“The cracks are showing,” a friend told me over the phone back in 2020 a few weeks into the first phase of the pandemic lockdown. As global shipping struggled to fulfill the needs of a “just-in-time” economy where businesses rarely kept more backroom inventory than needed for a few days of projected demand, the fragility of our global system of commerce was revealed for all to see.
When a container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal a year later, the same cracks were once again evident. Today, as Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz begins to drive fuel and grocery prices towards untenable heights, we’re seeing once again how the global economy is set up for speed and efficiency but not resilience. When a crucial point of failure is triggered, poor people pay the price.
So much of this fragility comes as a result of our misplaced faith in, and our ill-fated addiction to, growth.
In today’s newsletter, I look at a book that breaks down this growth imperative and its consequences as well as an alternative that could promise to make the economy more resilient, sustainable, and equitable.
Happy Reading,
Syris Valentine
Shrinking the Economy to Save the Planet
Degrowth is both necessary to defeat the destructive hydra of the GDP while also restoring authentic community-led decisionmaking.
The Second World War devastated France's economy as it did for much of Europe. Then came the US Marshall Plan, which was designed to help prop up the shadowed ruins of Western Europe's enfeebled empires. From 1945 to the mid-70s, France experienced significant growth, particularly when measured by a newly invented metric: the Gross National Product, the precursor to today's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The economic growth helped free many French people from a poverty they would have experienced even with the nation's resources evenly divided. But citizens still yearned for more than could be guaranteed by a climbing GNP.
In May and June of 1968, as the “Thirty Glorious Years” of growth neared their end, widespread student protests and mass strikes coalesced around this social craving. One piece of graffiti from the era particularly captured the mood:
“You can't fall in love with a growth rate.”
In his book Slow Down or Die, the English translation of which will christen its one-year anniversary next month, French economist Timothee Parrique points to the growth-skeptical sentiments of the May ‘68 rebellions as the earliest rumblings of the economic philosophy that his book elaborates: degrowth.