It’s sinister and anti-human to stop growth
Shrinking the global economy to consume fewer resources is the green lobby’s latest bad idea
It’s sinister and anti-human to stop growth
Shrinking the global economy to consume fewer resources is the green lobby’s latest bad idea
Melanie Phillips! Monday October 31 2022
Last month’s prime minister, Liz Truss, came to grief because her fanatical belief in economic growth crashed the economy into a wall. While condemning her recklessness, many nevertheless sympathised with the goal of growing the economy to produce increased prosperity and progress. After all, who wouldn’t agree with that?
It turns out that plenty of people wouldn’t, including the World Economic Forum.
The WEF is an international, non-governmental lobbying organisation whose membership comprises political and business leaders and other global movers and shakers. Known for its annual talk-fest in the Swiss resort of Davos, its mission is to improve the world “by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”.
Those agendas involve concepts such as “sustainability”, “inclusion” and “stakeholder capitalism”, which its website suggests have been inspired by Greta Thunberg, the teenage green activist, who it says reminds us that the “environmental unsustainability” of the current economic system “represents a betrayal of future generations”.
The WEF is the target of tiresome conspiracy theorists who believe it dictates everything governments do that corresponds to the liberal internationalist and green agenda. A moment’s thought suggests this is implausible. The WEF, which is little more than a glorified talking shop, brings together participants from about 100 countries, many of which aren’t liberal, internationalist or green. But just because conspiracy theorists say silly things doesn’t mean the WEF isn’t also out to lunch.
Its new thing is something called “degrowth”. According to its website, this means shrinking the economy in order to use fewer of the world’s “dwindling resources” and combat climate change. It means no longer assuming that “growth is good”. You may think it’s good because it means progress, advancement, improvement. Tsk! Growth is apparently very, very bad — even though it has given the world everything from cancer treatments to indoor plumbing.
In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler observes that degrowth would suppress innovation and lead to stagnation. Societies that don’t grow, he writes, eventually devolve into oppression, chaos, anarchy and then ruin.
Not at all, says the WEF; supporters of degrowth maintain it doesn’t mean “living in caves with candles”, just living a bit more simply.
No it doesn’t. Degrowth involves deindustrialisation. Indeed, the WEF implicitly blames industrialisation for climate change, citing the claim that man-made global warming started in the 1830s.
So much energy is expended on climate trends that the philosophical origins of modern environmentalism tend to be obscured. Curbing growth is, in fact, foundational to the environmental movement, whose agenda is central to the WEF’s preoccupations.
In the 1970s, while western politicians were promoting technological expansion and the consumer society, the dread of overpopulation was also rising. The environmental campaigners Barbara Ward and René Dubos, who wrote the framework for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, argued that the Earth’s species depended upon a finite stock of raw natural materials. In the same year, the Club of Rome argued that natural resources couldn’t support rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100.
This all had its roots in the late 18th-century theory advanced by Thomas Malthus that population growth would outstrip food. This has been proved spectacularly wrong. Yet the WEF again channels Malthus by decrying “the myth of infinite growth” which must be curbed as natural resources “dwindle closer to their reasonable limits”.
Environmental apocalypse is, of course, the agenda of Cop27, next month’s UN climate change conference in Egypt. But it’s not the WEF that’s putting pressure on Rishi Sunak to change his decision to stay away. It’s because so many members of his own party have been swept up in this catastrophising, which has become unchallengeable and axiomatic for such a lot of people. This reflects a broader cultural shift that views modernity and progress as bad as
Western society, where industrialisation started and which drove progress and modernity, is said to be so mired in the original sins of whiteness and colonialism that it needs to be deconstructed and a new society created in its place. Critical race theory is intimately involved in upending progress, smashing the belief in achievement through merit, which is an engine of growth.
The shift has gone even further. Just as Malthusianism led to the horrors of eugenics — a progressive doctrine until the Nazi party gave it such lousy PR — so too the degrowth agenda is anti-human, based on the belief that the planet’s biggest problem is the human beings who people it. And the below-replacement western birth rate already suggests a culture that no longer wants to reproduce itself.
Halting economic growth wouldn’t just stop in its tracks the improvements in society that we all take for granted. Growth is a characteristic of the natural world. It is hardwired into us as human beings. To want to halt growth is akin to wanting to stop the world.
The absurd and sinister vogue for degrowth reflects a society that is repudiating the optimistic rationality that created modernity. The WEF produces crackpot views because the demoralised, post-truth, post-rational West has become a culture of cranks.