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Can we solve climate change if we just accept getting dramatically poorer, forever?
As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really, and 2) we can solve climate change without it, and it will be better for everyone – especially those who are already poor – so we should do that instead.
But this idea stuck around in form “Growth” movementwhich argues that “economic growth” as an objective inevitably increases We should move away from environmental destruction and economic growth and focus on ways to improve living standards without it.
Degrowth has always been a bit of a moving target. Even mainstream economists would agree that GDP alone does not measure whether a life is meaningful and fulfilling, but they would also point out that as Countries become richer, they become healthier and happier. Is degradation just the contentious claim that what really matters is that people live well, or is it the highly contentious claim that people will live equally well even if we systematically shrink GDP to focus on sustainability in rich countries?
I think many people find something attractive about the rhetoric of decadence: anti-consumerism, a simple life, local food, etc. But mass adoption of all these things will do almost nothing about climate change or the movement’s other environmental issues. cares about
And while positioning itself as a policy platform, it Political poison. Once you start getting into the details, it’s hard to come up with anything worse than an ever-shrinking economy and the end of the conveniences of modern life. This makes it a policy agenda without any proposal on how it will become a law, an agenda that will sink any politician associated with it. (Not that you’re likely to find one.)
All of these combine to create decadent literature—which it has become at this time A large body of work – Disappointing. Degrowthers understandably want to engage with the literature of those who criticize their movement. one The most frequent response Criticism means that critics have engaged with only a small part of the decadent literature out there. It is true, but at the same time, one cannot seriously engage with hundreds of papers.
But writing so much about growing up doesn’t mean there’s a good answer hiding somewhere in a pile of papers. I increasingly realized that contributors to the movement were effectively in an academic echo chamber, publishing papers that only they read and that did not address any of their critics’ reservations.
a new one Critical review of the degradation literaturePublished in Journal Environmental EconomicsThe sum of everything that went wrong. But it also offers the degradation community the serious critical engagement it needs if it wants to move from idle speculation to an effective policy program.
What is wrong with decadent literature?
The authors analyzed 561 growth papers in an attempt to describe where the field is today. What they uncovered was deeply discouraging.
Their main takeaway: Of the 561 studies, “the vast majority (about 90%) of studies are opinion rather than analysis … most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lack policy evaluation and lack integration with insights from the environmental/climate literature .. .data analysis is often superficial and incomplete … studies do not satisfy accepted standards for good research.”
It is rare to find this rigorous critique of the academic literature of an entire field in a respected journal that is itself the field (Environmental Economics publishes papers on growing topics). And, to be clear, these are some pretty damning criticisms. They paint a picture of a field that is unusual about the actual quality of academic work, one awash in papers (many of them in reasonably respectable journals) but conducted entirely without reference to anything we actually know about how climate, development and policy work.
Reading this review, one gets the impression that the degradation literature is fundamentally incoherent. The author of the review said, “[O]We are inclined to assume that acculturation cannot (yet) be considered a significant area of academic research.”
The review describes paper after paper with absurdly small sample sizes: sociological interviews with 10 volunteers making handicrafts for charity in a German town, 12 Interview with residents of a town near Barcelona about tourismeight Interviews with environmental justice leaders in Croatia. Even a healthy field will have the occasional paper with a small sample size or is methodologically shaky, but the popularity of this small-sample-size qualitative interview-based study is characteristic of a field in its infancy that has yet to nail down its core. questions or procedures.
Degrowthism is not ready
All this is a significant problem. If any policies are proposed to address issues like climate change, they need to be implemented globally within the next two decades. This is not the policy maturity stage where you publish lots of interviews with volunteers at NGOs; This is the policy maturity stage where you are expected to (and where Mainstream climate policy literature have) specific bi-country emissions targets, a breakdown of possible routes to meet that country’s energy needs when those emissions targets are met, and an analysis of trajectories so far.
You might expect the field to have these struggles because it was new, but as it matured, there would be high-quality research. That does not appear to be the case with degrowthism, which it has As far back as the origins As the 1972 report “Growth limits” by the Club of Rome. As the review authors concluded: “There is no indication that things are improving over time.” Recent work is far from meeting the same scientific standards as older work.
None of this surprises me as someone who has tried to wade through degenerate literature for my reporting in the past. But I’m glad the review was written extensively and published in a journal that people who believe in degradation actually read.
If you think our world needs growing, then the appallingly poor quality of decadent literature isn’t just annoying, it’s a serious emergency.
The more important a problem is, the more important it is to do high-quality, comprehensive, well-justified work on it. If emerging ideas have anything to offer the world, it is even more important that they adhere to common standards about how to conduct research.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect Newsletter. Sign up here!
