we need to liberate ourselves from the absurd subjection we have to this system and recognize that we need to evolve a better one."
Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xz9kv/things-youre-doing-to-save-the-planet-that-are-actually-terrible

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